Many People are dealing with extreme financial hardship. However not the incoming president and first woman of the US. The truth is, the incumbent first woman has simply accepted a media deal that can pay her at the least seven occasions the earnings of the common American family.
The yr? 1932. The primary woman? Eleanor Roosevelt, who accepted $1,800 for 12 radio broadcasts (greater than $40,000 in 2025 {dollars}) sponsored by the cosmetics firm Pond’s.
Melania Trump has little else in frequent with Roosevelt besides the reported $40 million Amazon paid for her manufacturing firm’s documentary chronicling the weeks earlier than her husband’s second inauguration that arrived in theaters this previous weekend. Amazon put one other $35 million into advertising the movie forward of its launch, an exorbitant sum by documentary requirements. (Disclosure: For nearly 12 years, I labored for the Washington Publish, which was then and is now owned by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos.)
Melania Trump not too long ago insisted that the film is “a artistic expertise that gives views, insights and moments,” reasonably than a documentary, which is a reasonably good abstract. The entire thing is finest described as a company promotional video, narrated with a bland, shiny voiceover layered over anodyne opinions of place settings and gown fittings. There may be definitely some historic worth within the film’s behind-the-scenes have a look at the rituals of a presidential transition, and a single humorous second through which Trump humors her husband over the telephone as he drones on concerning the magnitude of his Electoral School victory. However there’s a purpose Melania pulled in simply $7 million in its opening weekend, comparatively robust for a documentary, however weak for such an costly high-profile launch; it’s fan service for the Trump trustworthy.
Essentially the most titillating factor concerning the film is the enterprise association that produced it, which has made it an emblem of corruption considerations across the Trump household, and the willingness of firms and people with enterprise earlier than the federal government to place cash of their pockets. The president has enthusiastically promoted the film and dismissed a reporter’s query concerning the battle of curiosity created by Amazon’s spending spree final week (“I’m not concerned in that. That was carried out with my spouse.”).
Nevertheless outre it might sound, although, Melania is much less a complete break with precedent than probably the most excessive endpoint of a century’s value of negotiations between first women and the media and debates over the commercialization of the nation’s highest workplaces.
The politics of first women getting paid
Roosevelt’s lengthy profession in journalism is a stark reminder of simply how new and unstable American norms about first women, paid work, and their relationships with the media actually are. Within the Twenties, Roosevelt edited and wrote for the Girls’s Democratic Information, which functioned as a cross between a coverage journal and a celebration organ, with what one observer referred to as “a kind of galloping fashion — she doesn’t consider in commas.” She offered journal articles and recommendation columns for which she was paid between $1,000 and $2,000 a month, and in 1935, Roosevelt’s agent, George Bye, negotiated a $1,000-a-month deal for her to file her “My Day” column six days every week for the United Characteristic Syndicate; she wrote the column at varied cadences, which appeared in dozens of newspapers across the nation, for 30 years.
For all each Roosevelt and “My Day” are remembered fondly, each her work as a commentator and the cash she created from it typically aroused controversy. The backlash to Roosevelt’s Pond’s-sponsored raid broadcasts was such that she swore off future contacts — however solely briefly. By 1934, because the media students Maurine H. Beasley and Henry R. Beasley word, she was again on air and making a high price of $500 per minute. As Roosevelt’s biographer Blanche Wiesen Prepare dinner famous, Roosevelt deflected expenses that she was profiteering from her place by donating a lot of her earnings from writing to charity.
However the cash was solely a part of the problem. At this time, newspapers will eagerly settle for the occasional op-ed from a president or first woman. However the thought of turning over column inches six days every week to a member of a presidential administration or to their partner — a lot much less paying that individual for the work — would at this time be thought-about an unseemly political contribution, if not a type of state media.
And in 1937, Roosevelt benefited from what now looks as if an egregious breach of media ethics. When Women House Journal was bidding for the serial rights to Roosevelt’s memoir, This Is My Story, the house owners provided to pay Roosevelt $75,000 — then the equal of the president’s annual wage, and value round $1.7 million in 2025 {dollars}. To sweeten the discount, in addition they canceled a syndicated column by her household rival Alice Roosevelt Longworth, the daughter of former president Theodore Roosevelt, handing Eleanor a decisive victory within the cousins’ personal newspaper struggle.
