Melania Trump will be a ‘semi-attached’ First Lady, spending more time in Mar-A-Lago and NYC than in Washington

Brief and bloodless, it was the classic Donald and ­Melania show of affection. As he turned to greet his wife on stage at his victory rally in Florida on Tuesday night, ­Melania, wearing a sombre grey Dior skirt-suit, offered him the usual chaste kiss on the cheek as she smiled serenely at the adoring MAGA crowd.

Sphinx-like as ever, the 54-year-old acknowledged the applause with a wave as her husband — 24 years her senior — proudly told supporters her memoir was the “number one best-selling book in the country”.

He went on: “She’s done a great job — she works very hard to help people so I just want to thank her.”

But whoever Melania’s been working hard to help, it’s hardly The Donald.

When she made a brief and stilted speech nearly two weeks ago in New York’s Madison Square Garden, it was the first time she’d appeared alongside him, let alone spoken at a rally during the campaign.

In fact, during the past year or so, husband and wife have been seen together publicly on only a handful of occasions - and always at events that didn’t involve Melania having to travel more than a few minutes from home, whether in New York or Palm Beach, Florida.

Melania — whose mother Amalija Knavs died in January — appears to have been preoccupied with raising her son, Barron, to whom she is clearly devoted. Aged 18 and 6ft 9in tall, he now towers over both his parents.

Just as there’s nothing like a Melania Trump vanishing act to set the Washington rumour mill whirring — and there have been a few over the years — a reappearance is calculated to set off fresh speculation about exactly how much the Slovenian former model wants to be a part of her husband’s ­political life.

That question has never been more ­relevant as she faces a return to the White House and reprising the role of First Lady. On election night 2016, this was a prospect she reportedly found so appalling that she burst into tears when it became clear Trump had won.

Melania so hated the intense scrutiny she attracted as First Lady, she resisted moving into the White House for five months (blaming her son’s education) and frequently didn’t accompany her husband on official duties.

Now sources close to the third Mrs Trump say that she will remain only semi-attached to the second Trump presidency.

The public expect the First Lady to reside in the White House with the President, but insiders have revealed she is likely to divide her time between her private apartment there, the Trump resort of Mar-a-Lago in Palm Beach, and their gold-encrusted penthouse apartment in Manhattan.

“She definitely won’t be going back to Washington to live,” said a source. “She’ll stay between ­Florida and NYC. This is not what she signed up for.”

And the Big Apple will always be her preferred base. New York has been Melania’s favourite city since she moved to the US from Eastern Europe in 1996, and it now has the added attraction of being the place where Barron goes to university.

None of this will come as a huge surprise to anyone who has read her autobiography, Melania, which revealed a carefully controlled if not icy woman — far from the helpless pawn of a domineering husband, as the Democrats first tried to claim.

After all, she reportedly spent the best part of 2023 renegotiating the terms of the prenuptial agreement she has with her billionaire spouse.

Melania was reportedly worried about how much money would be left over for her and Barron after his father had finished paying court-ordered damages and the lawyers’ bills incurred by his various legal cases. These now run into the hundreds of millions.

A source told the New York Post: “Trump remains very rich, but with mounting legal bills and judgments.” The renegotiated prenup would “provide a more solid future” for Melania and their son should the couple split.

“It’s not that she threatened to leave him,” the insider told the Post. The Trump camp declined to comment on the claims. One of the prices Melania has to pay for being the most hands-off First Lady in recent history is endless jibes from her husband’s opponents when she does suddenly pop up next to him.

“Melania Trump made a rare appearance in compliance with section 3, subsection 2.7 of her prenuptial agreement,” said late night chat show host Jimmy Kimmel after she showed up at the New York rally two weeks ago.

It’s true that the couple’s physical chemistry can hardly be described as smouldering. Their public displays of affection rarely extend beyond some limp hand-holding and a few kisses on the cheek — although Trump did appear to move in for a kiss on the lips at the recent New York event.

But what can Americans expect? Being married to Donald Trump is hardly for the faint-hearted — and the past 18 months have been a bumper period for spousal embarrassment. Many might think a peck on the cheek is rather more than he deserves.

Last year a jury in a civil case found that Trump sexually abused a writer and former agony aunt called E Jean Carroll in a New York shop changing room in 1996 but absolved him of raping her. When Trump insisted the episode had never happened, Carroll argued he had damaged her reputation by calling her a liar and sued for defamation. In January, a New York jury ordered Trump to pay $83.8million in damages.

Mrs Trump wasn’t seen at that trial nor was she present three months later when Trump appeared in another New York court, facing felony charges of falsifying business records over the Stormy Daniels scandal.

The case hinged on a $130,000 “hush money” payment to the ex-porn star just before the 2016 election relating to Daniels’ claims that she’d had a brief sexual liaison with Trump ten years earlier, soon after Barron was born, at a Nevada golf tournament. Trump was reportedly angry Melania didn’t show her face at the six-week trial, which ended with him being found guilty on 34 charges and becoming the first US president to be convicted of a criminal offence.

Despite a newspaper report that Melania had accepted Trump’s argument that the case against him was a “disgrace” and a cynical attempt to damage his election prospects, his wife never made any statement in support of him. Insiders claimed she had privately referred to the Daniels farrago as “his problem”.

In the final weeks of his election campaign, however, she rallied to his aid, giving two interviews (to the pro-Trump Fox News) in which she sang her husband’s praises — as she did in her book.

Asked what she most liked about him in September, she was unexpectedly gushing. “His being. His humour. His personality. His kindness,” she enthused. “He’s very special. His positivity. His energy. It’s unbelievable. Yeah, so we have a beautiful relationship.”

As we have seen, it is a relationship that has been sorely tested by scandals, lawsuits and accusations of infidelity and sexual misconduct, yet in her 182-page memoir Melania ignored them and dwelt on the finer side of a man she insisted “isn’t flashy or dramatic, just genuine and caring”.

This is all very well but these qualities were clearly not sufficient to have her rushing to his side as he prepared for a second stab at the presidency.

Nor have they left Washington insiders expecting to see too much of her during his second turn as the most powerful man on the planet.