What Does ‘Being Best' Mean to Melania Trump Now?
Ricky Carioti/The Washington Post
First lady Melania Trump exits the room after an event Thursday at the White House.
There she was. In the White House.
Black leather pencil skirt. Pencil-thin heels. White blazer, draped like a cape over her shoulders.
Melania Trump is not often seen inside these walls, let alone heard. But on Thursday, at a reception for military mothers, she gave her first public remarks there since President Donald Trump returned to office 108 days earlier.
The first lady approached the lectern in the East Room. She thanked her husband, the president, for introducing her. A few people in the crowd clapped tentatively. Melania continued over them, she and the audience feeling for a rhythm like rusty dance partners.
'Motherhood …,' the first lady began. The applause was no longer tentative, and she yielded to it.
In the world of Trump's political movement – with many talkers, posters and flood-the-zone filibusterers – Melania's reticence has given her something of an oracular quality. 'It kind of reminds me of Greta Garbo,' says Katherine Jellison, a professor of history at Ohio University who studies first ladies, referring to the famous actress turned recluse whose rare public appearances incited frenzy. 'The relative rarity of Melania Trump's appearances do spark greater interest when she does show up.'
When the first lady's guests finished applauding, they were silent, hanging on her every word. She picked up where she had left off about motherhood: 'The life-changing event that makes women invincible and exposed at the same time.' Melania described women's 'sacred strength' as 'unwavering love' and 'nurturing wisdom.' She urged the mothers in the room to 'prioritize your well-being,' because their health is 'the bedrock of a brighter future for our children.'
Melania remains a bit of a mystery – unusual for a first lady in her second term, according to Jellison. Trump returned to Washington with a clear and immediate agenda for how he wanted to grow and exercise his power. His wife, not so much. But she made not one but two rare appearances on Thursday, speaking her maternal truth before an audience of military moms, then, a few hours later, returning to the East Room to unveil a postage stamp honoring former first lady Barbara Bush. And on Friday morning, her office announced that the $25 million in the president's budget to support youths transitioning out of foster care had been secured in recognition of the anniversary of Be Best, her signature first-term initiative.
Melania hasn't been entirely invisible, or inaudible, in Washington. She spoke at a March event on Capitol Hill in support of a bill aimed at deterring the spread of nonconsensual explicit images (i.e. 'revenge porn') and an April ceremony honoring recipients of the International Women of Courage Award at the State Department. She attended her husband's first address to a joint session of Congress and the annual White House Easter Egg Roll, where she chatted with children and read them a story in the Amazon-sponsored reading nook. (Amazon founder Jeff Bezos owns The Washington Post.)
There was the trip she made with her husband to survey the wildfire devastation in California, shortly after Trump's swearing-in, where cameras captured Melania comforting victims in her native Slovenian. (So did a documentary film crew from Amazon, which struck a reported $40 million deal for a 'behind the scenes' look at Melania's life in the East Wing.) Late last month, she and Trump traveled to Rome for Pope Francis's funeral – but went their separate ways when the couple returned to the United States on April 26, which also happened to be Melania's 55th birthday.
Nevertheless, in her second term, Melania appears to be keeping the trappings of her office at arm's length. The White House's gilded makeover has been at the direction of the president, assuming the first lady's traditional role of decorator in chief. In February, her office announced that public tours of the White House would resume, but it was Trump who showed up to greet visitors on the first day.
And it was President Trump who greeted the East Room guests Thursday. His introductory remarks ran about three times as long as his wife's speech. He talked about the 'big deal with the U.K.' on trade and 'big rare earth deal with Ukraine' and the 'very big conversation in Switzerland taking place this weekend with China – has anyone heard of China recently?' In the spirit of Mother's Day, he recalled his own, a figure whom he seldom mentions. 'I had a great mother – I had a mother,' the president said. 'She was such an angel. She could be very tough, I will say. She had her tough moments – some difficult moments … but overall, very, very good.'
Anyway. Melania is 'one of the best moms that I know,' he said. 'Sometimes she's almost too good. She is so good with Barron that he's grown up strong and nice, and he's a good boy.' The first lady stared up at him with a closed-mouth smile, gently clapping her manicured hands together when he paused for applause.
The last time the Trumps were in the White House, Barron was dealing with the usual challenges of adolescence and the unusual ones of being the president's son. And motherhood seemed to shape Melania's ideas for what she could do as first lady.