This was absolutely not the comparability with Roosevelt Melania herself meant, when within the movie’s closing sequence the digital camera lingers on portraits of Roosevelt, Mamie Eisenhower, and Jackie Kennedy earlier than reducing to Trump posing for a photograph shoot. The documentary explicitly, however unconvincingly, insists that Trump is an innovator, shaking up inflexible social protocols with a snazzy candlelight dinner, intervening on behalf of Israeli hostages held by Hamas, sending pleas to Vladimir Putin to reunite Ukrainian households with their youngsters, and serving to to draft government orders. (Not talked about, amongst different examples: Nancy Reagan’s anti-drug advocacy, Hillary Clinton’s work on well being care reform, Edith Wilson’s shadow presidency.)
Trump’s finest case for groundbreaker standing, although, is the documentary itself and the enterprise association that produced it. Melania brings the presidency firmly into the fact tv period with its understanding winks to the digital camera concerning the peak of the primary woman’s heels and its quasi-confessional voiceovers. There’s a sure honesty to the best way Trump’s payday for the documentary rips away the fig leaf from the uneasy norm the nation has established: that it’s acceptable for the primary households to monetize the nation’s highest workplaces so long as they solely accomplish that after leaving workplace.
Presidential memoirs have lengthy been scorching commodities. Former President Ronald Reagan scored a $5 million, two-book deal in 1989; Invoice Clinton nabbed a $15 million contract for My Life; and Hillary Clinton acquired an $8 million advance for Residing Historical past, and reportedly $14 million for Exhausting Decisions, printed in 2014 when it appeared probably that she could be President Barack Obama’s successor. George W. Bush’s memoir offered for a relatively modest $7 million, a mirrored image of his declining reputation.
However the numbers actually shot up in 2017, when Barack and Michelle Obama reportedly signed a joint $65 million guide deal. Publishing insiders who anticipated the contract to be half that had been clearly baffled by the sum, even when nobody went as far as to counsel that the determine was truly corrupt. (Penguin and Random Home joined forces in 2013 in a merger the Obama administration declined to problem.)
The wager by Penguin Random Home paid off in gross sales, particularly the gamble on Michelle Obama’s memoir Turning into, for which the industrial prospects had been much less sure. Her guide truly outsold A Promised Land, the primary quantity of her husband’s two-part memoir: It’s now one of many best-selling books of all time. And the Obamas additionally broke new floor by signing a growth deal with Netflix and podcasting agreements first with Spotify after which with Audible.
What differentiates Melania from earlier marketing campaign documentaries just like the Oscar-nominated 1993 Clinton marketing campaign documentary The Struggle Room and Melania Trump from the Obamas is much less the greenback determine hooked up to the venture than the timing and the motivations of the customer. Trump’s determination to skip the ready interval that’s all that is still of the prohibition on cashing in on the presidency is in line with the broader Trump household’s willpower to monetize the workplace. And Amazon’s seeming determination to deal with the household’s eagerness as a chance to buy an insurance coverage coverage in opposition to presidential ire is a sadly typical — if weirdly flamboyant — bending of the company knee.
Melania director Brett Ratner’s need to purchase his method out of #MeToo director jail is its personal aspect plot, however one which’s generated its personal Trump-related spinoff scandal as properly: In November, the president reportedly pressured Paramount to greenlight a brand new installment of Ratner’s long-dormant Rush Hour franchise proper because it was making a bid for Warner Bros. meant to compete with a suggestion from Netflix.
What little worth Melania possesses as a movie is on the margins, within the glimpses it presents of the individuals tasked with finishing up Trump’s aesthetic visions and the protocols by way of which one administration transfers energy to a different. “Everybody desires to know” about her, the primary woman insists early within the movie, earlier than continuing to disclose exactly nothing about herself. As an alternative, I discovered myself desirous about one among her signature style statements: I don’t actually care, Melania. Do u?
