First lady Melania Trump in Focus after White House exit
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What’s next for soon-to-be former first lady Melania Trump?
Unconventional and unpredictable, first lady Melania Trump now faces the task of vacating the White House and deciding what the next phase of her life will look like.
The days since the election have been as tumultuous as the last near-four years in Washington – but pretty typical for her: She was seen only once – at the White House with the president in the early hours of last Wednesday – and has not been seen or heard in public since.
Meanwhile, it was all over but the shouting. Nail-biting waits for vote counts continued, and Joe Biden was declared president-elect Saturday morning. The president blasted out multiple ALL-CAP tweets; one demanded the vote counting stop, while another claimed he won "by a lot" just ahead of many media networks calling the race in favor of Biden. The president ranted Thursday night during a live press conference about alleged fraud in the election, which was so shocking many media outlets, including USA TODAY, cut away in the middle of it.
Melania Trump wasn't there. On Friday morning, her Twitter account sent out an anodyne tweet about a hospital she visited last year in Boston, as if nothing unusual was happening.
So now that Biden has been declared the winner, what's next for Mrs. Trump? Will she return to her former role of devoted mom and wealthy lady of leisure, traveling between one Trump estate to another? After Jan. 21, will she make a beeline for her Trump Tower penthouse in New York City, or head for the spa at Mar-a-Lago in sunny Palm Beach, Florida?
Based on the past four years, she's not likely to confide. But a hint: She voted last week in person in Palm Beach County, where the Trumps have registered to vote and have made their official residence.
"I assume Mrs. Trump will go back to Florida – or maybe she will be able to convince her husband to return to New York as their official residence – and continue the kind of life she led before the White House," predicts first lady historian Katherine Jellison, a professor of history at Ohio University.
But first she will busy herself with decorating the White House for the Trumps' final Christmas season there, says Anita McBride, who was former first lady Laura Bush's chief of staff and now runs the Legacies of America's First Ladies Initiative at American University.
Losing the election comes with "a certain disappointment of not having this option (of being in the White House) again after working so hard towards it," McBride says. "You go through the stages of a loss because it is a loss. I think (Trump) will focus on her family and her son (Barron); helping him to manage this transition will most likely be foremost in her mind."
But who could blame Trump if she is preparing to relinquish with some relief the undefined, unpaid, high-pressure job of first lady to former second lady Jill Biden, now the FLOTUS in waiting.
Why? Four years of near-constant battles with a mainstream media that Trump despised and a deluge of toxic tweets from critics who returned her disdain. Sharp criticism of her fashion and decorating choices. Two medical crises, including a five-day hospital stay and weeks when she disappeared from public view.
Continuing talk and lawsuits over her husband's past alleged indiscretions. A first-lady agenda that fell short of its ambitions, especially on fighting online bullying of the sort often practiced by the president.
There were public spats over banal jokes invoking son Barron, 14; over her desire to tune the TV on Air Force One to CNN; and on her role in the firing of a high-level national security official. Throughout there were dozens of pictures and videos showing her with a crestfallen face, or snatching her hand from his, or the risible conspiracy theory that she employed a body double in public.
Then there were the unwelcome biographies and tell-all books, including one by a former friend who promoted it by releasing secret tapes of their conversations, capturing the first lady's scorn for some aspects of her role and her familiarity with Anglo-Saxon expletives, if not perfect grammar.
JIM WATSON, AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES"I could say I'm the most bullied person in the world," she lamented to ABC in her one mainstream media interview, during her tour of Africa in 2018, for which she was dressed like a colonial big-game hunter with a pith helmet on a nearby table.
In short, after all the Sturm und Drang of the most idiosyncratic FLOTUS term in the modern history of American first ladies, it would be understandable if Trump viewed leaving it all behind with a sense of good riddance.
"I think Melania will probably be secretly relieved," says Kate Andersen Brower, a journalist and author of books about the White House, including "First Women," about modern first ladies. "This is not what she signed up for."
Americans might have suspected ambivalence based on her decision to not move into the White House on Jan. 21, 2017. She and her husband said she waited five months so that Barron could finish the school year in New York.
From that surprising beginning, Trump was often under siege in the East Wing, but with few connections to living former first ladies to call and commiserate.
"She feels like she can’t do anything right, and though every first lady feels that way at some point, she has the disadvantage of being married to someone who has burned every bridge to the past," Andersen Brower says.
Having been born and raised in the central European country of Slovenia (formerly part of Yugoslavia), Trump, 50, has been a U.S. citizen for only 14 years. But the role she was expected to embrace can be hard to discern even for politically and socially savvy women born and raised in the USA.
"The job is so unclear anyway, so expecting her to (immediately) understand the weight of it and know what to do, and meanwhile none of the others want to talk to her except maybe Laura Bush, who came to tea a few times, because they all dislike her husband so much," Andersen Brower says.
Myra Gutin, a professor of communication and a first lady historian at Rider University in New Jersey, thinks Trump will be judged "an average first lady," one who fulfilled ceremonial responsibilities and launched a first lady project.
But "she was not an activist and rarely a presidential surrogate," Gutin says.
There is little doubt Trump was an historic first lady, more for what she is rather than what she did: The first foreign-born FLOTUS in 195 years. The first former fashion model who also posed nude. The first to be the president's third wife. The first for whom English was not her first language.
There is little doubt Trump was a historic first lady, more for what she is rather than what she did: the first foreign-born FLOTUS in 195 years. The first former fashion model who also posed nude. The first to be a president's third wife. The first for whom English was not her first language.
After many delays, she launched her first-lady initiative, Be Best, which was aimed at "helping children" by fighting online bullying and opioid abuse.
"Many Americans never developed any definite perception of her," Gutin says. "Her White House initiative, though well-intentioned, never particularly resonated."
Betty Boyd Caroli, author of multiple White House-related books, including "First Ladies," says Trump "hasn’t done anything significant" during her term.
"Her take on the job seems to be to do as little as possible, and of course some Americans, but not a majority I think, like that," Caroli says. "I expect her Be Best project to get buried, to the extent it ever existed as far as staff and funding go, quicker than Nancy Reagan’s Foster Grandparent plan."
Caroli doesn't see Trump taking on a new cause or, say, getting involved in her husband's post-presidency foundation or library, if there is one, largely because Mrs. Trump wasn't much of an activist before.
"As far as I can tell, Melania was not one for projects even before the White House," Caroli says.
It's possible that Trump will continue to snub the media, even as her husband is expected to continue haranguing them. He might even join the media, possibly through a post-presidency Trump-branded television network – Trump TV, as it were – that's been floated.
Caroli thinks the outgoing first lady might make occasional attempts to send snarky messages to the media through her clothes.
During her 2018 ABC interview in Africa, she claimed her infamous "I REALLY DON'T CARE, DO U?" jacket was really a message to the media. Yet when she answered questions during a gaggle with reporters (Egypt's Great Sphinx in the background) on the same trip, she derided the media for paying too much attention to her clothes, saying she wished people would “focus on what I do, not what I wear."
MANDEL NGAN, AFP/GETTY IMAGES"She'll go down in history as a first lady who used her clothes as a vindictive gesture to the media – she hates the media," Andersen Brower says. "She thinks it's ridiculous that her clothes are analyzed like this, and so she's going to have fun taunting people."
