Free, Melania by Kate Bennett

Free, Melania: The Unauthorized Biography
By Kate Bennett
Flatiron Books, 2019

CNN reporter Kate Bennett’s baffling new book Free, Melania begins its quiet, well-mannered assault on the aesthetics and common sense of its readers right there in the title: the comma instantly turns “Free, Melania” into exactly the kind of Boris-and-Natasha pidgin gibberish the book’s subject spouts on a regular basis, despite having used English frequently for forty years. Is the title asserting that Melania Trump costs nothing? This is certainly, literally untrue. Is the comma a desperate attempt on the author’s part to prevent the book’s title from reading like a plea? The one thing the title cannot mean is almost certainly the meaning that’s actually intended: that Melania Trump is a free woman. Melania Trump is absolutely not a free woman. 

And while we’re at it, the book’s subtitle isn’t exactly a basket of gardenias. “The Unauthorized Biography”? If a collection of treacly, credulous pieties this fawning is the un-authorized biography, the mind recoils at what the authorized life will be like.

Melania Trump has been on the world stage for three years, as America’s second foreign-born First Lady, but she’s been a reliable topic of New York society pages for fifteen years, since she became the latest woman to become Mrs. Donald Trump. Bennett includes a touching comment about the blessed day, once again in mangled English:

“I was completely in every, every detail,” Melania said of her wedding planning. “I did everything and I wanted to be along to do it because more people have it to tell you, ‘Oh, maybe you should do that.’ You know you get confused. And I know what I want.” 

“What Melania wanted for her wedding day was elegance,” we’re told, “white and gold everything - and tons and tons of flowers.” 

Bennett wasn’t covering the Trumps at the time, granted. But if she’d sifted through the first-hand accounts of the wedding made by the few people not forced to sign Non-Disclosure Agreements, she’d have realized that Melania Trump didn’t plan a single detail of her wedding - not the guests, not the menu, not the color scheme, not the tons and tons of flowers, not even her own bathroom breaks. The book’s version of the event, like its version of so many things, is fraudulent in a very telling way: it’s painfully obvious that this is the way Melania dreams things went. It’s “I know what I want,” which may be true, only verged just slightly into “I get what I want,” which has never been true in even a single instance of her association with Donald Trump. 

It should be Bennett’s job to separate this kind of wishing from reality in the life of the woman she herself refers to as “perhaps the most technically unqualified modern first lady in recent history.” The sight of a CNN reporter being reduced to a Sean Spicer-style Trump mouthpiece adds a whole new crease of irony to the term “fake news.”

It’s well over 200 pages before Bennett feels the need to come right out and tell her readers “I am not naïve.” The context is the Spring of 2018, when Melania Trump disappeared from public view for 20 days:

I am a reporter in the Trumpian era of dramatic falsehoods and exaggerations and lies, many from the mouth of the president himself. The thought that something was fishy obviously occurred to me, and those suspicions were influenced and amplified, I will admit, by the Greek chorus of people telling me something wasn’t on the up-and-up. 

That parting hint is almost savagely funny: the thing that made this seasoned reporter get a little paranoid? It was everybody else just chattering! So why did the First Lady stay missing for so long, if she was fine the whole time? “Like anything else in Melania’s world,” Bennett writes in one of the book’s most astonishing sentences, “she wasn’t going to be forced into faking something.” 

Bennett accepts the carefully-crafted statement of the First Lady’s spokesperson that she went to Walter Reed for a simple kidney-related procedure, stayed there for a week, then recuperated for two weeks before resuming her grueling schedule of waving and changing her outfit four times a day. The fact that the mentioned procedure is usually performed in an hour on an outpatient basis is never mentioned. The fact that White House spokespeople have been caught flat-out lying on well more than 1000 occasions is never mentioned. The similarity between this disappearance and pre-White House disappearances (each one of which was accompanied by rumors that Melania’s husband had bruised her face so badly that she needed to stay off-camera) is never mentioned. That “I am a reporter” bit goes right out the window. 

In her defense, Bennett is willing to call Donald Trump “boorish” when her narrative forces her to choose sides. But such tiny gestures can’t even begin to compensate for the vetted PR that chokes the rest of the book, this ridiculous fictional portrait of a Melania-version who’s strong-willed, fiercely independent, and deeply intelligent. Even in the context of a First Lady biography - traditionally fluffy exercises in pointless euphemism and gargantuan CV-expansion - this is absurd, pathetic fawning. 

No matter what it’s supposed to mean, the title “Free, Melania” is wrong. “Moron Marries Monster for Money” would be much more accurate, but it might have hurt Bennett’s White House access.

—Steve Donoghue is a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in The Boston Globe, The Wall Street Journal, The Historical Novel Society, and The American Conservative. He writes regularly for The National, The Washington Post, The Vineyard Gazette, and The Christian Science Monitor. His website is http://www.stevedonoghue.com.