What Melania reveals

0:00Astead Herndon:When it comes to the new Melania movie, here are some important numbers to remember. $40 million. That's how much Amazon paid Melania Trump's production studio for the rights to the film. It's the highest price ever paid for a documentary. $35 million. That's about how much Amazon spent marketing the film. $28 million. How much went to the First Lady. And$7 million. That's how much the Melania movie made on opening weekend, which is honestly pretty good, and certainly more than many box office insiders projected. So, how did this movie get made? Who's it for? And if this is finally Melania Trump's side of the story, what does she have to say?

0:48Astead Herndon:That's coming up on Today Explained from Vox.

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2:31Astead Herndon:This is Today Explained. Mary Jordan is an associate editor of The Washington Post. She wrote a book on Melania Trump called The Art of Her Deal, The Untold Story of Melania Trump. On Friday, she and producer Ariana Aspuru braved the cold and went to see a morning showing of Melania the movie. The press was barred from the premiere the night before, which itself was unusual. And so I went the next morning, and there were a couple dozen people in the theater. So it was mostly empty. But it was in New York, and that's not Trump country, clearly. The theater's over. Bought our ticket. We're at the AMC because there's quite a few theaters that are now screening it along with other movies.

3:19So we'll see if anybody shows. I mean, the focus of this, they keep saying, is 20 days leading up to the inaugural. So I don't know. Will there be something interesting or relevant? We'll find out. But I guess I was more surprised that at the end, there was one person who was wildly clapping. So no matter how many detractors, and boy, there are a lot of both Melania and certainly this movie, which has become like a parody in some ways. Melania, I just asked.

3:54Astead Herndon:They have Spongebob buckets, but not. Not Melania buckets. They're still clearly people that like her and are going to like what they see. What ended up being my most favorite thing about this movie was the fact that it was so enlightening. She was an executive. She was a great model. She's gorgeous. The theater were, it was actually a full theater. Everyone was kind of clapping and it was a fun experience. Okay, so give me your review overall out of how many stars, if you could sum it up. If you looked at it, as I did, as a lost opportunity for Melania to really come center stage and gain more fans, it was kind of a zero.

4:43You know, it was advertised as this new reveal, pulling the curtain back on Melania. But actually, you never see her in jeans. She's constantly perfectly dressed in designer gear, full makeup. I think she could have humanized herself. And, you know, if that was the goal, you know, which I think people want to know, like, what does she do? Oh, you know, she disappears for weeks at a time. What is she doing? And there's none of that. We see her jet setting in and out of, you know, vans, getting into a private plane and jetting between her mansion in Florida, beside the ocean with a spa, and then coming back into Trump Tower, gold doors, mahogany, marble floors.

5:32And we know that we've seen that.

5:36Astead Herndon:My sense is that this has been kind of ravaged by critics, that you're not alone in your low star rating. Is that right? Well, people have said, you know, it's an infomercial. It's the worst movie we've ever seen. It's an abomination. It's an embarrassment. All right, what we have with Melania is a part documentary, part propaganda film, part Devil Wears Prada sequel without the lovable lead. It totally makes no sense. If they wanted to make a documentary about her, They should have given us some more of her backstory and said it's truly all about the Hamburglar look. And Rotten Tomatoes, you know, had 11, I gave it 11 % out of a, in a scale of 100.

6:13So, but, you know, we've seen movies that people go to see and like that critics, you know, pan. So here we go again. Here we go again.

6:26Astead Herndon:I want, you know, let's, I want to get into the meat also. But, you know, how did this movie even come to be? Like, give us the origin story of the Melania Trump documentary. Apparently there was a conversation that included Jeff Bezos, who not only is one of the richest men in the world, but he owns Amazon and he owns this studio. And there was talk and, you know, Melania wanted to do a movie and voila, a deal was made and he paid an extraordinary amount for it. was the fact that there's so much criticism that Amazon paid$40 million to acquire the rights to this film. And reports say it could be one of the most expensive documentaries to have ever been made.

7:09At one point in the movie, Melania says, I intend to break norms as First Lady. Well, the very first thing was the money she took. That broke all norms because typically you wait to leave public office to do these commercial ventures. Why? Because of the appearance of graft, of corruption. I mean, sure, rich guy, let's say like Jeff Bezos, who has government contracts, might like to curry favor with the president by throwing millions of dollars at his wife. I mean, that's why you don't do it.