But after the White House, it won't matter as much. It could "drive reporters crazy, but I’m not sure anyone will care about what she wears after she’s out of D.C.," Caroli says.
Trump could get her revenge on her foes by writing a memoir, as most first ladies usually do: Michelle Obama's book, "Becoming," was a runaway best-seller and made her millions while allowing her to get things off her chest, including the experience of being attacked in ugly racist terms while she was first lady.
"I think Melania is going to return to that lady-who-lunches lifestyle, which is totally her right to do, but if she wrote a book, she could make a lot of money," Andersen Brower says. "If she wrote a no-holds-barred book, like Nancy Reagan's 'My Turn' memoir, that would do very well. And she might, given the way she (sometimes) talks so candidly."
But Trump will make motherhood her role first and foremost, even as Barron grows up in a few years and prepares to leave home. Will they go back to New York so he can return to his former private school in Manhattan?
Could she bear to stay behind in Washington while he finishes high school at his current school in Potomac, Maryland, about 20 miles from the White House? (Former President Barack Obama and Michelle Obama stayed in Washington after their White House years so their two daughters could finish up at their private school.)
McBride doesn't think the Trumps, any of them, will stick around Washington. She thinks it's possible that the former first lady could become quietly involved in the design of a post-presidency library, given her interest in design.
But she could also continue advocating for some of the causes she showcased in the White House, such as neonatal drug addiction, especially if she's asked by some of the groups she interacted with while visiting hospitals and hosting roundtables on the issue, McBride says.
"Sometimes, you're damned if you do, and damned if you don't, so you do what you like, what comes natural and is a reflection of your style and taste, and then you hope people like it," McBride says.
As for where the Trumps will live after leaving the White House, they have many luxury homes to choose from, including Trump Tower, Mar-a-Lago in Palm Beach, the Seven Springs estate in Westchester, New York, and the Trump National Golf Course in Bedminster, New Jersey.
Jill Biden will be historic first lady: Just call her ‘Professor FLOTUS’
The first thing to know about America's next first lady is that Jill Biden – a college English professor with four degrees, including a doctorate – is going to be a very busy FLOTUS, since she plans to keep her day job after moving into the White House.
After all, she continued teaching at Northern Virginia Community College during the eight years she served as second lady, working closely with the historic then-first lady Michelle Obama.
The latter considers Biden a "dear friend," who brings "kindness, empathy, and humor to even the most difficult of situations."
"She is going to be a terrific First Lady,” Obama said in a statement to USA TODAY.
But Biden will be historic in her own way, or at least that's her plan: She intends to be the first FLOTUS in the role's 231-year history to pursue her career and keep a paying job while living in the White House and serving as first lady.
Hear more about Joe Biden and Kamala Harris' election win by clicking play below
"She will really be bringing the role of first lady into the 21st century," says first-lady historian Katherine Jellison, a professor at Ohio University, noting no previous FLOTUS has been "allowed" to be like most modern American women, with both a work life and a family life.
"Americans have historically wanted their first ladies to be in the White House and at the president's side whenever possible," Jellison says. "Maybe the time has come when Americans will be more accepting of the idea that a president's wife can simultaneously be a first lady and a working professional."
"The winds of change are blowing because the country keeps moving; this was bound to happen," says Anita McBride, who was chief of staff to former first lady Laura Bush and assistant to President George W. Bush, and now runs the Legacies of America's First Ladies Initiative at American University's School of Public Affairs.
STEVE HELBER, APWhat’s next for soon-to-be former first lady Melania Trump?
Unconventional and unpredictable, first lady Melania Trump now faces the task of vacating the White House and deciding what the next phase of her life will look like.
The days since the election have been as tumultuous as the last near-four years in Washington – but pretty typical for her: She was seen only once – at the White House with the president in the early hours of last Wednesday – and has not been seen or heard in public since.
Meanwhile, it was all over but the shouting. Nail-biting waits for vote counts continued, and Joe Biden was declared president-elect Saturday morning. The president blasted out multiple ALL-CAP tweets; one demanded the vote counting stop, while another claimed he won "by a lot" just ahead of many media networks calling the race in favor of Biden. The president ranted Thursday night during a live press conference about alleged fraud in the election, which was so shocking many media outlets, including USA TODAY, cut away in the middle of it.
Melania Trump wasn't there. On Friday morning, her Twitter account sent out an anodyne tweet about a hospital she visited last year in Boston, as if nothing unusual was happening.
So now that Biden has been declared the winner, what's next for Mrs. Trump? Will she return to her former role of devoted mom and wealthy lady of leisure, traveling between one Trump estate to another? After Jan. 21, will she make a beeline for her Trump Tower penthouse in New York City, or head for the spa at Mar-a-Lago in sunny Palm Beach, Florida?
Based on the past four years, she's not likely to confide. But a hint: She voted last week in person in Palm Beach County, where the Trumps have registered to vote and have made their official residence.
"I assume Mrs. Trump will go back to Florida – or maybe she will be able to convince her husband to return to New York as their official residence – and continue the kind of life she led before the White House," predicts first lady historian Katherine Jellison, a professor of history at Ohio University.
But first she will busy herself with decorating the White House for the Trumps' final Christmas season there, says Anita McBride, who was former first lady Laura Bush's chief of staff and now runs the Legacies of America's First Ladies Initiative at American University.
Losing the election comes with "a certain disappointment of not having this option (of being in the White House) again after working so hard towards it," McBride says. "You go through the stages of a loss because it is a loss. I think (Trump) will focus on her family and her son (Barron); helping him to manage this transition will most likely be foremost in her mind."
But who could blame Trump if she is preparing to relinquish with some relief the undefined, unpaid, high-pressure job of first lady to former second lady Jill Biden, now the FLOTUS in waiting.
Why? Four years of near-constant battles with a mainstream media that Trump despised and a deluge of toxic tweets from critics who returned her disdain. Sharp criticism of her fashion and decorating choices. Two medical crises, including a five-day hospital stay and weeks when she disappeared from public view.
Continuing talk and lawsuits over her husband's past alleged indiscretions. A first-lady agenda that fell short of its ambitions, especially on fighting online bullying of the sort often practiced by the president.
There were public spats over banal jokes invoking son Barron, 14; over her desire to tune the TV on Air Force One to CNN; and on her role in the firing of a high-level national security official. Throughout there were dozens of pictures and videos showing her with a crestfallen face, or snatching her hand from his, or the risible conspiracy theory that she employed a body double in public.
Then there were the unwelcome biographies and tell-all books, including one by a former friend who promoted it by releasing secret tapes of their conversations, capturing the first lady's scorn for some aspects of her role and her familiarity with Anglo-Saxon expletives, if not perfect grammar.
JIM WATSON, AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES"I could say I'm the most bullied person in the world," she lamented to ABC in her one mainstream media interview, during her tour of Africa in 2018, for which she was dressed like a colonial big-game hunter with a pith helmet on a nearby table.
In short, after all the Sturm und Drang of the most idiosyncratic FLOTUS term in the modern history of American first ladies, it would be understandable if Trump viewed leaving it all behind with a sense of good riddance.
"I think Melania will probably be secretly relieved," says Kate Andersen Brower, a journalist and author of books about the White House, including "First Women," about modern first ladies. "This is not what she signed up for."
Americans might have suspected ambivalence based on her decision to not move into the White House on Jan. 21, 2017. She and her husband said she waited five months so that Barron could finish the school year in New York.
