Many Americans are facing severe economic hardship. But not the incoming president and first lady of the United States. In fact, the incumbent first lady has just accepted a media deal that will pay her at least seven times the income of the average American household.
The year? 1932. The first lady? Eleanor Roosevelt, who accepted $1,800 for 12 radio broadcasts (more than $40,000 in 2025 dollars) sponsored by the cosmetics company Pond’s.
Melania Trump has little else in common with Roosevelt except the reported $40 million Amazon paid for her production company’s documentary chronicling the weeks before her husband’s second inauguration that arrived in theaters this past weekend. Amazon put another $35 million into marketing the film ahead of its release, an exorbitant sum by documentary standards. (Disclosure: For almost 12 years, I worked for the Washington Post, which was then and is now owned by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos.)
Melania Trump recently insisted that the movie is “a creative experience that offers perspectives, insights and moments,” rather than a documentary, which is a pretty good summary. The whole thing is best described as a corporate promotional video, narrated with a bland, glossy voiceover layered over anodyne reviews of place settings and dress fittings. There is certainly some historical value in the movie’s behind-the-scenes look at the rituals of a presidential transition, and a single funny moment in which Trump humors her husband over the phone as he drones on about the magnitude of his Electoral College victory. But there’s a reason Melania pulled in just $7 million in its opening weekend, relatively strong for a documentary, but weak for such an expensive high-profile release; it’s fan service for the Trump faithful.
The most titillating thing about the movie is the business arrangement that produced it, which has made it a symbol of corruption concerns around the Trump family, and the willingness of companies and individuals with business before the government to put money in their pockets. The president has enthusiastically promoted the movie and dismissed a reporter’s question about the conflict of interest created by Amazon’s spending spree last week (“I’m not involved in that. That was done with my wife.”).
However outre it might seem, though, Melania is less a total break with precedent than the most extreme endpoint of a century’s worth of negotiations between first ladies and the media and debates over the commercialization of the country’s highest offices.
The politics of first ladies getting paid
Roosevelt’s long career in journalism is a stark reminder of just how new and unstable American norms about first ladies, paid work, and their relationships with the media really are. In the 1920s, Roosevelt edited and wrote for the Women’s Democratic News, which functioned as a cross between a policy magazine and a party organ, with what one observer called “a sort of galloping style — she doesn’t believe in commas.” She sold magazine articles and advice columns for which she was paid between $1,000 and $2,000 a month, and in 1935, Roosevelt’s agent, George Bye, negotiated a $1,000-a-month deal for her to file her “My Day” column six days a week for the United Feature Syndicate; she wrote the column at various cadences, which appeared in dozens of newspapers around the country, for 30 years.
For all both Roosevelt and “My Day” are remembered fondly, both her work as a commentator and the money she made from it sometimes aroused controversy. The backlash to Roosevelt’s Pond’s-sponsored raid broadcasts was such that she swore off future contacts — but only temporarily. By 1934, as the media scholars Maurine H. Beasley and Henry R. Beasley note, she was back on air and making a top rate of $500 per minute. As Roosevelt’s biographer Blanche Wiesen Cook noted, Roosevelt deflected charges that she was profiteering from her position by donating much of her earnings from writing to charity.
But the money was only part of the issue. Today, newspapers will eagerly accept the occasional op-ed from a president or first lady. But the idea of turning over column inches six days a week to a member of a presidential administration or to their spouse — much less paying that person for the work — would today be considered an unseemly political contribution, if not a form of state media.
And in 1937, Roosevelt benefited from what now seems like an egregious breach of media ethics. When Ladies Home Journal was bidding for the serial rights to Roosevelt’s memoir, This Is My Story, the owners offered to pay Roosevelt $75,000 — then the equivalent of the president’s annual salary, and worth around $1.7 million in 2025 dollars. To sweeten the bargain, they also canceled a syndicated column by her family rival Alice Roosevelt Longworth, the daughter of former president Theodore Roosevelt, handing Eleanor a decisive victory in the cousins’ private newspaper war.
This was surely not the comparison with Roosevelt Melania herself intended, when in the film’s closing sequence the camera lingers on portraits of Roosevelt, Mamie Eisenhower, and Jackie Kennedy before cutting to Trump posing for a photo shoot. The documentary explicitly, but unconvincingly, insists that Trump is an innovator, shaking up rigid social protocols with a snazzy candlelight dinner, intervening on behalf of Israeli hostages held by Hamas, sending pleas to Vladimir Putin to reunite Ukrainian families with their children, and helping to draft executive orders. (Not mentioned, among other examples: Nancy Reagan’s anti-drug advocacy, Hillary Clinton’s work on health care reform, Edith Wilson’s shadow presidency.)
Trump’s best case for groundbreaker status, though, is the documentary itself and the business arrangement that produced it. Melania brings the presidency firmly into the reality television era with its knowing winks to the camera about the height of the first lady’s heels and its quasi-confessional voiceovers. There’s a certain honesty to the way Trump’s payday for the documentary rips away the fig leaf from the uneasy norm the country has established: that it’s acceptable for the first families to monetize the country’s highest offices as long as they only do so after leaving office.
Presidential memoirs have long been hot commodities. Former President Ronald Reagan scored a $5 million, two-book deal in 1989; Bill Clinton nabbed a $15 million contract for My Life; and Hillary Clinton received an $8 million advance for Living History, and reportedly $14 million for Hard Choices, published in 2014 when it seemed likely that she would be President Barack Obama’s successor. George W. Bush’s memoir sold for a comparatively modest $7 million, a reflection of his declining popularity.
But the numbers really shot up in 2017, when Barack and Michelle Obama reportedly signed a joint $65 million book deal. Publishing insiders who expected the contract to be half that were clearly baffled by the sum, even if no one went so far as to suggest that the figure was actually corrupt. (Penguin and Random House joined forces in 2013 in a merger the Obama administration declined to challenge.)
The bet by Penguin Random House paid off in sales, especially the gamble on Michelle Obama’s memoir Becoming, for which the commercial prospects had been less certain. Her book actually outsold A Promised Land, the first volume of her husband’s two-part memoir: It is now one of the best-selling books of all time. And the Obamas also broke new ground by signing a development deal with Netflix and podcasting agreements first with Spotify and then with Audible.
What differentiates Melania from earlier campaign documentaries like the Oscar-nominated 1993 Clinton campaign documentary The War Room and Melania Trump from the Obamas is less the dollar figure attached to the project than the timing and the motivations of the buyer. Trump’s decision to skip the waiting period that is all that remains of the prohibition on profiting from the presidency is in keeping with the broader Trump family’s determination to monetize the office. And Amazon’s seeming decision to treat the family’s eagerness as an opportunity to purchase an insurance policy against presidential ire is a sadly typical — if weirdly flamboyant — bending of the corporate knee.
Melania director Brett Ratner’s desire to buy his way out of #MeToo director jail is its own side plot, but one that’s generated its own Trump-related spinoff scandal as well: In November, the president reportedly pressured Paramount to greenlight a new installment of Ratner’s long-dormant Rush Hour franchise right as it was making a bid for Warner Bros. intended to compete with an offer from Netflix.
What little value Melania possesses as a film is at the margins, in the glimpses it offers of the people tasked with carrying out Trump’s aesthetic visions and the protocols through which one administration transfers power to another. “Everyone wants to know” about her, the first lady insists early in the film, before proceeding to reveal precisely nothing about herself. Instead, I found myself thinking about one of her signature fashion statements: I don’t really care, Melania. Do u?
