When Donald Trump first accepted his party’s nomination for president at the Republican National Convention in 2016, his wife, Melania, delivered a primetime speech in support of her husband.
Four years later amid the Covid pandemic, she did the same, in remarks delivered in the White House Rose Garden.
But this week, as her husband prepares to accept the Republican party nomination for president for a third time at the party’s convention in Milwaukee, she has been notably absent.
Melania’s low profile is part of a marked shift within the ex-president’s family that has already begun to play out in public at the Republican convention.
Also largely absent from the festivities are his daughter Ivanka and her husband Jared Kushner, who were top aides in the Trump White House. Instead, his oldest son Donald Jr — who is popular among his father’s populist base — has been ubiquitous in Milwaukee and will speak on Wednesday evening ahead of vice-presidential nominee JD Vance. The two are known to be close friends and confidants.
Trump campaign officials have insisted the former first lady, who has faded from public view since her husband left the White House, will appear at the convention later in the week. She also issued a rare public statement at the weekend after the attempted assassination of her husband, calling for national unity and healing.
But she will not speak on stage, and on Tuesday night, it was a relative newcomer to the public-facing Trumpian pantheon — the president’s daughter-in-law, Lara Trump — who delivered the keynote speech in the slot historically reserved for the wife of the presidential nominee intended to humanise the candidate.
“When I look at Donald Trump, I see a wonderful father, father-in-law, and of course grandfather to my two children,” Lara said in her address. “This is a man who has sacrificed for his family, and a man who has truly sacrificed for his country.”
Like her stepmother, Ivanka is expected to appear at the convention. But she is not scheduled to speak, and it remains unclear whether she or Kushner — who has spent the past four years focused on his investment firm, which received a cash injection of $2bn from the Saudi sovereign wealth fund just six months after Trump left the White House — will seek a larger role in the campaign, or a second Trump administration.
“This time around, I am choosing to prioritise my young children and the private life we are creating as a family,” Ivanka said in a statement after her father announced his third White House bid. “While I will always support my father, going forward I will do so outside the political arena.”
Kate Andersen Brower, an author of several books about the White House, including First Women, said it was “very unusual” for a candidate’s spouse not to speak at a convention, but Melania — who was accused of plagiarising Michelle Obama in her 2016 convention speech — “probably sees it has having some more to lose than to gain”.
“They desperately needed a woman representative from the Trump family to fill that role,” Brower added. “Lara can fill that void.”
It was something of a coming-out moment for Lara, the 41-year-old former tabloid television producer who is married to Eric Trump and earlier this year became co-chair of the Republican National Committee at the behest of her father-in-law.
“Donald Trump has always relied heavily on his family, and he is going to continue to do so,” said Mick Mulvaney, who was Trump’s acting White House chief of staff from 2019 to 2020. “It may be different family members in the second term . . . but his kids will always be his senior advisers.”
The subtle shift within the family was on display during the first night of the convention, when the former president made a surprise appearance in the arena and sat next to Donald Jr and Eric in a VIP box. They were flanked by their partners, Kimberly Guilfoyle and Lara Trump, as well as their younger sister, Tiffany Trump, and her husband, Michael Boulos.
If Ivanka and Jared were representative of what some in Trump world derisively called “the globalists”, it was hard not to notice a very different image surrounding the first family in the VIP box: former Fox News personality and rightwing provocateur Tucker Carlson was also seated there, alongside loyal congressional allies such as Florida congressman Byron Donalds and Speaker of the House Mike Johnson.
Mulvaney acknowledged Ivanka and Jared represent more “centrist” elements of the Republican party, rather than the more populist right-wing factions embodied by Donald Jr and Vance.
Indeed, nothing symbolises Donald Jr’s ascendancy more than the selection of Vance. The two men were close personal friends and speak or text on a near-daily basis, according to a person familiar with their relationship. Donald Jr and his fiancée, Guilfoyle, have also played an active role in fundraising for the campaign.
Brower said the absence of Ivanka and Melania from the front lines in Milwaukee was a sign of the toll Trump’s first presidency placed on both family members.
“There is a lot of scar tissue for the Trump women,” Brower said. “Ivanka was criticised by a lot of Democrats who thought she was going to be someone who could temper her father in the White House, and she couldn’t. Either she didn’t want to, or she couldn’t.”
Despite the toll on his family, Mulvaney says he expects a second Trump administration to continue his unusual practice of putting family members in pivotal policy and political positions.
“The presidential nominee always gets to put their stamp on the national party,” said Mulvaney. “Anybody who is surprised by Donald Trump putting his family members in key positions does not know Donald Trump.”
“Sometimes, the only people you can trust are family,” Lara Trump told The Washington Post in a recent interview. “For [Donald Trump], that’s been the case, sadly, more often than not.”
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