From that surprising beginning, Trump was often under siege in the East Wing, but with few connections to living former first ladies to call and commiserate.
"She feels like she can’t do anything right, and though every first lady feels that way at some point, she has the disadvantage of being married to someone who has burned every bridge to the past," Andersen Brower says.
Having been born and raised in the central European country of Slovenia (formerly part of Yugoslavia), Trump, 50, has been a U.S. citizen for only 14 years. But the role she was expected to embrace can be hard to discern even for politically and socially savvy women born and raised in the USA.
"The job is so unclear anyway, so expecting her to (immediately) understand the weight of it and know what to do, and meanwhile none of the others want to talk to her except maybe Laura Bush, who came to tea a few times, because they all dislike her husband so much," Andersen Brower says.
Myra Gutin, a professor of communication and a first lady historian at Rider University in New Jersey, thinks Trump will be judged "an average first lady," one who fulfilled ceremonial responsibilities and launched a first lady project.
But "she was not an activist and rarely a presidential surrogate," Gutin says.
There is little doubt Trump was an historic first lady, more for what she is rather than what she did: The first foreign-born FLOTUS in 195 years. The first former fashion model who also posed nude. The first to be the president's third wife. The first for whom English was not her first language.
There is little doubt Trump was a historic first lady, more for what she is rather than what she did: the first foreign-born FLOTUS in 195 years. The first former fashion model who also posed nude. The first to be a president's third wife. The first for whom English was not her first language.
After many delays, she launched her first-lady initiative, Be Best, which was aimed at "helping children" by fighting online bullying and opioid abuse.
"Many Americans never developed any definite perception of her," Gutin says. "Her White House initiative, though well-intentioned, never particularly resonated."
Betty Boyd Caroli, author of multiple White House-related books, including "First Ladies," says Trump "hasn’t done anything significant" during her term.
"Her take on the job seems to be to do as little as possible, and of course some Americans, but not a majority I think, like that," Caroli says. "I expect her Be Best project to get buried, to the extent it ever existed as far as staff and funding go, quicker than Nancy Reagan’s Foster Grandparent plan."
Caroli doesn't see Trump taking on a new cause or, say, getting involved in her husband's post-presidency foundation or library, if there is one, largely because Mrs. Trump wasn't much of an activist before.
"As far as I can tell, Melania was not one for projects even before the White House," Caroli says.
It's possible that Trump will continue to snub the media, even as her husband is expected to continue haranguing them. He might even join the media, possibly through a post-presidency Trump-branded television network – Trump TV, as it were – that's been floated.
Caroli thinks the outgoing first lady might make occasional attempts to send snarky messages to the media through her clothes.
During her 2018 ABC interview in Africa, she claimed her infamous "I REALLY DON'T CARE, DO U?" jacket was really a message to the media. Yet when she answered questions during a gaggle with reporters (Egypt's Great Sphinx in the background) on the same trip, she derided the media for paying too much attention to her clothes, saying she wished people would “focus on what I do, not what I wear."
MANDEL NGAN, AFP/GETTY IMAGES"She'll go down in history as a first lady who used her clothes as a vindictive gesture to the media – she hates the media," Andersen Brower says. "She thinks it's ridiculous that her clothes are analyzed like this, and so she's going to have fun taunting people."
But after the White House, it won't matter as much. It could "drive reporters crazy, but I’m not sure anyone will care about what she wears after she’s out of D.C.," Caroli says.
Trump could get her revenge on her foes by writing a memoir, as most first ladies usually do: Michelle Obama's book, "Becoming," was a runaway best-seller and made her millions while allowing her to get things off her chest, including the experience of being attacked in ugly racist terms while she was first lady.
"I think Melania is going to return to that lady-who-lunches lifestyle, which is totally her right to do, but if she wrote a book, she could make a lot of money," Andersen Brower says. "If she wrote a no-holds-barred book, like Nancy Reagan's 'My Turn' memoir, that would do very well. And she might, given the way she (sometimes) talks so candidly."
But Trump will make motherhood her role first and foremost, even as Barron grows up in a few years and prepares to leave home. Will they go back to New York so he can return to his former private school in Manhattan?
Could she bear to stay behind in Washington while he finishes high school at his current school in Potomac, Maryland, about 20 miles from the White House? (Former President Barack Obama and Michelle Obama stayed in Washington after their White House years so their two daughters could finish up at their private school.)
McBride doesn't think the Trumps, any of them, will stick around Washington. She thinks it's possible that the former first lady could become quietly involved in the design of a post-presidency library, given her interest in design.
But she could also continue advocating for some of the causes she showcased in the White House, such as neonatal drug addiction, especially if she's asked by some of the groups she interacted with while visiting hospitals and hosting roundtables on the issue, McBride says.
"Sometimes, you're damned if you do, and damned if you don't, so you do what you like, what comes natural and is a reflection of your style and taste, and then you hope people like it," McBride says.
As for where the Trumps will live after leaving the White House, they have many luxury homes to choose from, including Trump Tower, Mar-a-Lago in Palm Beach, the Seven Springs estate in Westchester, New York, and the Trump National Golf Course in Bedminster, New Jersey.
Jill Biden will be historic first lady: Just call her ‘Professor FLOTUS’
The first thing to know about America's next first lady is that Jill Biden – a college English professor with four degrees, including a doctorate – is going to be a very busy FLOTUS, since she plans to keep her day job after moving into the White House.
After all, she continued teaching at Northern Virginia Community College during the eight years she served as second lady, working closely with the historic then-first lady Michelle Obama.
The latter considers Biden a "dear friend," who brings "kindness, empathy, and humor to even the most difficult of situations."
"She is going to be a terrific First Lady,” Obama said in a statement to USA TODAY.
But Biden will be historic in her own way, or at least that's her plan: She intends to be the first FLOTUS in the role's 231-year history to pursue her career and keep a paying job while living in the White House and serving as first lady.
Hear more about Joe Biden and Kamala Harris' election win by clicking play below
"She will really be bringing the role of first lady into the 21st century," says first-lady historian Katherine Jellison, a professor at Ohio University, noting no previous FLOTUS has been "allowed" to be like most modern American women, with both a work life and a family life.
"Americans have historically wanted their first ladies to be in the White House and at the president's side whenever possible," Jellison says. "Maybe the time has come when Americans will be more accepting of the idea that a president's wife can simultaneously be a first lady and a working professional."
"The winds of change are blowing because the country keeps moving; this was bound to happen," says Anita McBride, who was chief of staff to former first lady Laura Bush and assistant to President George W. Bush, and now runs the Legacies of America's First Ladies Initiative at American University's School of Public Affairs.
STEVE HELBER, APAmericans have historically wanted their first ladies to be in the White House and at the president’s side whenever possible. Maybe the time has come when Americans will be more accepting of the idea that a president’s wife can simultaneously be a first lady and a working professional.
There's another thing to know about Jill Biden, and about Joe Biden: They project serenity, which has turned out to be a vital quality in the 2020 election.
The Bidens come to the White House (this is his third attempt) under the most unusual of circumstances: A tight election result and a slow vote tally (due to the huge number of pandemic-inspired mail-in ballots) was made even more tense by the angry ranting in public by the incumbent president, who tried to stop the vote counting, filed lawsuits in multiple states, shouted unfounded allegations about fraud in a live press conference and hinted he might not accept the results.
