What Next - Meh-lania
Slate Daily Feed
Slate
3.9 • 1.1K Ratings
🗓️ 3 February 2026
⏱️ 22 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Melania, the documentary about the First Lady, is a lot like its subject: extremely expensive and fundamentally inscrutable.
Guest: Heather Schwedel, staff writer at Slate, author of “Unfortunately, I Have to Recommend You See Melania”.
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Podcast production by Elena Schwartz, Paige Osburn, Anna Phillips, Madeline Ducharme, and Rob Gunther.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | So Heather, you saw the Melania movie last week. |
| 0:12.0 | Congratulations? |
| 0:13.5 | Thank you. |
| 0:14.5 | Yes. |
| 0:16.8 | Heather Schwedell writes about culture for Slate. |
| 0:20.1 | On Friday, she went to a movie that burned through tens of millions of dollars on its way to the box office and opened on 1,700 screens. |
| 0:29.3 | That movie was Melania, which claims to be a documentary about Melania Trump. |
| 0:36.8 | Were there a press screening you went to? |
| 0:39.8 | No, there were no press screenings. |
| 0:42.4 | Never a good sign for a movie, TBH. |
| 0:44.8 | I looked up when it was playing in the very first show in all of New York City was at 10 a.m. |
| 0:51.3 | at a.m. at a theater downtown. I think there were probably about 12 people in the theater, |
| 0:58.1 | and it kind of came out that almost all of them were journalists. A guy approached me wanting |
| 1:04.8 | to interview me, like thinking, you know, maybe I was just a Melania fan, and he wanted to know |
| 1:10.4 | why I was there there and no one had |
| 1:12.0 | anyone to interview. What'd you think? |
| 1:16.2 | I don't know. She's very inscrutable, but it's like there's nothing to screwt, ultimately. |
| 1:24.5 | There's nothing to scroot. Here's the thing. |
| 1:28.1 | I read your article about the movie. |
| 1:30.3 | You actually kind of recommend people see it. |
| 1:33.3 | You say Melania is worth seeing despite or maybe because of how bad it is. |
| 1:38.8 | Why do you say that? |
... |
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