Melania — Grace, Style, and the Strength That Doesn’t Shout

Guest Opinion by Perry O. Hooper Jr.

 Melania out-grossed five 2025 Academy Award nominees — including two Best Picture contenders — in a single opening weekend. With $7 million in its first three days, it registered the strongest debut for a non-concert documentary in over a decade, earning an A CinemaScore from audiences and a 99 percent approval rating from moviegoers on Rotten Tomatoes. Much has been made by critics of what they call propaganda. That is not entirely what this film is. What it is, is something far more rare and far more needed: a portrait of responsibility, composure, and the quiet discipline required of those who stand closest to power and understand that duty does not ask permission.

The film gives audiences a behind-the-scenes look into the twenty days leading up to President Donald Trump’s second inauguration; told entirely from the First Lady’s perspective. What it reveals is not spectacle, but burden: the weight of planning events, managing protocols, coordinating security, assembling a capable staff, and navigating the complexities of family life under the most extraordinary pressure imaginable, all carried with grace, with style, and with an unmistakable respect for the office.

And through all of it, she is mourning the loss of her mother.

Some are allowed to grieve privately. Melania Trump was required to grieve while history kept moving. The most affecting moments in the film are the quiet ones ,attending President Jimmy Carter’s funeral while carrying personal loss, standing alone in St. Patrick’s Cathedral, lighting candles for her mother, offering no words for the camera. No performance. No explanation. Just presence.

There is a particular kind of strength required of families in public service, the strength to keep going when stopping would be understandable. The film captures a conversation between husband and wife about security, about risk, about whether it is safe for the President to walk during the inauguration procession. It is not dramatized. It does not need to be. Public service does not only endanger leaders. It endangers families. And the concern Melania shows for her husband’s safety answers, more plainly than any interview ever could, those who have questioned the nature of their partnership.

The documentary also reveals the work she has chosen to focus on: advocating for foster children and foster families, pressing for the return of missing Ukrainian children, addressing the exploitation of non-consensual images, and engaging in humanitarian efforts abroad. These are not presented with fanfare. They are presented as responsibilities. In one understated moment, the film shows her reviewing briefing materials about displaced Ukrainian children late in the evening, asking fewer rhetorical questions and more practical ones: where they are housed, who is responsible, and what needs to be done. There is no speech attached to the moment. The work simply continues.

What the film also makes clear is that this return to public life is not a repetition, but a refinement. Melania has assembled a more dynamic, capable team aligned with her causes.  People focused on child welfare, humanitarian relief, and protecting the vulnerable rather than chasing headlines. Service without narration.

Perhaps the most telling difference between Melania Trump’s first term and her second is this: she has now surrounded herself with a staff befitting the position she holds. During the first administration, much was made of the revolving door, the infighting, the sense that the East Wing was understaffed and under siege. That chapter is over. What the documentary reveals is a First Lady who has hand-selected a team of serious professionals, people with backgrounds in child advocacy, international humanitarian work, and policy. A staff who share her priorities and understand her expectations. There is no chaos. There is no confusion about the mission. She has built an operation worthy of the office, and she runs it the way she carries herself: quietly, deliberately, and without apology.

A reviewer for the London Standard — hardly a sympathetic outlet — offered an unguarded admission: “She’s not Princess Diana, but she wants us to know she cares.” That matters precisely because it was not offered generously. It was observed.  In my opinion, Melania exceeds Lady Diana. Princess Diana was beloved, and rightly so, but she operated within a system designed to support her. Melania Trump has carried the same grace and the same compassion under conditions that offered no such protection — enduring relentless hostility from the press, the entertainment industry, and the political establishment, and never once letting it diminish her purpose or her poise.

In an age addicted to performance, Melania Trump’s grace is found in what she refuses to do. She does not shout. She does not demand understanding. She does not trade private pain for public approval.

She carries the responsibility. She protects her family and most importantly she shows up. This is not weakness this is real strength and it is deeply American.

I encourage every family to see Melania. Take your children. Take your parents. Not because it is about politics, but because it is about what it means to love your country enough to sacrifice for it, to love your family enough to protect them, and to carry yourself with dignity when the world offers every excuse not to.

Perry O. Hooper Jr. is a longtime Alabama Republican figure, former Alabama Legislator and Montgomery businessman. He served as Co-Chair of “Alabama Trump Victory” in 2016, and served as an at-large delegate to the Republican National Convention. He is a noted civic leader in Montgomery with deep family roots in Alabama’s legal and political history.

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