Throughout, both Bidens remained calm and pressed for everyone else to do the same. It's likely to be the same once Jill Biden takes up the role of first lady.
Because of her professional life, you can count on education being at the top of Biden's first-lady agenda, along with advocating for military families and cancer awareness (son Beau Biden died of brain cancer in 2015), all of which she pursued as second lady.
“The beauty of (being FLOTUS) is that you can define it however you want," she told Vogue in July 2019. "And that’s what I did as second lady – I defined that role the way I wanted it to be. I would still work on all the same issues. Education would be right up there, and military families. I’d travel all over this country trying to get free community college.”
But first lady is a higher-level job in terms of attention and pressure – can she really do it all?
"I would love to. If we get to the White House, I'm going to continue to teach," she said in an interview with "CBS Sunday Morning" in August. "I want people to value teachers and know their contributions and to lift up the profession."
Still, she took a leave of absence from teaching this year as she campaigned for her husband.
"He's always supported my career," she told CNN in January. "And this is a critical time for me to support him because, you know, I want change,"
On the road, often accompanied by one of her granddaughters, she was an engaged, enthusiastic campaigner, often pictured with her arms raised in exuberance as she addressed audiences. Biden headlined about two dozen events in battleground states in October alone, in addition to the multiple virtual events that have become necessary due to the pandemic.
She has strongly defended her husband and family. When asked about President Donald Trump and his conservative media allies' personal attacks on surviving son, Hunter Biden, 50, she told "The View" hosts that their tactics were mere “distractions.”
Trump and his allies of late have pushed a scandal story about Hunter Biden's business dealings and the contents of a mysterious laptop supposed to have belonged to him. So far, it's failed to get much traction in the mainstream media.
"I don’t like to see my son attacked, and certainly I don’t like to see my husband attacked, but to me, these are distractions," she said. “This election is… about the American people....The American people don’t want to hear these smears against my family.”
She further underscored family in a tweet after her husband was named president-elect, writing: "He will be a President for all of our families."
Biden, 69, has a bachelor's degree and two master's degrees, and a doctorate of education from the University of Delaware, which she earned in 2007 under her original name, Jill Jacobs.
As second lady, Biden was the first to have a paying non-political, non-legal, outside-the-Beltway job while serving. Former second lady Lynne Cheney worked, too, (and still works) as a senior fellow at a Washington think tank, the American Enterprise Institute, considered an inside-the-Beltway job.
Current second lady Karen Pence also teaches: She announced in 2019 that she would return to teaching art at a Christian elementary school in northern Virginia.
Biden signaled how much she values her career as an educator when she gave her national convention speech this summer while standing in the empty classroom where she taught English at Delaware's Brandywine High School in the early 1990s.
"Teaching is not what I do. It's who I am," Biden said in a pre-speech tweet.
"She has said on the campaign trail she has every intention of doing it even if he loses," says Kate Andersen Brower, author of books about the White House, including "First Women," about modern first ladies.
At least initially, most of her students were unaware of the full identity of "Dr. Biden" as either a U.S. senator's wife or as second lady, according to an interview with Vogue in March. She asked Secret Service agents to dress like college students and sit unobtrusively out in the hallway, on laptops, and it worked. As first lady, she's likely to lose this relative anonymity.
One first-lady expert, Betty Boyd Caroli, author of multiple White House-related books, including "First Ladies," has her doubts.
"Eleanor Roosevelt thought she could combine the two jobs but soon found out she could not, and the job of FLOTUS has grown a lot since she left the White House (in 1945)," Caroli says.
Biden has the experience to make a good try. She is not the first second lady to graduate to first lady (the most recent was the late Barbara Bush), but she has the advantage of bonding and working closely with "her" first lady, Michelle Obama.
"Jill Biden gives every indication she will be a very activist FLOTUS, following the example of Lady Bird Johnson and others; she’s been thinking about it for a long time," Caroli says.
CAROLYN KASTER, APIndeed, she's been thinking about it since 1987, when she spoke at a forum on first ladies in Iowa, according to a C-SPAN video. Biden said there's no one specific "right role" for a first lady but there is one objective.
"That is to make Americans feel proud of their first lady as someone who is in some way a reflection of their lives and values," she said then. "She should respond to the interests and concerns of today's American women, who are mothers, spouses and wage earners and struggling to balance all three. I think they will identify with a first lady who also is trying to balance all three roles."
"Biden has been around Washington longer than any FLOTUS in history, and she should have a full Rolodex of people to help her," Caroli said. "I expect her to quickly appoint a large, competent staff to develop her projects and do whatever she thinks will add to her husband’s legacy."
McBride and Andersen Brower say Biden is more prepared to be first lady than most of her recent predecessors with the exception of Barbara Bush and her daughter-in-law, Laura Bush.
"The amount of time of exposure to this world, eight years plus his (36) years in the U.S. Senate, makes her uniquely equipped to handle the job, and to balance teaching with the opportunity to change people's lives with this major megaphone as FLOTUS," Andersen Brower says.
"She is used to having a good team and staff, a good infrastructure around her so she can carve out a new chapter of this role (of first lady)," McBride says. "I think she will figure out a way to make it work – it's not without its heavy demands. I think her experience will make it easier to transition to a working (FLOTUS)."
Biden, born in Hammonton, New Jersey, and raised in Willow Grove, Pennsylvania, was getting divorced when she met her husband (she married Bill Stevenson after graduation from high school but they had drifted apart by their junior year at the University of Delaware).
According to the story, the then-U.S. senator from Delaware, a widower with two young sons who had lost his wife and baby daughter in a car accident, saw her picture in an ad (she did a little local modeling), and sought her out; their first date was in spring 1975.
It took five proposals before she agreed to marry him (she wanted to be sure; she didn't want Beau and Hunter to lose another mother). The couple married In 1977, and had daughter Ashley in 1981. Married to a plastic surgeon, Ashley campaigns against the death penalty and for criminal justice reform, and founded her own charity-based clothing brand.
Since their children are adults, it appears the Biden White House will be mostly without young children living there full time, as Barron Trump did and Malia and Sasha Obama did before him.
The Bidens now have five grandchildren (ages 25 to 14) old enough to appear occasionally on the campaign trail.
When she moved into the vice-presidential residence at the U.S. Naval Observatory in Washington in 2009, Biden continued to teach while playing a low-key and supportive role to the Obamas.
She and Michelle Obama launched Joining Forces to help military families with educational, health and job resources, and made frequent joint appearances to promote their initiative. In 2010, Biden hosted the first-ever White House Summit on Community Colleges with President Obama.
Michelle Obama has long been a big fan of Jill Biden.
“I’m lucky enough to call Dr. Jill Biden a dear friend, and I’ve seen up close the kindness, empathy, and humor she brings to even the most difficult of situations," Obama said in an emailed statement to USA TODAY. "Through our work together in the White House, I’ve seen Jill’s passion, hard work and dedication. As a military mom and an educator, Jill has always led by example, treating everybody she meets with the sort of genuine warmth and care that sticks with you. She is going to be a terrific First Lady.”
In their joint exit interview with People magazine in 2016, Obama commented admiringly that Biden often pulled out student papers to peruse on the plane as they traveled together.
