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Amazon, it seems, cannot get enough “Melania.” And at this moment, they feel like the only entity for whom that’s true.
The company has announced its plan to release a two-part documentary series about First Lady Melania
Trump on Nov. 20; this follows on the stilettoed heels of their feature film documentary, “Melania,” released in theaters in January. Back then, director Brett Ratner’s film — while failing to recoup the astonishing $75 million Amazon spent on rights and marketing — did well for a documentary, earning some $16.6 million. But that film came amidst the seeming height of a cultural shift toward forever-Trumpism that began in November 2024 — one that has now been decisively ended. In the wake of the midterms offering a stunning nationwide repudiation of her husband, what’s left to say about Melania?
There’s reason beyond the shock Democratic Party victories from Kansas to South Carolina to suspect “Melania,” the series — which, Amazon promises, will be split into episodes following Melania’s experience of the 2024 presidential transition and then the immediate aftermath of Donald Trump’s second inauguration — will meet an indifferent public. “Melania,” the film, covered the same territory with astounding vacuity. This viewer went in not expecting my opinions of Melania’s husband to shift but curious about the by-every-indication extraordinary life Melania herself has led. And I grew numb at the umpteenth shot of her walking into and out of rooms, random stylists and decorators burbling away in her wake.
Even by this family’s low standard, it seemed shameless: Melania Trump was willing to accept a staggeringly large check but seemed not to feel even the slightest twinge that would have prompted her to offer something, anything, to earn the fee. But the film was a document of an aesthetic, and a movement, that was ascendant.
The day after the 2024 election, a perception began spreading that the surprising nature of Trump’s popular-vote victory meant that not merely was Trump more popular than ever before but that our society had fundamentally changed. In Trump’s first term and through the Joe Biden presidency, corporations took tones between studied neutrality and resistance. Now, though, corporate America flocked to Trump, with Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and his soon-to-be-wife Lauren Sánchez among the guests of honor at Trump’s inauguration. As such, a film about how Melania prepared for said inauguration had a grim civic-duty feel. Want to see America? This was it — an oligarch’s wife flatly bragging to camera that she’s always had an intuitive feel for design, and charging you for the privilege of being in her company.
Something’s shifted! Trump is still the president (and Melania still the first lady), but we’ve just been issued as striking notice as possible that whatever change Trump has lost control of the national conversation. (Notable, perhaps: “Melania” came out in theaters before the launch of the disastrous war in Iran, a turning point for the president’s popularity.) This ought to have been predictable: Beyond the fact that Trump’s own tendencies seemed likely to doom his popularity sooner or later, no moment in time lasts forever, and electoral victories are just that, not restructures of society at every level.
This may be a hard pill to swallow for Bezos in particular, whose gut-renovation of his public image seemed designed to earn himself and his wife permanent seats at Mar-a-Lago. (Bezos’ tasteless June 2025 wedding, commandeering seemingly the entire city of Venice, was a stunning let-them-eat-cake moment from the onetime nerdy Seattle bookseller.) Amazon has, reportedly, discussed rebooting Trump’s old reality franchise “The Apprentice” with Donald Trump Jr. as its lead. Now that making the president happy seems like a less urgent concern — and that the negative optics of currying favor with him seem clear — one wonders how committed Bezos is to the new values he discovered in 2024.
An “Apprentice” reboot wouldn’t just be politically toxic at this moment, it’d never work: Everyone knows the only Trump who’s any good on TV is Donald. Just look at “Melania” — its subject seems to be gritting her teeth in order to get through a film designed to show her in an exclusively flattering light. But Amazon already spent the money they spent on it, and recutting it into a TV series will give Trump something to talk about. Increasingly distracted, the President spent the run-up to the election discussing men’s physiques and the day after his electoral thumping touring his under-construction ballroom; being able to spin a story about his wife now having the highest-rated TV series on streaming, or whatever, will at least give him something to do, while the rest of the country tunes out.
But the project is symbolic of a series of bets corporate America made that Trump’s opposition would never win again. Oops! At Skydance, for instance, opinion journalist Bari Weiss, in charge of CBS News, has radically revamped the division into something that suited the moment for, well, a moment, and now couldn’t seem less like what viewers crave. And, more consequentially, the new Democratic Senate majority is signaling that they will, after taking over in January 2027, subpoena tech companies — including Amazon — over their donations to Trump’s ballroom project. The donations made, somewhat like the $75 million spent on a documentary that’s now a time capsule, are the kind companies make when thinking only in the present tense. And, this past week, they collided with a future in which buying off the powerful may not work as well. At least Amazon will always have footage of Melania Trump singing “Billie Jean” to Brett Ratner, for whatever that’s worth.