7:46Astead Herndon:Onto the film and its substance, Melania Trump said that the movie was a never-before-seen look into her life. You mentioned this earlier, but I just want to ask it directly. Like, did we, what did we learn about her life from this documentary? I did not know that she has an entire drawer full of designer sunglasses.

8:10There were things like that. And very, you know, at one point she's asked, who's your favorite recording artist? And she says, Michael Jackson. What's your favorite song? And she said, Billie Jean. All right, now we know that. So there were like a few little things.

8:26Astead Herndon:That honestly is like maybe the chat GPT answer if you put in, like, if you average all of humanity, what their favorite song would be. I mean, like, that's not that deep of an insight. No, there was no deep reflection. I mean, I think, again, what a missed opportunity. She has an incredible story to tell, and she just doesn't tell it. I mean, actually, it made me think that maybe she's smarter than many people believe, because now she can get paid for another movie that offers to reveal, like, she could do a sequel. Okay, this time I really will reveal, and she could make millions more. You know, a lot of celebrities have shied away from, you know, public vulnerability.

9:10Astead Herndon:They don't necessarily that maybe we're not surprised that this documentary doesn't lay out kind of deeper insights into her life. But, you know, fashion also seems to be a core part of what this documentary was. Was it making some sort of argument that even I have heard some Trump supporters make in political spaces that, you know, Melania Trump is an underrated figure in, you know, when we think about legacy fashion worlds like Vogue or other things like that? I think clearly she thinks about fashion. She thinks about clothes to an extraordinary degree. Just my style. There is not really a message.

9:49Astead Herndon:That's what I like. And they will see it in the film. OK. Everything. And she talks about sharp colors and that black and white are her favorite colors. And there's an enormous percent of the movie. She's standing there and she's like, take this in a pinch, you know, with people hemming. And like, you clearly see that she has an eye. The idea from the details, how I designed it. Yes. And it will be all in the film. And every detail. She talks that her mother, who was a seamstress and made patterns, gave her her fashion sense or attention to detail. That we know, we believe. It's just that when you're the first lady, there is this expectation that you do that for other people.

10:39So why, for instance, didn't she announce that, okay,$20 million made by this thing will go to help young people, young people who want to go to fashion, you know, underprivileged people. Well, there was one part where she talked about foster children. I mean, I have no doubt that she cares about children. She is clearly a concerned mom, a devoted mother. She talks about Barron. We see him on the screen. We don't see the other stepchildren, except glancingly in the back. But Barron is something that he's talked about, and she's front and center in her life. She loves children. I believe that. I know that, talking to people.

11:17but what is she doing for them she talks about fostering children but there's no details and because in the past the trumps you know donald trump included have said that they're doing this why do we never see details and then when we we actually dig into the journalists dig into it it turns out that hey this was advertised as a big philanthropical thing but it didn't really work out and the charity didn't get the money. So if they're doing that, let's be front and center and talk about details. How many kids and what are they doing?

11:52Astead Herndon:Yeah. I've read that all of the heavy hitters are in this movie. You get cameos for Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, J.D. Vance. I mean, I guess I wanted to know, of course, the president plays a big role, should mention him. What do they say? Do we learn anything about their relationship to heard from it. What is their role in the doc? This is Melania, by Melania, named Melania. She does, you know, you don't hear from any of those people. You have a glance, even Donald Trump is pretty much silenced in this. She is the focus. And, you know, fair enough. The guy has stolen the limelight for decades since they've been married, right?

12:35This is her one moment. But there is this one moment where she walks in when he's practicing his inaugural for January 2025, and he said he wants to be a peacemaker. And she goes, and unifier, and then cut.

12:51Astead Herndon:My proudest legacy will be that of a peacemaker and unifier. That's what I want to be, a peacemaker and a unifier. And he uses her word, unifier. You know, obviously a nod to showing she has influence. But we only really see Donald when it supports Melania because she had creative control. Yeah, yeah. So you're saying like we don't get like, you know, Trump doesn't talk about, you know, when they met or anything like that. It's just like... Oh, gosh, no. That would be too deep. That would like... No, no, no, no, no, no, no. This is, that's why people are saying it's an infomercial. It's like a montage of wedding photos.