“Jill is always grading papers,” Obama said. “Which is funny because I’d forget, ‘Oh yeah, you have a day job!’ And then she pulls out her papers and she’s so diligent and I’m like, ‘Look at you! You have a job! Tell me! Tell me what it’s like!’"
"Michelle Obama commanded attention because she was so historic as a first lady; Jill Biden was more low-key (as second lady) but still effective," Andersen Brower says.
Both Bidens are devoted to the “Cancer Moonshot” program, launched by President Obama "to end cancer as we know it." It wasn't just due to Beau's death at age 46; both of Jill Biden's parents died of cancer.
"Cancer is a brutal disease; it shatters our hearts and steals our joy," she wrote in a column for The Gazette in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, in 2019. "But what Joe and I have learned is that even if we don’t have medical degrees or science backgrounds, we aren’t helpless in the face of cancer."
"There are stories about her on the campaign trial connecting with people who lost loved ones, reaching out to people getting chemotherapy," Andersen Brower says. "She is famous for her empathy, she keeps in touch with people she's met who are dealing with cancer."
So even if Biden carries out the role of first lady with the unprecedented twist of pursuing her career, she has already demonstrated qualities prized for the "traditional" part of the FLOTUS job and what has long been assumed to be the first lady's No. 1 goal: humanizing her husband and promoting his agenda.
Myra Gutin, a first-lady historian and professor of communication at Rider University in New Jersey, says that a press secretary for former first lady Betty Ford wrote years ago that FLOTUS can provide a window into the White House.
"From this window, we can develop a sense of the character of the president and his family," Gutin says, predicting Biden will use her White House podium to provide those insights and "make life a little better for Americans."
What’s next for soon-to-be former first lady Melania Trump?
Unconventional and unpredictable, first lady Melania Trump now faces the task of vacating the White House and deciding what the next phase of her life will look like.
The days since the election have been as tumultuous as the last near-four years in Washington – but pretty typical for her: She was seen only once – at the White House with the president in the early hours of last Wednesday – and has not been seen or heard in public since.
Meanwhile, it was all over but the shouting. Nail-biting waits for vote counts continued, and Joe Biden was declared president-elect Saturday morning. The president blasted out multiple ALL-CAP tweets; one demanded the vote counting stop, while another claimed he won "by a lot" just ahead of many media networks calling the race in favor of Biden. The president ranted Thursday night during a live press conference about alleged fraud in the election, which was so shocking many media outlets, including USA TODAY, cut away in the middle of it.
Melania Trump wasn't there. On Friday morning, her Twitter account sent out an anodyne tweet about a hospital she visited last year in Boston, as if nothing unusual was happening.
So now that Biden has been declared the winner, what's next for Mrs. Trump? Will she return to her former role of devoted mom and wealthy lady of leisure, traveling between one Trump estate to another? After Jan. 21, will she make a beeline for her Trump Tower penthouse in New York City, or head for the spa at Mar-a-Lago in sunny Palm Beach, Florida?
Based on the past four years, she's not likely to confide. But a hint: She voted last week in person in Palm Beach County, where the Trumps have registered to vote and have made their official residence.
"I assume Mrs. Trump will go back to Florida – or maybe she will be able to convince her husband to return to New York as their official residence – and continue the kind of life she led before the White House," predicts first lady historian Katherine Jellison, a professor of history at Ohio University.
But first she will busy herself with decorating the White House for the Trumps' final Christmas season there, says Anita McBride, who was former first lady Laura Bush's chief of staff and now runs the Legacies of America's First Ladies Initiative at American University.
Losing the election comes with "a certain disappointment of not having this option (of being in the White House) again after working so hard towards it," McBride says. "You go through the stages of a loss because it is a loss. I think (Trump) will focus on her family and her son (Barron); helping him to manage this transition will most likely be foremost in her mind."
But who could blame Trump if she is preparing to relinquish with some relief the undefined, unpaid, high-pressure job of first lady to former second lady Jill Biden, now the FLOTUS in waiting.
Why? Four years of near-constant battles with a mainstream media that Trump despised and a deluge of toxic tweets from critics who returned her disdain. Sharp criticism of her fashion and decorating choices. Two medical crises, including a five-day hospital stay and weeks when she disappeared from public view.
Continuing talk and lawsuits over her husband's past alleged indiscretions. A first-lady agenda that fell short of its ambitions, especially on fighting online bullying of the sort often practiced by the president.
There were public spats over banal jokes invoking son Barron, 14; over her desire to tune the TV on Air Force One to CNN; and on her role in the firing of a high-level national security official. Throughout there were dozens of pictures and videos showing her with a crestfallen face, or snatching her hand from his, or the risible conspiracy theory that she employed a body double in public.
Then there were the unwelcome biographies and tell-all books, including one by a former friend who promoted it by releasing secret tapes of their conversations, capturing the first lady's scorn for some aspects of her role and her familiarity with Anglo-Saxon expletives, if not perfect grammar.
JIM WATSON, AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES"I could say I'm the most bullied person in the world," she lamented to ABC in her one mainstream media interview, during her tour of Africa in 2018, for which she was dressed like a colonial big-game hunter with a pith helmet on a nearby table.
In short, after all the Sturm und Drang of the most idiosyncratic FLOTUS term in the modern history of American first ladies, it would be understandable if Trump viewed leaving it all behind with a sense of good riddance.
"I think Melania will probably be secretly relieved," says Kate Andersen Brower, a journalist and author of books about the White House, including "First Women," about modern first ladies. "This is not what she signed up for."
Americans might have suspected ambivalence based on her decision to not move into the White House on Jan. 21, 2017. She and her husband said she waited five months so that Barron could finish the school year in New York.
From that surprising beginning, Trump was often under siege in the East Wing, but with few connections to living former first ladies to call and commiserate.
"She feels like she can’t do anything right, and though every first lady feels that way at some point, she has the disadvantage of being married to someone who has burned every bridge to the past," Andersen Brower says.
Having been born and raised in the central European country of Slovenia (formerly part of Yugoslavia), Trump, 50, has been a U.S. citizen for only 14 years. But the role she was expected to embrace can be hard to discern even for politically and socially savvy women born and raised in the USA.
"The job is so unclear anyway, so expecting her to (immediately) understand the weight of it and know what to do, and meanwhile none of the others want to talk to her except maybe Laura Bush, who came to tea a few times, because they all dislike her husband so much," Andersen Brower says.
Myra Gutin, a professor of communication and a first lady historian at Rider University in New Jersey, thinks Trump will be judged "an average first lady," one who fulfilled ceremonial responsibilities and launched a first lady project.
But "she was not an activist and rarely a presidential surrogate," Gutin says.
There is little doubt Trump was an historic first lady, more for what she is rather than what she did: The first foreign-born FLOTUS in 195 years. The first former fashion model who also posed nude. The first to be the president's third wife. The first for whom English was not her first language.
There is little doubt Trump was a historic first lady, more for what she is rather than what she did: the first foreign-born FLOTUS in 195 years. The first former fashion model who also posed nude. The first to be a president's third wife. The first for whom English was not her first language.
After many delays, she launched her first-lady initiative, Be Best, which was aimed at "helping children" by fighting online bullying and opioid abuse.
"Many Americans never developed any definite perception of her," Gutin says. "Her White House initiative, though well-intentioned, never particularly resonated."
Betty Boyd Caroli, author of multiple White House-related books, including "First Ladies," says Trump "hasn’t done anything significant" during her term.
