Is Donald Trump the greatest grifter of them all? Melania is giving him a run for his money | Emma Brockes

There was something almost poignant about Donald Trump’s tweets in support of his wife, Melania, on the occasion of her memoir being published this week. On Tuesday, the former president posted on X that he was “very proud of Melania!”, who is characterised in the book’s publicity material as Trump’s “rock and foundation”. It’s wrong, I know, to ascribe regular human responses to either of the Trumps, but watching activity around the book this week, it was hard not to wonder whether the pair’s pantomime uxoriousness caused either one of them the tiniest pang of regret for faking a loving relationship.

I mean, no, right? Then again, who knows? The comedy and drama of the rollout of Melania are not the revelations – there are none, aside from Melania’s presumably calculated reveal about her position on abortion – but rather the spectacle of watching the former first lady answer questions about a man we must assume she can’t stand. While US reviewers mocked the book’s focus on Melania’s various business ventures – the Washington Post pulled out “the Fluid Day Serum, the Luxe Night with Vitamins A and E, cleansing balm, and an exfoliating peel, all priced between $50 and $150” for particular mockery – and bitterness about her treatment by the “news media”, the author herself appeared on a series of Fox News shows to publicly support her husband’s bid for re-election.

It was, it should be said, a very particular form of support, delivered in Melania’s stilted, blank-faced style, which only softened when she talked about her son Barron. When asked if she was worried about her husband’s safety, on the Fox panel show The Five, Melania said, “Of course I do”, with no further elaboration. This was before saying that one of her husband’s strengths is the fact that “he took care of the military and I loved visiting them around the world, even when I went to Iraq. And also when I visited the aircraft in the middle of the ocean.”

Talking to Maria Bartiromo on a separate Fox show, Melania said, “It’s important to have a great success”, and referred viewers to her website, where you can buy, among other things, a lovely “Vote Freedom” necklace “which features the iconic Lady Liberty” for $175, or something from her Limited Edition Ornament series emblazoned with “Merry Christmas, AMERICA!” This sounds like the title of an episode of South Park but is in fact a series of Christmas decorations and “digital collectibles” that shine very brightly against the backdrop of Melania’s remark of 2019, when she was secretly recorded by an aide saying: “Who gives a fuck about Christmas stuff and decoration? But I have to do it.”

It was, however, Melania’s interview on yet another Fox show with host Ainsley Earhardt that offered the most revealing insight into just how hard this publicity tour has been on her. Dutifully, Melania worked through her talking points about how her husband is “passionate to make America great again”. She complained about the “misinformation” around her and urged viewers to buy the book so they “can learn some things that were never discussed”. And she referred to the press release she issued shortly before the Republican national convention this year as the time “I wrote a beautiful letter to America”. (In it, she urged unity because “our gentle nation is tattered”.)

It was when Earhardt asked Melania about the 13 July attempt on her husband’s life, however, that the former first lady appeared to suffer a serious malfunction. Questioned about how she responded to being informed that her husband had apparently been shot, Melania said: “I ran to the TV, and I rewind it, and … something I guess look over me so I didn’t really see ‘live, live’ but maybe a few minutes later. But when I saw it, it was only, nobody really knew yet. Because when you see him on the floor and you don’t know what really happened.”

There was a pause while Earhardt tried to process these remarks and wait to see if there were more, which there weren’t. So after an even less satisfying back and forth about the second failed attempt on Trump’s life, she asked: “Does this make you more believe in a higher power?” To which Melania replied that the “country really needs him”, to which a by now thoroughly downcast-looking Earhardt mumbled: “Maybe God’s sparing his life.” Samuel Beckett himself could not have come up with a finer absurdist exchange.

The effect of watching these interviews, meanwhile, was quietly chilling. Asked by a Fox interviewer what she wished Trump’s detractors knew about him, she said, bald-faced, smiling slightly, bold as brass in the prosecution of her naked self-interest, “that he is really a family man, he loves his family”.

It was a spine-tingling moment that brings you to an interesting conclusion. If you watch enough Melania content you start to believe that she is, perhaps, even more of a grifter than her husband.

• Emma Brockes is a Guardian columnist