13:38It's, you know, it's not, at no point do we, you know, if somebody else were doing a book on, a movie on Melania, they would ask, they would do that, of course. This is the danger of being in charge of telling your own story.

13:56Astead Herndon:Coming up, what do we know about Melania Trump?

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17:40Astead Herndon:Hi, Mr. President. Congratulations. Did you watch it? I did not. Yeah, I will see it on Today Explained. We're back with Mary Jordan. Mary, since you wrote a biography about Melania Trump in 2021, we wanted to ask you to fill in some of the gaps that were maybe left out of the movie. Can you tell me about the process you went through in your book? What did you learn about the famously closed-off figure? I ran the Washington Post bureaus in Tokyo, Mexico, London. I've worked in 40 countries. I've met a lot of interesting people, both in politics and in public life. I have never, including drug cartel leaders, met someone more secretive.

18:23She was the hardest target because she had so few friends, so few people who knew her. You know, I'd go to Slovenia and I'd get the class list in their elementary school, you know, find them. And they would all say, well, she really talked that, but there were one person. And you find the one person, you get tiny bits. She was so quiet. And this was true her whole life. Her whole life. She was tough to write about because, like, Donald Trump has so many people that you can call who have direct interaction, right? Yeah. She does not. A lot of Americans would love to hear the inspiring story of her mom, who was a factory worker in a former communist country.

19:05She comes. She wants to make it big. She doesn't have that much money. She first lives in New York City, and she has to share one bedroom, you know, a curtain down the middle. And you live in the city, so it's hard to have a pet in the city.

19:18Astead Herndon:Yes, that's true. It's New York, so it's a very busy place. And I said to many people in New York who knew her when she was younger and she had just married Trump, they said that she just wanted to act like she was always like this, always rich. What was your first impression of Donald Trump? But he was very charming, and we had a great sparkle. Can we think about the usual role of First Lady? How does she depart from that other than the obvious ways? Like how, you know, even going back to her first term, how has she been different in that role? Well, there was this expectation that because the public elected you and you're in the White House, that the public pays for, and you have Secret Service, and you have Air Force One, all that on the government dime, that you tell people where you are.

20:12Like, there's a public agenda. What are you doing today? She said, well, I don't have to do that. I'm not elected. I'm just the spouse. So she would hide. Like, nobody knew where she was. Why wasn't Melania Trump at the White House with President-elect Donald Trump? Where on earth is Melania? So she has redefined the role, And she says, and she told me, you know, I'm not the elected one, and she can do whatever she wants. And so if she doesn't feel like it, she doesn't go. And, you know, it kind of works because people, oh, my God, Melani hasn't been seen in two weeks. She's coming out. And so she does get more people to pay attention when she does speak.

20:52Again, we have this tradition that the First Lady helps others, uses the powerful office, the amazing reach of the microphone platform of the First Lady. I mean, it's so powerful. Laura Bush did it, created the National Book Festival, had a whole campaign, Let's Read Literacy.

21:14Astead Herndon:No matter what our political views might be or what our differences might be of any kind, we all love books. We all love reading. Michelle Obama tackled the obesity campaign. To achieve a single but very ambitious goal. And that's to solve the problem of childhood obesity in a generation. So, like, let's, she could do something, even if it was in fashion. Hey, wouldn't that be great? You know, hey, all these young people who want to get in fashion, I can help you. But the absence does, like, lead to some questions. I mean, you kind of implied this, but do we know where she's been? Like, you know, my kind of question for the last year is actually just, you know, what has she been up to?

21:58Well, she's wherever Barron is, pretty much. And Barron now likes to be in the White House. I like my suitcase. Now he's 19. And so she's now, in this term, more in the White House than she has in the past, mainly because Barron wants to be there. But she loves to go to New York, Trump Tower, and she loves to go to Mar-a-Lago. She calls it Mar-a-Lago in Florida, her refuge in the movie. She spends a lot of time not with her husband. And that's, I think, the big difference. Like the Bidens, you'd see them in Delaware riding bikes. You'd see the Obamas going to dinner. These little candid moments where it actually looked like they liked each other.