In her 2024 memoir, Melania recalled a particularly stinging episode of 'the poison of social media' when, a few weeks after the 2016 election, comedian Rosie O'Donnell wondered on Twitter about whether Barron, then 10, might be autistic, linking to a YouTube video suggesting as much. (The person who made the video later apologized, stating: 'I falsely correlated him trying to stay awake and occasionally doing quirky things with him suffering from autism.' O'Donnell also apologized.) 'The sheer malice of O'Donnell's act made me furious,' Melania wrote in her memoir, where she also noted that Barron is not autistic. 'There was a child at the other end of that tweet.'
Stephen Balkam, the founder and CEO of the nonprofit Family Online Safety Institute, remembers talking to Melania at a roundtable he participated in with tech corporations and advocacy groups in 2018. With respect to her son, Balkam recalls the first lady raising a common parenting worry: 'She was very concerned about how much he was playing computer games,' he says. 'So we ended up talking about screen time and then, of course, cyberbullying itself.'
Be Best had three pillars: the well-being of children, online safety and tackling opioid abuse. 'There is one goal to Be Best, and that is to educate children about the many issues they're facing today,' Melania announced in the Rose Garden on May 7, 2018 – a date her husband officially designated as 'Be Best Day,' via presidential proclamation. For the next few years, the first lady hosted conversations, made speeches and took trips to highlight her priorities. With such a small policy team, she often partnered with federal agencies to execute projects. (Her 2018 trip to Africa, for example, was done in conjunction with the U.S. Agency for International Development – which the new Trump administration has now gutted.)
Be Best always had an irony problem. How could the first lady advocate against cyberbullying when her husband constantly turned to social media to bully those he saw as his political enemies? 'She isn't in lockstep with Trump on certain things,' says Kate Bennett, who previously covered the Trumps for CNN and wrote a book about Melania in 2019. 'Instead of getting credit for taking on cyberbullying, she was slammed for it.' The effort also struggled to measure its own impact. 'I think it was very well-intentioned, but I wasn't clear of what the goal was, ultimately, and what would look like success after four years of the project,' Balkam says. 'There didn't seem to be any benchmarks.'
On Wednesday, Be Best Day passed almost without notice. The first lady had no public events; whether she was at the White House, her spokesperson did not say. Near the end of the day, her office issued a statement supporting the president's proclamation declaring May as National Foster Care Month, noting that it coincided with the Be Best anniversary.
What, exactly, is Be Best this time around? Her office declined multiple requests to define the initiative on the record. There are clues, however, in Melania's public appearances and statements. That press release about National Foster Care Month said that Be Best 'supports children's well-being, including individuals within the foster care community.' There were Be Best-branded activities at the Easter Egg Roll, such as hopscotch and a station for writing letters to service members. Her guests for Trump's first address to a joint session of Congress included a 15-year-old high school student who had been bullied with digital deepfakes.
Then there's her support for the anti-revenge-porn legislation, called the Take It Down Act. The first lady's staff reached out to the offices of Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) and Rep. María Elvira Salazar (R-Florida) early in Trump's second term to express interest in working on the bill. In March, Melania hosted a roundtable on Capitol Hill with lawmakers and advocates to bring attention to it. 'That's a great example of how a first lady's advocacy can be used well,' says Anita McBride, who served as chief of staff to Laura Bush and has written a book about first ladies.
The bill has since passed both the House and Senate. There was little doubt that the legislation would get through Congress eventually, but Hill aides and advocates attribute Melania's support to the speed of the bill's passage.
Melania returned to the East Room on Thursday afternoon for yet another event: the unveiling of a postage stamp honoring Barbara Bush to an audience of the former first lady's friends and former staffers – as well as some of her children, grandchildren and cousins, easily identified by their broad cheekbones and falcon noses. (Though there weren't as many Bushes present as there could have been. The stamp unveiling conflicted with an annual event hosted by former first lady Laura Bush. Of Barbara's kids, Neil and Doro were at the White House; Jeb, George and Marvin were not.) Melania sat onstage as representatives from the U.S. Postal Service and Barbara Bush's foundation delivered remarks, her feline stare flicking between the speakers and the audience. She broke into a smile only a few times – including when Doro Bush Koch recalled that she and the other Bush kids had a nickname for their mom: 'the Enforcer.'
Then it was time for Melania to speak, again. She used her time to note the importance of 'strong American families,' where 'the principles of morality, ambition and empathy take root.' She highlighted Barbara's 'iconic' 1990 commencement speech at Wellesley College for how it encouraged young women to pursue their dreams. 'Who knows? Somewhere out in this audience may even be someone who will one day follow in my footsteps and preside over the White House – and I wish him well,' the first lady joked. Then she praised Barbara for how she 'supported women's empowerment, changed the national conversation on AIDS and took a stance supporting gay rights.'