"Her take on the job seems to be to do as little as possible, and of course some Americans, but not a majority I think, like that," Caroli says. "I expect her Be Best project to get buried, to the extent it ever existed as far as staff and funding go, quicker than Nancy Reagan’s Foster Grandparent plan."
Caroli doesn't see Trump taking on a new cause or, say, getting involved in her husband's post-presidency foundation or library, if there is one, largely because Mrs. Trump wasn't much of an activist before.
"As far as I can tell, Melania was not one for projects even before the White House," Caroli says.
It's possible that Trump will continue to snub the media, even as her husband is expected to continue haranguing them. He might even join the media, possibly through a post-presidency Trump-branded television network – Trump TV, as it were – that's been floated.
Caroli thinks the outgoing first lady might make occasional attempts to send snarky messages to the media through her clothes.
During her 2018 ABC interview in Africa, she claimed her infamous "I REALLY DON'T CARE, DO U?" jacket was really a message to the media. Yet when she answered questions during a gaggle with reporters (Egypt's Great Sphinx in the background) on the same trip, she derided the media for paying too much attention to her clothes, saying she wished people would “focus on what I do, not what I wear."
MANDEL NGAN, AFP/GETTY IMAGES"She'll go down in history as a first lady who used her clothes as a vindictive gesture to the media – she hates the media," Andersen Brower says. "She thinks it's ridiculous that her clothes are analyzed like this, and so she's going to have fun taunting people."
But after the White House, it won't matter as much. It could "drive reporters crazy, but I’m not sure anyone will care about what she wears after she’s out of D.C.," Caroli says.
Trump could get her revenge on her foes by writing a memoir, as most first ladies usually do: Michelle Obama's book, "Becoming," was a runaway best-seller and made her millions while allowing her to get things off her chest, including the experience of being attacked in ugly racist terms while she was first lady.
"I think Melania is going to return to that lady-who-lunches lifestyle, which is totally her right to do, but if she wrote a book, she could make a lot of money," Andersen Brower says. "If she wrote a no-holds-barred book, like Nancy Reagan's 'My Turn' memoir, that would do very well. And she might, given the way she (sometimes) talks so candidly."
But Trump will make motherhood her role first and foremost, even as Barron grows up in a few years and prepares to leave home. Will they go back to New York so he can return to his former private school in Manhattan?
Could she bear to stay behind in Washington while he finishes high school at his current school in Potomac, Maryland, about 20 miles from the White House? (Former President Barack Obama and Michelle Obama stayed in Washington after their White House years so their two daughters could finish up at their private school.)
McBride doesn't think the Trumps, any of them, will stick around Washington. She thinks it's possible that the former first lady could become quietly involved in the design of a post-presidency library, given her interest in design.
But she could also continue advocating for some of the causes she showcased in the White House, such as neonatal drug addiction, especially if she's asked by some of the groups she interacted with while visiting hospitals and hosting roundtables on the issue, McBride says.
"Sometimes, you're damned if you do, and damned if you don't, so you do what you like, what comes natural and is a reflection of your style and taste, and then you hope people like it," McBride says.
As for where the Trumps will live after leaving the White House, they have many luxury homes to choose from, including Trump Tower, Mar-a-Lago in Palm Beach, the Seven Springs estate in Westchester, New York, and the Trump National Golf Course in Bedminster, New Jersey.
Americans have historically wanted their first ladies to be in the White House and at the president’s side whenever possible. Maybe the time has come when Americans will be more accepting of the idea that a president’s wife can simultaneously be a first lady and a working professional.
There's another thing to know about Jill Biden, and about Joe Biden: They project serenity, which has turned out to be a vital quality in the 2020 election.
The Bidens come to the White House (this is his third attempt) under the most unusual of circumstances: A tight election result and a slow vote tally (due to the huge number of pandemic-inspired mail-in ballots) was made even more tense by the angry ranting in public by the incumbent president, who tried to stop the vote counting, filed lawsuits in multiple states, shouted unfounded allegations about fraud in a live press conference and hinted he might not accept the results.
Throughout, both Bidens remained calm and pressed for everyone else to do the same. It's likely to be the same once Jill Biden takes up the role of first lady.
Because of her professional life, you can count on education being at the top of Biden's first-lady agenda, along with advocating for military families and cancer awareness (son Beau Biden died of brain cancer in 2015), all of which she pursued as second lady.
“The beauty of (being FLOTUS) is that you can define it however you want," she told Vogue in July 2019. "And that’s what I did as second lady – I defined that role the way I wanted it to be. I would still work on all the same issues. Education would be right up there, and military families. I’d travel all over this country trying to get free community college.”
But first lady is a higher-level job in terms of attention and pressure – can she really do it all?
"I would love to. If we get to the White House, I'm going to continue to teach," she said in an interview with "CBS Sunday Morning" in August. "I want people to value teachers and know their contributions and to lift up the profession."
Still, she took a leave of absence from teaching this year as she campaigned for her husband.
"He's always supported my career," she told CNN in January. "And this is a critical time for me to support him because, you know, I want change,"
On the road, often accompanied by one of her granddaughters, she was an engaged, enthusiastic campaigner, often pictured with her arms raised in exuberance as she addressed audiences. Biden headlined about two dozen events in battleground states in October alone, in addition to the multiple virtual events that have become necessary due to the pandemic.
She has strongly defended her husband and family. When asked about President Donald Trump and his conservative media allies' personal attacks on surviving son, Hunter Biden, 50, she told "The View" hosts that their tactics were mere “distractions.”
Trump and his allies of late have pushed a scandal story about Hunter Biden's business dealings and the contents of a mysterious laptop supposed to have belonged to him. So far, it's failed to get much traction in the mainstream media.
"I don’t like to see my son attacked, and certainly I don’t like to see my husband attacked, but to me, these are distractions," she said. “This election is… about the American people....The American people don’t want to hear these smears against my family.”
She further underscored family in a tweet after her husband was named president-elect, writing: "He will be a President for all of our families."
Biden, 69, has a bachelor's degree and two master's degrees, and a doctorate of education from the University of Delaware, which she earned in 2007 under her original name, Jill Jacobs.
As second lady, Biden was the first to have a paying non-political, non-legal, outside-the-Beltway job while serving. Former second lady Lynne Cheney worked, too, (and still works) as a senior fellow at a Washington think tank, the American Enterprise Institute, considered an inside-the-Beltway job.
Current second lady Karen Pence also teaches: She announced in 2019 that she would return to teaching art at a Christian elementary school in northern Virginia.
Biden signaled how much she values her career as an educator when she gave her national convention speech this summer while standing in the empty classroom where she taught English at Delaware's Brandywine High School in the early 1990s.
"Teaching is not what I do. It's who I am," Biden said in a pre-speech tweet.
"She has said on the campaign trail she has every intention of doing it even if he loses," says Kate Andersen Brower, author of books about the White House, including "First Women," about modern first ladies.
At least initially, most of her students were unaware of the full identity of "Dr. Biden" as either a U.S. senator's wife or as second lady, according to an interview with Vogue in March. She asked Secret Service agents to dress like college students and sit unobtrusively out in the hallway, on laptops, and it worked. As first lady, she's likely to lose this relative anonymity.
One first-lady expert, Betty Boyd Caroli, author of multiple White House-related books, including "First Ladies," has her doubts.
