When First Lady Melania Trump makes a public appearance, there’s about a 50 percent chance that something will go wrong: She’ll mimic several lines from a Michelle Obama speech, or she’ll don a pair of stilettos on her way to a flood zone, or she’ll get caught on camera studiously avoiding her husband, Donald Trump. On Monday, however, Melania’s speech to a room full of middle-schoolers in Detroit wasn't overtly awkward—instead, it was uncomfortable thanks to a painfully obvious elephant in the room.

The First Lady flew to Michigan on Monday to kick off her much-discussed anti-bullying campaign, which she first announced in the run-up to the election. At the time, her intentions were met with bemused incredulity; her husband, after all, fueled his presidential campaign by cyberbullying his opponents into submission and still cannot seem to resist attacking his political enemies (and allies) online, to the point of potentially instigating a nuclear war via Twitter. In the last day alone, Trump has described critical news outlets as “fake,” claimed that football players protesting racial injustice are “showing total disrespect,” and accused a grieving military widow of lying about his condolence call to her. But Stephanie Grisham, Melania's press secretary, insisted that there was no irony in the First Lady’s trip. “Mrs. Trump is independent and acts independently from her husband,” Grisham told CNN. “She does what she feels is right and knows that she has a real opportunity through her role as First Lady to have a positive impact on the lives of children. Her only focus is to effect change within our next generation.”

Even without taking her husband's behavior into account, Melania’s campaign has taken some time to get off the ground. Questions surrounding her commitment were brewing as recently as May, when several prominent anti-bullying advocates told USA Today that the First Lady’s office had yet to contact them. (At the time, Grisham said the office was working on it.) Melania made her advocacy debut months later at the United Nations, where she delivered a speech promising to focus on combatting child-on-child cyberbullying. “Nothing can be more urgent nor worthy a cause than preparing future generations for adulthood with true moral clarity and responsibility,” she said. “Therefore, we must teach each child the values of empathy and communication that are at the core of kindness, mindfulness, integrity, and leadership, which can only be taught by example.”

That the First Lady has chosen to address such a specific niche of online bullying would seem to show a modicum of self-awareness on her part—or at least on the part of one of her staffers. As Stephen Balkam, the C.E. O. of the Family Online Safety Institute, told USA Today in May, child-on-child bullying might be the one area in which Melania can carry out her work without running up against finger-pointing when it comes to the president. If she sticks to that niche, “it’s possible nothing [Donald Trump] does undermines what she tries to do,” Balkam said. “But let’s wait and see.” Fortunately, the wait was brief.