The spectacle of Melania Trump at the Nato celebrations, inside an outfit that looked half papal, half gobstopper, was not the neatest fit with older, possibly inaccurate perceptions of pallid misery and a mutinous resolve to reserve a separate identity from the old goat she, however inexplicably, married.

Consider the handholding. Previously, she was widely admired for a very relatable reluctance to touch Trump – witnessed in the celebrated Tel Aviv hand-swat. Last week, the couple handheld, practically snuggling their way round the summit, or as much as a gigantic poncho ever allows. At an event that exposed, to the largest of audiences, Donald Trump’s more comical deficiencies, his alleged victim appeared all loyalty. Stockholm syndrome? Or could Mrs Trump, hardly a feminist icon from the start, have long been the object of spurious concern, sympathy, wishful thinking?

Without doubt, the garment signified something. Or other

In the absence of fellow partners and any recorded interest in Nato’s strategic goals, it was not clear why Melania attended the event, let alone in a hi-vis cape, never removed indoors, which would get an average person followed around a department store by teams of detectives. Crusading? Nursing? Could we have a quick look underneath there, madam? There was definitely room for medical supplies. Maybe doctors had, wisely as it turned out, recommended some sort of rapid response unit for any Trumpian crisis that might be triggered by international, specifically Canadian, disrespect: “Get your cape, Melania, we’re leaving.” How much more painfully humiliating, if he’d ended lumbering home alone, only Donald knows.

Without doubt, the garment signified something. Or other. In a new book, Free, Melania: The Unauthorized Biography, the CNN reporter Kate Bennett dwells on her subject’s use of fashion “as a messaging tool”. After the “pussy-grabbing” tape, for instance, Melania appeared in a pink pussy bow. After the Stormy Daniels revelations, she wore “a bright white Christian Dior pantsuit with matching white button-down shirt”. Bennett translates: “Whatever she was trying to say with that suit, and she was trying to say something, it had a message, and the message was nothing to do with supporting Trump.” Maybe it was in Slovenian.

Some of the more mysterious things about Mrs Trump – that she rarely smiles, endures serial humiliation by the lifelong pussy-grabber – can be attributed to Melania’s heritage: “If you understand Slovenians, you know they are not a grinning country.” Same with divorce: “She was, like most women in Slovenia, not only raised a Catholic but also trained to take the bad with the good, even if the bad was really, really bad.” Such endurance has not previously been tested, obviously, on Slovenians married to orange narcissists who sentence countless Kurds to death.

But misunderstandings are inevitable when a person combines clothes messaging with being, as Bennett also decides, “the most enigmatic first lady in modern history”. Even the infamous “I really don’t care, do u?” Zara parka that the first lady modelled at a Texan border camp was not, in Bennett’s analysis, a message to an incredulous world, but to her step-daughter Ivanka (because Ivanka shops at Zara). It meant: stop taking credit for stopping the separation of migrant families. “There are no coincidences with Melania Trump.”

This is by no means the most counterproductive anecdote in a book committed to showing that Melania’s is an impressive, independent identity – hence the title’s comma – but with little other than her proximity to Trump to work with. Though she likes gold stuff and flowers. Enough to make her “one of the few creatives who has ever been first lady”. Anything else? She is “uncommonly beautiful”. “Luminous”. “Hypnotic”. One need hardly add that the barge she sat in, like a burnish’d throne, burned on the water.

To return to Bennett, (who surely, on the book’s evidence, deserves a role as the Washington Cleopatra’s handmaiden or, better still, press secretary): “Then there’s the way she smells. She has a distinct, noticeable fragrance, even to those who generally don’t notice such things.” Her voice? “Neither too high nor too low.” Her “signature” wave? “Far more comfortable for putting others at ease than, say, Hillary Clinton’s perfunctory side-to-side wave or Michelle Obama’s full-forearm windshield wiper.”

As with Carrie Symonds, Melania has benefited from a feminist impulse to respect women as independent of their partners

Supposing the hagiography does dispel, as it should, lingering suspicions of victimhood, the corollary must surely be a new, less forgiving acknowledgment that Melania, performing in public as shagger’s lustrous helpmeet, is complicit in her country’s disgrace. Bennett confirms that Melania broadly agrees with her husband’s politics and urged him to run. But, as with Carrie Symonds in the UK, Melania, allegedly condescended to by feminists, has in reality benefited from a feminist impulse to respect women as independent of their partners.

Since Melania chooses, however, not only to busy herself with table landscapes but with staged proofs of allegiance, so as to advance the proposition that Trump is not, regardless of the evidence, the embodiment of cruelty and sexism, it is unclear that feminist principles should help with the detoxifying. Leave that to his latest press secretary, Stephanie Grisham, recommended by both Melania (her previous charge) and by the heavily indebted Bennett. Melania, according to Grisham, is “very funny”. She uses emojis. Endorsing these endorsements, the PR herself is praised for having served journalists “warm chocolate chip cookies and milk”.

As much, then, as this glowing account owes to a White House official (the one currently savaging Nancy Pelosi and Stanford law professor Pamela Karlan), it confirms what must be obvious to anyone fluent in cape-language: Melania Trump is as valuable to the political interests of her husband, the sexual predator, as Symonds, the animal lover and Tory campaigner, is to selling her own incontinently lying partner’s #getbrexitdone project. It really would be condescending, considering the women’s strenuous promotional work, not to believe them implicated in its consequences.

• Catherine Bennett is an Observer columnist