The “Melania” Documentary Offers an Intimate Look at Very Little
The Political Scene | The New Yorker
The New Yorker
4.3 • 3.9K Ratings
🗓️ 5 February 2026
⏱️ 39 minutes
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Summary
The New Yorker staff writer Lauren Collins joins Tyler Foggatt to discuss a new documentary about Melania Trump, which chronicles her life during the twenty days leading up to Donald Trump’s second Inauguration. They talk about the film’s glossy yet superficial portrait of the First Lady, who served as an executive producer, as well as its troubled rollout and poor critical reception. They also explore Melania’s tenure as First Lady and the contradictions at the center of her political identity as an immigrant married to a President whose anti-immigration rhetoric and policies have come to define both his Administration and the moment of the film’s release.
This week’s reading:
- “ ‘Melania’ Is a Forty-Million-Dollar Journey Into the Void,” by Lauren Collins
- “What a ‘Melania’ Cinematographer Hoped to Accomplish,” by Isaac Chotiner
- “How Jeff Bezos Brought Down the Washington Post,” by Ruth Marcus
- “Why the D.H.S. Disaster in Minneapolis Was Predictable,” by Jonathan Blitzer
- “Trump’s Profiteering Hits $4 Billion,” by David Kirkpatrick
The Political Scene draws on the reporting and analysis found in The New Yorker for lively conversations about the big questions in American politics. Join the magazine’s writers and editors as they put into context the latest news—about elections, the economy, the White House, the Supreme Court, and much more. New episodes are available three times a week.
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| 0:00.0 | Hey, Lauren. |
| 0:07.8 | Hi, Tyler. |
| 0:08.6 | Thanks for having me on. |
| 0:09.8 | Yeah, thanks so much for being here. |
| 0:11.8 | Would you say that there is a particular image or scene from the Melania documentary |
| 0:17.1 | that either intentionally or unintentionally captures the first lady's essence. |
| 0:24.1 | Ooh, you know, this is the thing that is fascinating about the film. It's more the absence |
| 0:30.6 | of a scene that captures the first lady's essence. What I was totally fascinated by is, you know, |
| 0:36.8 | this film, she had creative control, |
| 0:40.2 | could have put anything in it that she wanted us to see, right? And it is entirely formal, |
| 0:46.6 | entirely rigid, entirely like whatever the opposite of behind the scenes is, you know, |
| 0:51.5 | it's all kind of like on stage. I just thought it was fascinating. |
| 0:55.9 | I was like kept waiting for the kind of like accessible, humanizing kind of like downtime |
| 1:03.5 | moment where you were going to see her like in her exercise clothes or like eating a yogurt |
| 1:09.2 | or I don't know what, walking a a dog I don't think she has one |
| 1:13.3 | but something and I just kept like anticipating that scene that was going to come and it was going |
| 1:19.3 | to make us see Melania in a way that we've never seen her before and it never happened so that was |
| 1:24.0 | what what really made an impression on me was kind of like even, you know, given every |
| 1:28.7 | opportunity to either document or conjure one, Melania and, you know, her handpick makers of this |
| 1:35.9 | film chose to present her as we've always seen her, which is like a lady in a hat that |
| 1:40.9 | doesn't show her eyes. |
| 1:42.4 | I think that is the perfect description of the movie. |
... |
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