When first lady Melania Trump wanted to host a bipartisan roundtable on Capitol Hill this spring to advocate for her “Fostering the Future” legislation, Rep. Jason Smith (R-Mo.) wasn’t sure if it was a good idea.
Smith recalled feeling “fearful” because “Democrats really don’t like her husband,” he told POLITICO.
But Trump was undeterred. She had been discussing a roundtable since November when President Donald Trump signed a “Fostering the Future” executive order, which is intended to improve child welfare outcomes. The order was nice but to give it teeth, Congress needed to step up.
The roundtable was convened in April. Sitting between Smith, chair of the Ways and Means committee and Rep. Danny Davis (D-Ill.), the ranking member of the panel’s subcommittee on work and welfare, Trump publicly lamented that only 3 percent of children in foster care earn a college degree and called the legislation a “moral imperative.”
Then, the roughly half-dozen members went behind closed doors and the first lady, according to Smith, said, “I want this on Donald's desk by the August recess.”
Proponents of the legislation faced little resistance, even in the chronically-divided chamber.The bill, which aims to increase access to housing, education and workforce training programs for young people aging out of the foster care system, soon passed unanimously through the House.
The day it passed, Trump stood next to her husband at the White House during the congressional picnic and both called on the Senate to act fast.
“Hopefully, it will quickly pass in the Senate,” the president said. “I’m sure it will. It’s a great thing.”
But it has not yet moved out of committee and the first lady’s August deadline is coming up fast. The president has not publicly pressured the Senate since the picnic.
Still, Democrats usually wary of anything named Trump were warm to the first lady’s visit.
“I think it made all of us feel good” to have the first lady speak on foster care issues despite other potential political disagreements, said Davis. "It’s been great to work knowing that the first lady shares some of the same thoughts and ideas, and I think her support has been very helpful in moving the agenda forward.”
Rep. Gwen Moore (D-Wis.), another member of the subcommittee who attended the roundtable, said “the First Lady has shown an interest and passion in helping foster youth, and it’s wonderful that she is lifting up their needs.”
Trump was also pleased to have bipartisan support, a rarity in Washington. The collaboration with Democrats to get the bill passed in the House “meant a lot to her,” said Marc Beckman, senior exclusive adviser to the first lady.
The roundtable, details of which have not been previously reported, underscores the first lady’s effort to take a more proactive and tactical approach in her husband’s second term.
Mostly working behind the scenes, Trump has engaged selectively on issues she cares about personally. In addition to the foster care legislation, she worked with lawmakers to pass the Take It Down Act. She and her staff have negotiated directly with Russian and Ukrainian officials on the issue of displaced and abducted children, according to the White House, the Russians and the Ukrainians. In September, she hosted Cabinet officials and tech CEOs, including Google’s Sundar Pichai and IBM’s Arvind Krishna, to promote integrating artificial intelligence into children’s education.
In at least one instance, the first lady pushed a message she cared about even when it seemingly clashed with the White House: Melania Trump called on Congress to invite victims of Jeffrey Epstein’s abuse to testify at a time when the broader Trump team was trying to move on from the scandal.
She makes relatively few public appearances and eschews the talk show circuit that often provided a friendly venue for other first ladies to talk about their pet projects or humanize their husbands. She rarely campaigned with her husband in 2024 and rarely travels with the president since he has returned to the White House.
In a rare interview, Beckman made the case to POLITICO that Melania Trump’s more sparing public profile this term was aimed at making her more effective on the issues she cares about. Her lack of ubiquity, this theory goes, makes the spotlight brighter when she chooses to speak.
She’s pursuing “Melania Trump’s playbook,” Beckman said. “First lady Melania Trump is locked in. She is looking to achieve more than any first lady before in history.”
That’s a tall order, but the evolution of her agenda points to a first lady determined to leave a different mark in her second term than she did in her first.
During President Donald Trump’s first term, she focused her efforts on awareness campaigns, most famously the “Be Best” initiative, an anti-bullying effort that promoted healthy living. At the time, many Democrats criticized the initiative as tone-deaf given her husband’s penchant for name-calling and use of social media to attack political enemies.
But Trump, who declined to be interviewed for this piece, did not push legislation or involve herself in foreign affairs the way she has in the second term. In addition to the Fostering the Future Act, she held a bipartisan roundtable with House and Senate members to push the Take It Down Act, which the president signed into law in May 2025. In March, she became the first sitting spouse of any country to chair a UN Security Council meeting.
The U.N. visit highlighted why the first lady remains a polarizing figure, with unprecedentedly low poll numbers. Her supporters saw a historic first. She brought her signature issue – the safety of children – to the world stage and called for peace, saying it “does not need to be fragile.”
Her critics noted she spoke just days after the U.S. and Israel launched a war with Iran, a topic she did not mention, and that her calls for peace and protecting children rang hollow in light of her husband’s new war.
Beckman said Trump is unbothered.
“She doesn't decide to do anything based on what the media might say,” Beckman said of the continuous torrent of criticisms the first lady may receive on her actions. “There's so much important work that she's doing.”
Both Melania and Donald Trump have expressed regret that they allowed themselves to be handled by advisers during the first four years when they felt they should have listened to their own instincts.
The president has sought to rectify what he believes is a misstep by surrounding himself with a very small coterie of loyalists and managing even more out of the Oval Office.
In her memoir, the first lady described feeling like an “outsider” when she first came to Washington and having to learn the ropes of staffing and resources. There were “protocols and politics” that disrupted her preparing the residence for inauguration, and at the end of her first four years, things felt more "manageable" because “we had been through it all before.”
