The former first lady isn’t too hard to find. So why does it feel like she’s hiding?

November 10, 2023 at 5:00 a.m. EST

(María Alconada Brooks, Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)

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PALM BEACH, Fla. — On an October morning, before the club had opened for its winter season, all was quiet at Mar-a-Lago. The five clay tennis courts were unblemished. The beach umbrellas were unopened. The perfectly manicured lawn surrounding the 17-acre Spanish Revival was unoccupied.

The security team, however, remained active. A guard stationed at a side entrance wasn’t interested in gabbing about whether a certain hard-to-spot resident was somewhere on the grounds.

“Do you ever see Melania Trump?” we asked him.

“Sir, you’re going to have to step back and keep walking,” he replied.

She’s around. If not at this moment, then in general. For months, the former first lady has been living in one of Mar-a-Lago’s many bedrooms, secluded and almost entirely out of the public eye.

But as the big twin storylines of 2024 — whether Donald Trump will return to the White House, and whether he’ll be convicted of crimes and face possible prison time — have ramped up, Melania Trump has been more notable for where and when she has not appeared.

She did not appear by her husband’s side at the New York courthouse when the former president pleaded not guilty to 34 charges relating to hush money paid to the adult film actress Stormy Daniels — not that anyone really expected her to do so. But she wasn’t seen at the Miami courthouse, either, when her husband pleaded not guilty to 37 charges related to his handling of classified documents. She was not spotted at the D.C. courthouse when he pleaded not guilty to four charges related to alleged attempts to overturn the 2020 presidential election. She did not turn up at the Georgia courthouse when he pleaded not guilty to 13 charges.

Melania has also been absent from Donald Trump’s presidential campaign appearances — the state fair visits and raucous rallies — since attending his kickoff last November at Mar-a-Lago.

The disappearing act extends beyond the trail and the trials. Outside the walls of the Trumps’ estate here in Florida, Melania hasn’t really been seen at all, per our informal survey of local hangouts for rich people with free time.

Not at any of the high-end shops on Worth Avenue, located just two miles up the road in Palm Beach: “She used to come in but no one has seen her in years,” said a Salvatore Ferragamo salesperson, echoing what employees in more than a dozen stores told us. “It’s a quiet, safe oasis here,” the Ferragamo worker said. “It’s why you see celebrities around. But for some reason not her.”

Not at the fancy restaurants: “Jimmy Buffett used to sit right there, loved speaking French to the staff,” said the bartender at the nearby Cafe L’Europe. “I’ve never seen Melania, though. It’s incredible. It’s like they might as well live in another country, not just down the road.”

Not even on the Palm Beach party circuit: “There’s a small-town feel here for very wealthy people, a place where you see everyone at social events,” said Ryan Williams, a Republican consultant and Palm Beach socialite. “But I’ve never seen her outside the walls of Mar-a-Lago.”

The Trump campaign did not make her available for an interview. In response to a request for comment on various details in this article, Trump spokesman Steven Cheung sent a statement: “There will always be those who seek relevance and financial gain by inserting themselves into stories. Mrs. Trump has always been and will always be focused on her family, as it is her number one priority. Any reports claiming to have insight into her life should be read with caution.”

Melania’s absence has delighted Trump critics who see it as a possible sign that Trump has lost the backing of his most-loyal supporter in his bid for reelection/exoneration. If his wife were in fact over it, then perhaps the loyalty of his other longtime fans might be liable to fade.

Someone running against Trump is, at least, trying to draw attention to Melania’s absence. In September, “Missing Melania” fliers popped up in Iowa, and an airplane flew over a college-football game, dragging a banner that read: “Where’s Melania?”

It’s not much of a mystery: She’s spent some time at Trump Tower in New York, which she is said to prefer over the club in Bedminster, N.J. She’s been paid to attend a number of events, including, according to the New York Times, collecting $500,000 from the Log Cabin Republicans and a conservative elections organization called Fix California. She has made some halfhearted attempts at a second act — including her collection of Apollo-11-themed NFTs (the minting and selling of which may have violated NASA policies), and a scholarship program for foster children aging out of the system.

For the most part, though, she’s here, at Mar-a-Lago. If she’s missing, it’s only in the sense that she is not as present as she could be, if she wanted.

And this leads back to that old question: What is Melania Trump thinking? What, if anything, is she trying to show us by remaining out of the public eye? And what might she be saying with her silence?

Let’s start with the visible: Mar-a-Lago.

“Have you seen it?” said Dan Leber, a funeral home owner from New Jersey who has a condo in the Palm Beach area. “It’s spectacular.” Not a bad place to hole up.

He’d visited as a guest a handful of times over the years. “This friend of mine was a member of Mar-a-Lago,” Leber explained to us while sitting at the bar at Cafe L’Europe with a cocktail and a plate of short ribs. “He died at 68 years old, in Las Vegas, screwing his girlfriend. He had a heart attack. His girlfriend went nuts and started dialing 911, but 9 dialed room service in the hotel.”

Writing a novel had always been on Leber’s bucket list, and after his friend’s funeral he found words pouring out of him on to handwritten pages. Before he knew it, he was writing a thriller novel with a main character based on his friend — except the story he wrote wasn’t about an accidental death, and Leber had a better location than Las Vegas in mind: He titled his book “Murder at Mar-a-Lago.”

Leber had been smitten by his visits to Trump’s club. He said he once shook Mike Tyson’s hand there. Another time he saw Donald Trump win a pro-am doubles tennis tournament. “The pro was running all over the court making all the shots, totally covering Donald’s ass,” said Leber (who, we should note, voted for Trump and would do so again). Afterward, he remembers Melania running over to give her husband a big, celebratory hug in front of everyone.

As far as he’s concerned, any rumors about their marriage is just another kind of Mar-a-Lago-based fiction.

“I don’t believe the stories that say their relationship is bad,” Leber said. “Every time one comes out, a week or two later you hear she’s completely supporting him.”

Anti-fan fiction is a storied pastime, Melania-wise. Her husband’s tendency to say seemingly everything that pops into his head, and her tendency to say nothing at all, has long inspired speculation among America’s amateur body language interpreters. When she didn’t physically stand by him, that must mean she couldn’t stand him . . . right? When she swatted away his hand, shouldn’t we take that as a signal of distress?

“She always said she was going to do what she wanted to do,” said Stephanie Winston Wolkoff Melania’s former friend and adviser. “Her favorite line when she saw that stuff was, ‘Give me a break.’”

Melania always hated stories that cast her as a damsel in need of rescuing, says Stephanie Grisham, her former chief of staff.

Yes, Melania could get mad at her husband. She was displeased enough with him after the Stormy Daniels news broke that she deliberately skipped the State of the Union address and showed up to Air Force One separately for a trip, Grisham said. She was less angry about the attempt to buy silence from Daniels (née Stephanie Clifford) — the centerpiece of the New York criminal case — and more that the cheating allegations had publicly embarrassed her, according to Grisham. Usually, however, Melania’s absence was due to more…