Shunning the White House for Trump Tower, the former model has a unique take on the role of presidential spouse – ‘she is challenging American tradition’

When Donald Trump takes the Japanese prime minister, Shinzo Abe, to his resort at Mar-a-Lago in Palm Beach, Florida, this weekend, eyebrows will rise – and not just because of the glaring conflict of interest in hosting a state visit at a flagship Trump property. It’s also that those present at the event will include the two leaders’ wives – both of them.

In the three weeks since Trump took over the world’s most powerful job, his wife, Melania, has established herself as a worthy spouse every bit as baffling as him. She has displayed an equally effortless ability to confound and confuse, with the one important distinction that while he has studiously hogged the limelight, she has remained largely in the shadows.

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Mar-a-Lago will mark her debut in a formal role as first lady since her starring appearance on inauguration day when she evoked parallels with Jackie Kennedy. Since that heady start, she has virtually disappeared from view, vanishing into the bowels of Trump Tower, where her silence has been as deafening as her husband’s bark.

Take Twitter, the medium that has so far defined the Trump presidency. While he has tweeted almost literally around the clock, her @FLOTUS handle, with its 7 million followers, still quaintly bears but a single tweet posted the day after the inauguration.

In it she said that she was “deeply honored” to serve as first lady. But if that really is the case, then where is she?

Last week, when the president made an unannounced trip to Dover air force base to receive the body of a slain navy Seal who had died in Yemen, at his side was not his wife but his daughter, Ivanka. That in itself was not an aberration: Ivanka Trump has relocated with her husband Jared Kushner to Washington to be with her father, while Melania has remained behind in New York with their 10-year-old son, Barron.

Past first ladies have tried to minimize the agony of playing the fawning presidential spouse by limiting their formal functions, notably Bess Truman, the post-second world war first lady who spent as little time as she could in the White House. But there has never been anyone quite like Melania Trump.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Melania Trump drew comparisons to Jackie Kennedy on inauguration day. Photograph: UPI / Barcroft Images

“This is unique, like so much of this presidency,” said Dr Jean Harris, a political scientist at the University of Scranton in Pennsylvania who has studied the evolution of the first ladyship. “It really does boggle the mind what’s happening – she is challenging American tradition.”

She may be absent, but she has not been idle. On Monday, Melania Trump astounded observers by reigniting a $150m defamation lawsuit against the Daily Mail, an act unprecedented in itself from a sitting first lady.

What was most astonishing about the legal filing was the terms in which her objection to the Mail’s retracted August 2016 article was put. Certainly, she resented what she alleges was the newspaper’s implication: that when she began her career as a model she had worked as an “elite escort” in the “sex business”.

But then she went on to lament that the Mail had jeopardized her “unique, once-in-a-lifetime opportunity … to launch a broad-based commercial brand for a multi-year term during which [Trump] is one of the most photographed women in the world”. She didn’t spell out that the “term” would coincide with her husband’s term or terms in the White House, but she left little to the imagination.

So how are the American people to interpret this puzzling combination of physical absence and commercial opportunism? The New York Times took a rather stuffy stance in answering that conundrum, pontificating that her invisibility raised “questions about her role” and cast in doubt the annual Easter Egg Roll.

An alternative position would be to suggest that in 2017 it must be possible for an accomplished and ambitious woman (and first spouses have, of course, all been women in the 228-year history of the American presidency) to remain independent. After all, it was not Melania who ran for public office.

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“I haven’t yet heard Trump herself express a feminist angle to any of this,” said Professor Katherine Sibley, an expert on presidential matters at Saint Joseph’s University. “But maybe she does feel the role, which is unpaid, is suffocating and wants to focus on her own career.”

The billion-dollar question is how this will go down with the American electorate. Trump’s supporters put him into the White House as a vote for change, but was this the change that his supporters – including many white working-class and conservative-minded people from the heartlands – had in mind?

Harris is skeptical. “I don’t think Americans are ready for the kind of first lady Melania has so far shown herself to be. They still have traditional expectations that the first lady should be there to support her husband and present a loving family ideal to the American people.”

First ladies have been obliged to reboot their images in the past. Hillary Clinton tried to be an active member of Bill’s administration in the early 1990s, taking healthcare reform under her wing. But when that failed, and she was castigated for overstepping her mark, she reined in her ambitions and reverted to a more conventional part.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Melania Trump joins her husband, Donald, on a private visit to his Mar-a-Lago Resort in Palm Beach, Florida. She has appeared at few official events. Photograph: Joe Raedle/Getty Images

Melania Trump has veered in the opposite direction, opting to play a lesser role than her predecessors, who have each championed causes, such as Barbara Bush on literacy and Michelle Obama’s drive against obesity. The new first lady has said she wants to make the fight against cyberbullying her thing, though, as Mother Jones has pointed out, there is scant evidence that she is doing anything about it. Others have pointed out the irony of her chosen cause given her husband’s habit of frequent and often aggressively personal tweeting.

Melania Trump has begun, rather belatedly, to pull together a team for the East Wing. She has appointed a chief of staff and a senior adviser, and this week added to the list her new social secretary, Anna Lloyd.

In the press release announcing the appointment, the White House ticked off a number of conventional functions that Lloyd would oversee, including state dinners, social calendar events and unspecified “first lady’s initiatives”. Even more pointedly, Trump herself commented that she was looking forward to bringing “my ideas and traditions of entertaining to America’s house, my new home”.

Maybe she means it, that the White House will soon become her home, the enigma that is Melania Trump will rapidly dissipate and she will settle into a traditional first lady’s role. But given that there is little traditional about the world of President Trump, you’ve got to doubt it.