"Eleanor Roosevelt thought she could combine the two jobs but soon found out she could not, and the job of FLOTUS has grown a lot since she left the White House (in 1945)," Caroli says.
Biden has the experience to make a good try. She is not the first second lady to graduate to first lady (the most recent was the late Barbara Bush), but she has the advantage of bonding and working closely with "her" first lady, Michelle Obama.
"Jill Biden gives every indication she will be a very activist FLOTUS, following the example of Lady Bird Johnson and others; she’s been thinking about it for a long time," Caroli says.
CAROLYN KASTER, APIndeed, she's been thinking about it since 1987, when she spoke at a forum on first ladies in Iowa, according to a C-SPAN video. Biden said there's no one specific "right role" for a first lady but there is one objective.
"That is to make Americans feel proud of their first lady as someone who is in some way a reflection of their lives and values," she said then. "She should respond to the interests and concerns of today's American women, who are mothers, spouses and wage earners and struggling to balance all three. I think they will identify with a first lady who also is trying to balance all three roles."
"Biden has been around Washington longer than any FLOTUS in history, and she should have a full Rolodex of people to help her," Caroli said. "I expect her to quickly appoint a large, competent staff to develop her projects and do whatever she thinks will add to her husband’s legacy."
McBride and Andersen Brower say Biden is more prepared to be first lady than most of her recent predecessors with the exception of Barbara Bush and her daughter-in-law, Laura Bush.
"The amount of time of exposure to this world, eight years plus his (36) years in the U.S. Senate, makes her uniquely equipped to handle the job, and to balance teaching with the opportunity to change people's lives with this major megaphone as FLOTUS," Andersen Brower says.
"She is used to having a good team and staff, a good infrastructure around her so she can carve out a new chapter of this role (of first lady)," McBride says. "I think she will figure out a way to make it work – it's not without its heavy demands. I think her experience will make it easier to transition to a working (FLOTUS)."
Biden, born in Hammonton, New Jersey, and raised in Willow Grove, Pennsylvania, was getting divorced when she met her husband (she married Bill Stevenson after graduation from high school but they had drifted apart by their junior year at the University of Delaware).
According to the story, the then-U.S. senator from Delaware, a widower with two young sons who had lost his wife and baby daughter in a car accident, saw her picture in an ad (she did a little local modeling), and sought her out; their first date was in spring 1975.
It took five proposals before she agreed to marry him (she wanted to be sure; she didn't want Beau and Hunter to lose another mother). The couple married In 1977, and had daughter Ashley in 1981. Married to a plastic surgeon, Ashley campaigns against the death penalty and for criminal justice reform, and founded her own charity-based clothing brand.
Since their children are adults, it appears the Biden White House will be mostly without young children living there full time, as Barron Trump did and Malia and Sasha Obama did before him.
The Bidens now have five grandchildren (ages 25 to 14) old enough to appear occasionally on the campaign trail.
When she moved into the vice-presidential residence at the U.S. Naval Observatory in Washington in 2009, Biden continued to teach while playing a low-key and supportive role to the Obamas.
She and Michelle Obama launched Joining Forces to help military families with educational, health and job resources, and made frequent joint appearances to promote their initiative. In 2010, Biden hosted the first-ever White House Summit on Community Colleges with President Obama.
Michelle Obama has long been a big fan of Jill Biden.
“I’m lucky enough to call Dr. Jill Biden a dear friend, and I’ve seen up close the kindness, empathy, and humor she brings to even the most difficult of situations," Obama said in an emailed statement to USA TODAY. "Through our work together in the White House, I’ve seen Jill’s passion, hard work and dedication. As a military mom and an educator, Jill has always led by example, treating everybody she meets with the sort of genuine warmth and care that sticks with you. She is going to be a terrific First Lady.”
In their joint exit interview with People magazine in 2016, Obama commented admiringly that Biden often pulled out student papers to peruse on the plane as they traveled together.
“Jill is always grading papers,” Obama said. “Which is funny because I’d forget, ‘Oh yeah, you have a day job!’ And then she pulls out her papers and she’s so diligent and I’m like, ‘Look at you! You have a job! Tell me! Tell me what it’s like!’"
"Michelle Obama commanded attention because she was so historic as a first lady; Jill Biden was more low-key (as second lady) but still effective," Andersen Brower says.
Both Bidens are devoted to the “Cancer Moonshot” program, launched by President Obama "to end cancer as we know it." It wasn't just due to Beau's death at age 46; both of Jill Biden's parents died of cancer.
"Cancer is a brutal disease; it shatters our hearts and steals our joy," she wrote in a column for The Gazette in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, in 2019. "But what Joe and I have learned is that even if we don’t have medical degrees or science backgrounds, we aren’t helpless in the face of cancer."
"There are stories about her on the campaign trial connecting with people who lost loved ones, reaching out to people getting chemotherapy," Andersen Brower says. "She is famous for her empathy, she keeps in touch with people she's met who are dealing with cancer."
So even if Biden carries out the role of first lady with the unprecedented twist of pursuing her career, she has already demonstrated qualities prized for the "traditional" part of the FLOTUS job and what has long been assumed to be the first lady's No. 1 goal: humanizing her husband and promoting his agenda.
Myra Gutin, a first-lady historian and professor of communication at Rider University in New Jersey, says that a press secretary for former first lady Betty Ford wrote years ago that FLOTUS can provide a window into the White House.
"From this window, we can develop a sense of the character of the president and his family," Gutin says, predicting Biden will use her White House podium to provide those insights and "make life a little better for Americans."
What’s next for soon-to-be former first lady Melania Trump?
Unconventional and unpredictable, first lady Melania Trump now faces the task of vacating the White House and deciding what the next phase of her life will look like.
The days since the election have been as tumultuous as the last near-four years in Washington – but pretty typical for her: She was seen only once – at the White House with the president in the early hours of last Wednesday – and has not been seen or heard in public since.
Meanwhile, it was all over but the shouting. Nail-biting waits for vote counts continued, and Joe Biden was declared president-elect Saturday morning. The president blasted out multiple ALL-CAP tweets; one demanded the vote counting stop, while another claimed he won "by a lot" just ahead of many media networks calling the race in favor of Biden. The president ranted Thursday night during a live press conference about alleged fraud in the election, which was so shocking many media outlets, including USA TODAY, cut away in the middle of it.
Melania Trump wasn't there. On Friday morning, her Twitter account sent out an anodyne tweet about a hospital she visited last year in Boston, as if nothing unusual was happening.
So now that Biden has been declared the winner, what's next for Mrs. Trump? Will she return to her former role of devoted mom and wealthy lady of leisure, traveling between one Trump estate to another? After Jan. 21, will she make a beeline for her Trump Tower penthouse in New York City, or head for the spa at Mar-a-Lago in sunny Palm Beach, Florida?
Based on the past four years, she's not likely to confide. But a hint: She voted last week in person in Palm Beach County, where the Trumps have registered to vote and have made their official residence.
"I assume Mrs. Trump will go back to Florida – or maybe she will be able to convince her husband to return to New York as their official residence – and continue the kind of life she led before the White House," predicts first lady historian Katherine Jellison, a professor of history at Ohio University.
But first she will busy herself with decorating the White House for the Trumps' final Christmas season there, says Anita McBride, who was former first lady Laura Bush's chief of staff and now runs the Legacies of America's First Ladies Initiative at American University.