Melania revealed more of her personal beliefs in four minutes than she had in the previous four months. Then she vanished through the East Room's doors – invincible and exposed at the same time.
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The nonprofit research consortium gets its core funding from the Gates Foundation, backed by Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, and Open Philanthropy, backed by Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz and his wife, Cari Tuna. 'We believe that this technology can really be transformative,' Simoni said. At the heart of Target Malaria's work is a powerful genetic tool called a gene drive. Under the normal rules of inheritance, a parent has a 50-50 chance of passing a particular gene on to an offspring. But by adding special genetic machinery – dubbed a gene drive – to segments of DNA, scientists can rig the coin flip and ensure a gene is included in an animal's eggs and sperm, nearly guaranteeing it will be passed along. Over successive generations, gene drives can cause a trait to spread across an entire species's population, even if that gene doesn't benefit the organism. 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Nearly 600,000 people died of the disease in 2023, according to the World Health Organization, with the majority of cases in Africa. On the continent, the death toll is akin to 'crashing two Boeing 747s into Kilimanjaro' every day, said Paul Ndebele, a bioethicist at George Washington University. For gene-drive advocates, making the case for releasing genetically modified mosquitoes in nations such as Burkina Faso or Uganda is straightforward. 'This is not a difficult audience, because these are people that are living in an area where children are dying,' said Krystal Birungi, an entomologist for Target Malaria in Uganda, though she added that she sometimes has to fight misinformation, such as the false idea that bites from genetically modified mosquitoes can make people sterile. But recently, the Hastings Center for Bioethics, a research institute in New York, and Arizona State University brought together a group of bioethicists to discuss the potential pitfalls of intentionally trying to drive a species to extinction. In a policy paper published in the journal Science last month, the group concluded that 'deliberate full extinction might occasionally be acceptable, but only extremely rarely.' A compelling candidate for total eradication, according to the bioethicists, is the New World screwworm. This parasitic fly, which lays eggs in wounds and eats the flesh of both humans and livestock, appears to play little role in ecosystems. Infections are difficult to treat and can lead to slow and painful deaths. Yet it may be too risky, they say, to use gene drives on invasive rodents on remote Pacific islands where they decimate native birds, given the nonzero chance of a gene-edited rat or mouse jumping ship to the mainland and spreading across a continent. 'Even at a microbial level, it became plain in our conversations, we are not in favor of remaking the world to suit human desires,' said Gregory Kaebnick, a senior research scholar at the institute. It's unclear how important malaria-carrying mosquitoes are to broader ecosystems. Little research has been done to figure out whether frogs or other animals that eat the insects would be able to find their meals elsewhere. Scientists are hotly debating whether a broader 'insect apocalypse' is underway in many parts of the world, which may imperil other creatures that depend on them for food and pollination. 'The eradication of the mosquito through a genetic technology would have the potential to create global eradication in a way that just felt a little risky,' said Preston, who contributed with Ndebele to the discussion published in Science. Instead, the authors said, geneticists should be able to use gene editing, vaccines and other tools to target not the mosquito itself, but the single-celled Plasmodium parasite that is responsible for malaria. That invisible microorganism – which a mosquito transfers from its saliva to a person's blood when it bites – is the real culprit. 'You can get rid of malaria without actually getting rid of the mosquito,' Kaebnick said. He added that, at a time when the Trump administration talks cavalierly about animals going extinct, intentional extinction should be an option for only 'particularly horrific species.' But Ndebele, who is from Zimbabwe, noted that most of the people opposed to the elimination of the mosquitoes 'are not based in Africa.' Ndebele has intimate experience with malaria; he once had to rush his sick son to a hospital after the disease manifested as a hallucinatory episode. 'We're just in panic mode,' he recalled. 'You can just imagine – we're not sure what's happening with this young guy.' Still, Ndebele and his colleagues expressed caution about using gene-drive technology. Even if people were to agree to rid the globe of every mosquito – not just Anopheles gambiae but also ones that transmit other diseases or merely bite and irritate – it would be a 'herculean undertaking,' according to Kaebnick. There are more than 3,500 known species, each potentially requiring its own specially designed gene drive. And there is no guarantee a gene drive would wipe out a population as intended. Simoni, the gene-drive researcher, agreed that there are limits to what the technology can do. His team's modeling suggests it would suppress malaria-carrying mosquitoes only locally without outright eliminating them. Mosquitoes have been 'around for hundreds of millions of years,' he said. 'It's a very difficult species to eliminate.'
