Melania Trump may be much better at playing the game in Washington than anyone’s been giving her credit for. She barely had to appear during the campaign, then she got herself a cushy office when her hubby won the election, and she even secured herself a smooch from the handsome governor of California. That’s just in the last few weeks!

All the while, she’s been hunkered down who-knows-where since just a few days after the inauguration. There’s been plenty of opportunity to get out there and be seen if she wanted — her husband has been making so much news on purpose, I feel like I’ve been eating Trump Flakes for breakfast every morning for more than three weeks now.

The strategy from Team Trump has been to “flood the zone,” or inundate the news cycle with so much at once that little stuff like, say, hiring back a white supremacist from the first administration, barely registers as a blip on the media’s screen.

But the zone’s been so flooded nobody’s stopped to ask why Melania has absolutely vacated the scene since January 24th, when she was on location with Donald in North Carolina to pretend like the two of them cared about Hurricane Helene. That’s the day Gavin Newsom stood his ground against Trump’s patented Big Boy Handshake™ and then leaned in to plant a smooch on her, immediately reducing her to a puddle of makeup and weird clothes.

Trump has, of course, been riding bareback across the Constitutional plains, kickin’ up twisters and signin’ Executive Orders like a buckin’ bronco. Okay, I just wanted to see how many words I could end with an apostrophe there, but you get my point: Trump has been making news as much as humanly possible.

Melania didn’t even come to the Super Bowl with him. He took his other First Lady, Ivanka, instead.

It’s honestly getting a little weird at this point. Elon Musk wasn’t even elected to anything, isn’t related to Trump, doesn’t get paid for what he’s been doing, and is starting to get on everyone’s nerves — and we’ve seen him more since the inauguration than we saw of Melania during Trump’s entire first term.

I’ve heard of having an “office spouse,” but there may be something to this whole thing with people calling the First Buddy “Elonia.”

It’s not just executive orders she’s been absent from, either. She wasn’t there when Trump signed the first bill of his new term, the Laken Riley Act. She was MIA for meet-and-greets with the leaders of Israel, Japan, and Jordan, even though she acted like besties with Queen Rania before the inauguration.

She didn’t even show up for the special dinner at her own house for Republican senators and their wives.

The only social media post she’s made in recent days was after her husband canned basically America’s entire governmental flight safety apparatus and a helicopter crashed into an airplane over the Potomac.

Her last Instagram post was the infamous official portrait that we told you about.

And there was this exciting tweet:

The President and I are excited to reopen the White House to those interested in the extraordinary story of this iconic and beautiful landmark. There is much to learn about the American Presidency, the First Families who have lived here, and our Nation’s rich history from a… pic.twitter.com/wsel0Dpn2I

— First Lady Melania Trump (@FLOTUS) February 12, 2025

One week before her husband’s inauguration, Melania told Fox News that this time around, “I will be in the White House.” This sparked headlines about her plan to be a full-time First Lady, though her next sentence was more ambiguous: “And, you know, when I need to be in New York, I will be in New York. When I need to be in Palm Beach, I will be in Palm Beach.”

It’s beginning to seem like Melania wants very little to do with Donald Trump these days. Who knows if it’s the company he’s keeping, or if she’s seeing a side of him she didn’t see during the first administration. Either way, we can’t really blame her. We’re pretty sick of him ourselves.