Losing the election comes with "a certain disappointment of not having this option (of being in the White House) again after working so hard towards it," McBride says. "You go through the stages of a loss because it is a loss. I think (Trump) will focus on her family and her son (Barron); helping him to manage this transition will most likely be foremost in her mind."
But who could blame Trump if she is preparing to relinquish with some relief the undefined, unpaid, high-pressure job of first lady to former second lady Jill Biden, now the FLOTUS in waiting.
Why? Four years of near-constant battles with a mainstream media that Trump despised and a deluge of toxic tweets from critics who returned her disdain. Sharp criticism of her fashion and decorating choices. Two medical crises, including a five-day hospital stay and weeks when she disappeared from public view.
Continuing talk and lawsuits over her husband's past alleged indiscretions. A first-lady agenda that fell short of its ambitions, especially on fighting online bullying of the sort often practiced by the president.
There were public spats over banal jokes invoking son Barron, 14; over her desire to tune the TV on Air Force One to CNN; and on her role in the firing of a high-level national security official. Throughout there were dozens of pictures and videos showing her with a crestfallen face, or snatching her hand from his, or the risible conspiracy theory that she employed a body double in public.
Then there were the unwelcome biographies and tell-all books, including one by a former friend who promoted it by releasing secret tapes of their conversations, capturing the first lady's scorn for some aspects of her role and her familiarity with Anglo-Saxon expletives, if not perfect grammar.
JIM WATSON, AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES"I could say I'm the most bullied person in the world," she lamented to ABC in her one mainstream media interview, during her tour of Africa in 2018, for which she was dressed like a colonial big-game hunter with a pith helmet on a nearby table.
In short, after all the Sturm und Drang of the most idiosyncratic FLOTUS term in the modern history of American first ladies, it would be understandable if Trump viewed leaving it all behind with a sense of good riddance.
"I think Melania will probably be secretly relieved," says Kate Andersen Brower, a journalist and author of books about the White House, including "First Women," about modern first ladies. "This is not what she signed up for."
Americans might have suspected ambivalence based on her decision to not move into the White House on Jan. 21, 2017. She and her husband said she waited five months so that Barron could finish the school year in New York.
From that surprising beginning, Trump was often under siege in the East Wing, but with few connections to living former first ladies to call and commiserate.
"She feels like she can’t do anything right, and though every first lady feels that way at some point, she has the disadvantage of being married to someone who has burned every bridge to the past," Andersen Brower says.
Having been born and raised in the central European country of Slovenia (formerly part of Yugoslavia), Trump, 50, has been a U.S. citizen for only 14 years. But the role she was expected to embrace can be hard to discern even for politically and socially savvy women born and raised in the USA.
"The job is so unclear anyway, so expecting her to (immediately) understand the weight of it and know what to do, and meanwhile none of the others want to talk to her except maybe Laura Bush, who came to tea a few times, because they all dislike her husband so much," Andersen Brower says.
Myra Gutin, a professor of communication and a first lady historian at Rider University in New Jersey, thinks Trump will be judged "an average first lady," one who fulfilled ceremonial responsibilities and launched a first lady project.
But "she was not an activist and rarely a presidential surrogate," Gutin says.
There is little doubt Trump was an historic first lady, more for what she is rather than what she did: The first foreign-born FLOTUS in 195 years. The first former fashion model who also posed nude. The first to be the president's third wife. The first for whom English was not her first language.
There is little doubt Trump was a historic first lady, more for what she is rather than what she did: the first foreign-born FLOTUS in 195 years. The first former fashion model who also posed nude. The first to be a president's third wife. The first for whom English was not her first language.
After many delays, she launched her first-lady initiative, Be Best, which was aimed at "helping children" by fighting online bullying and opioid abuse.
"Many Americans never developed any definite perception of her," Gutin says. "Her White House initiative, though well-intentioned, never particularly resonated."
Betty Boyd Caroli, author of multiple White House-related books, including "First Ladies," says Trump "hasn’t done anything significant" during her term.
"Her take on the job seems to be to do as little as possible, and of course some Americans, but not a majority I think, like that," Caroli says. "I expect her Be Best project to get buried, to the extent it ever existed as far as staff and funding go, quicker than Nancy Reagan’s Foster Grandparent plan."
Caroli doesn't see Trump taking on a new cause or, say, getting involved in her husband's post-presidency foundation or library, if there is one, largely because Mrs. Trump wasn't much of an activist before.
"As far as I can tell, Melania was not one for projects even before the White House," Caroli says.
It's possible that Trump will continue to snub the media, even as her husband is expected to continue haranguing them. He might even join the media, possibly through a post-presidency Trump-branded television network – Trump TV, as it were – that's been floated.
Caroli thinks the outgoing first lady might make occasional attempts to send snarky messages to the media through her clothes.
During her 2018 ABC interview in Africa, she claimed her infamous "I REALLY DON'T CARE, DO U?" jacket was really a message to the media. Yet when she answered questions during a gaggle with reporters (Egypt's Great Sphinx in the background) on the same trip, she derided the media for paying too much attention to her clothes, saying she wished people would “focus on what I do, not what I wear."
MANDEL NGAN, AFP/GETTY IMAGES"She'll go down in history as a first lady who used her clothes as a vindictive gesture to the media – she hates the media," Andersen Brower says. "She thinks it's ridiculous that her clothes are analyzed like this, and so she's going to have fun taunting people."
But after the White House, it won't matter as much. It could "drive reporters crazy, but I’m not sure anyone will care about what she wears after she’s out of D.C.," Caroli says.
Trump could get her revenge on her foes by writing a memoir, as most first ladies usually do: Michelle Obama's book, "Becoming," was a runaway best-seller and made her millions while allowing her to get things off her chest, including the experience of being attacked in ugly racist terms while she was first lady.
"I think Melania is going to return to that lady-who-lunches lifestyle, which is totally her right to do, but if she wrote a book, she could make a lot of money," Andersen Brower says. "If she wrote a no-holds-barred book, like Nancy Reagan's 'My Turn' memoir, that would do very well. And she might, given the way she (sometimes) talks so candidly."
But Trump will make motherhood her role first and foremost, even as Barron grows up in a few years and prepares to leave home. Will they go back to New York so he can return to his former private school in Manhattan?
Could she bear to stay behind in Washington while he finishes high school at his current school in Potomac, Maryland, about 20 miles from the White House? (Former President Barack Obama and Michelle Obama stayed in Washington after their White House years so their two daughters could finish up at their private school.)
McBride doesn't think the Trumps, any of them, will stick around Washington. She thinks it's possible that the former first lady could become quietly involved in the design of a post-presidency library, given her interest in design.
But she could also continue advocating for some of the causes she showcased in the White House, such as neonatal drug addiction, especially if she's asked by some of the groups she interacted with while visiting hospitals and hosting roundtables on the issue, McBride says.
"Sometimes, you're damned if you do, and damned if you don't, so you do what you like, what comes natural and is a reflection of your style and taste, and then you hope people like it," McBride says.
As for where the Trumps will live after leaving the White House, they have many luxury homes to choose from, including Trump Tower, Mar-a-Lago in Palm Beach, the Seven Springs estate in Westchester, New York, and the Trump National Golf Course in Bedminster, New Jersey.
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