There were a couple weeks in July where Melania Trump faced the media firing squad typically reserved for candidates running for elected office. It famously began in Cleveland, when Donald Trump’s third wife barely had time to flutter her billowy white sleeves off stage after addressing the Republican National Convention before the press opened fire. The critiques were entirely deserved, of course. Melania’s address had unequivocally borrowed lines from a convention speech delivered eight years earlier by First Lady Michelle Obama—an error practically incomprehensible even for the bumbling, infantile Trump campaign.

The plagiarism scandal was made worse when, at the very same convention, the Republican National Committee inaccurately credited Melania with having received a bachelor’s degree from a university in Slovenia. In all fairness to the R.N.C., the biography on her own Web site included that same detail before the whole thing was scrubbed and redirected to her husband’s official site. But it’s a detail that, according to several reports, is untrue. A number of outlets, including The New York Times and The New Yorker, have recently reported that Melania did not, in fact, graduate with an undergraduate degree; rather, she dropped out.

Then came the questions about her immigration status. Politico raised the issue of “gaps” in Mrs. Trump’s immigration story, prompting her to tweet a response to what she called “inaccurate reporting and misinformation.” Trump’s lawyers also stepped in, penning a legal letter to the news outlet putting it on notice for “false and defamatory statements” regarding her immigration history.

In early August, Donald Trump announced that the campaign would hold a news conference in the next few weeks to answer questions about his wife’s visa status when she came to the United States. No such news conference has been held.

As her husband crisscrossed across the country, holding rallies, and buoying cable-news networks with an ever-present stream of live press coverage, Melania was nowhere to be found.

Instead, Melania addressed the controversy earlier this week, when she tweeted out a letter from her immigration attorney, which she said states “with 100% percent certainty I correctly went through the legal process when arriving in the USA.” She also sued the Daily Mail for $150 million over what she called a “tremendously damaging” story that alleged she had previously worked as an escort (the British tabloid has since issued a retraction).

Through all this media swatting, Melania, along with her stepdaughter, seemingly went off the campaign grid. Until last week, the last image we had of her was onstage in Cleveland, way back in July, on the night her husband accepted the nomination. It is undoubtedly unusual for a political spouse to fade from the national spotlight so close to the election. As her husband crisscrossed across the country, holding rallies, and buoying cable-news networks with an ever-present stream of live press coverage, Melania was nowhere to be found. Whether she was holed up in her gilded triplex atop Fifth Avenue or nestled in their 60-room Bedford estate out of the city or tucked away at Mar-a-Lago or visiting her family in Slovenia, we don’t know. (The Trump campaign did not respond to a request asking why Melania had been absent from the campaign trail.)

We do know a couple things, though. First, we know that she is, in fact, still kicking. Of course, the lawsuits and legal threats and letters from immigration attorneys are one clue. And a brief pan of the camera at NBC’s forum with the two presidential candidates aboard the U.S.S. Intrepid last week happened to catch a quick snapshot of Melania, in a splendid purple sheath dress, clapping in the audience. She also appeared at her husband’s side at Phyllis Shlafly’s funeral earlier this week.

We also learned that Melania, the heavily accented Trump without an Ivy League degree (and perhaps any degree at all), may be the wisest Trump of the whole lot. Because the other Trumps who have stepped out on behalf of their campaign recently have really stepped in it. Donald Trump Jr., for one, shared a meme widely seen as anti-Semitic (though he later denied any knowledge of this). Then there was his assertion that it would be a bad idea for his father to release his much anticipated tax returns—those very same documents every president in the last several decades has released—because they would “distract from [his father’s] main message.” On Wednesday, the eldest Trump heir invoked Holocaust imagery in a radio interview, saying that if Republicans lied the way Democrats do, “they’d be warming up the gas chamber right now.” (A Trump campaign spokesman defended the remark as a reference to capital punishment.)

Then there was Ivanka, the always-on-message golden child of the Trump clan, who unexpectedly dug her own hole this week. She choked during what should have been a victory lap for her—a few easy interviews to tout the Trump campaign’s newly announced maternity-leave proposal. She botched details about the Trump Organization’s own leave options—claiming that all employees receive eight weeks paid time off when they have a baby, which is not, in fact, true—and got sharply defensive when a reporter pressed her on some of the more subtle nuances of her father’s plan.

In her absence, then, Melania avoided the inevitable Trump family imbroglio. Where has she been? “Enjoying my life & family and loving our country!” she tweeted last weekend. The Trump offspring have a lot to learn from their stepmother.