She left the White House in 2021, thinking that she wanted to pursue a more personalized agenda, without the restraints of “mere policy and awareness-driven work,” she wrote.
The first lady declined requests for an interview but told Fox News’ Rachel Campos-Duffy in January that “it’s very different this time, because I have much more support than the first time.”
A letter to Putin
Early in the second term, as the president worked in vain to broker a truce between Ukraine and Russia, the first lady wrote a letter to Russian President Vladimir Putin and helped orchestrate the reunification of dozens of Russian and Ukrainian children.
“The images coming out where she learned about these children who were displaced as a result of the war really impacted her," Beckman said.
He continued, “she and her representative are continuing forward with working towards getting as many children back with their families as she can, she's very committed to it… she’s not looking at nations or borders” in her reunification efforts.
That effort is ongoing, with the first lady’s office taking the lead instead of working through the State Department.
The unique nature of the office of the first lady allows for an approach that cuts through bureaucracy and a personalized portfolio, said Anita McBride, first lady expert and former chief of staff for first lady Laura Bush.
“Every first lady comes into this position able to, and wanting to put their own stamp on the role, and because it is so undefined and not officially documented anywhere in the Constitution, or anywhere, there's no position description for it. They get to rewrite it any way that they want it to be,” said McBride, who is currently executive-in-residence at American University’s School of Public Affairs.
During a brief phone interview with POLITICO in March, the president praised his wife as “smart” and “hardworking.” She's got a great network of people that help her with returning children,” he said. “She's done a great job. Not since Eleanor Roosevelt has there been anybody like her.”
Putin mentioned the first lady’s efforts during his latest call with the president in June, according to a readout of the call by Russian aide Yuri Ushakov, per Russian state media. Zelenskyy handed a letter to the president from first lady Olena Zelenska in gratitude for the reunifications, joking, “it’s not for you, it’s for your wife.”
And on the fate of the outcome of the war, Beckman said, Melania Trump wants peace.
“The first lady wants peace. She wants peace in Ukraine, Russia. She wants peace in Iran. She doesn't support war,” he said, marking the first time the first lady’s team has remarked on her views on Iran.
On the first lady’s reticence – even with something as high-profile as the reunifications, Diana Carlin, co-author of Remember the First Ladies and professor emeritus at St. Louis University, said that sometimes, “less is more,” especially in tough negotiations.
“A lot of our first ladies have been more private, and that's the beauty of this position. There is no legal requirement to do anything,” Carlin said.
Beckman analogized Trump’s approach to public life to how “royalty was historically” – “quiet” but “very impactful.”
“She speaks from time to time when it's important,” he said. “Otherwise, she doesn't need to speak at all.”
Trump is fascinated by royalty – whether it's the British monarchy or American Camelot and Jackie Kennedy. She’s close with Queen Rania of Jordan and hosted her at Mar-a-Lago in January 2025, regularly exchanges letters with King Charles and said she would “never forget” her visit with Pope Francis in 2017.
Part of her reluctance to be more public-facing stems from a deep distrust of the media, which she feels has treated her and her husband unfairly. The relationship has always been rocky. When they first went public with their relationship, Trump was accused of being interested in her much older partner for his money, a claim she publicly denied on ABC. Her 2016 speech at the Republican National Convention was panned for appearing to plagiarize then-first lady Michelle Obama.
In her memoir, she describes how she, like her husband, had spent some of the first term surrounded by staff they didn’t view as competent enough and ran into public relations snafus. The infamous “I really don’t care, do you” jacket she was pilloried over for wearing during the first term, she said, was intended as a dig at the media that criticized her. But a staffer at the time said the jacket had no intended message, which few believed and led to even more media criticism.
In this term, there are still some misunderstandings. Beckman described doubts that she really lives in the White House as “the most laughable thing” and said, “the bottom line is the woman lives [at the White House]. She's with her husband and her son [Barron], they all live there, and she lives there.”
Her sudden decision to speak direct-to-camera to deny involvement with Epstein was borne out of another misunderstanding, Beckman said.
“It was about going on the record to talk about the fact that she wasn't connected with, is not connected with, Jeffrey Epstein at all,” he said. “She wanted to be a champion, a leader for the victims, and then finally she called on Congress to give the victims the ability to go on the congressional record, sit in front of Congress if they want, and go on the record.”
The AI debate
The White House has been grappling with how to handle federal policy on artificial intelligence, with an internal divide blooming between those who want more guardrails and those who favor unleashed innovation.
The first lady, who has made “emerging technology” a part of her portfolio, has expressed concerns about child safety and privacy going back to her first term in office under the “Be Best” initiative.
In the second term, she built support around the Take It Down Act. The bill was signed into law in May of 2025 and deals with nonconsensual pictures and deepfakes published on the internet.
“I would say go ahead,” the first lady told Beckman in an interview in October, 2024 on how to approach AI technology. “But maybe we need to look for some restrictions regarding taking advantage of negative and toxic AI.”
That cautious tone is similar to that of the centrist AI camp that wants to strike a balance between innovation and guardrails. In the administration, that includes chief of staff Susie Wiles and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent. Meanwhile, former AI czar David Sacks has urged the president to more strictly favor freedom of innovation, and Pentagon officials like Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and under secretary of defense for research and engineering Emil Michael have expressed significant doubts.
“There's a little bit of a divide, I think, in the White House,” said Beckman. “You're going to see the first lady time and time again, forever side with regards to protecting the children, and she stands for no matter what – we have to worry about the children being in a position of safety first.”
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