“Let the future of publishing begin,” first lady Melania Trump declared on X last week. The “future,” in this instance, was the fact that the audiobook version of her memoir will be narrated “entirely using artificial intelligence in my own voice.” It was, in a number of ways, a perfect encapsulation of Trump’s approach to her role in government, as a first lady who is doing the least — and turning a profit off of it with few scruples.
In an age where businesses are scrambling to apply AI to everything, Trump’s announcement might not seem surprising. But it seems to be an obvious example of the technology going too far.
Trump’s decision to delegate the reading of her memoir to a robot seems entirely fitting with her apparent quiet quitting of the first lady’s office.
Trump’s memoir “Melania” discusses intimate details of her personal life, including her childhood in Slovenia; the night she met her husband, Donald Trump; and “cruel” allegations that her son, Barron, was autistic. It also includes political commentary, from questioning the 2020 election results to taking a pro-abortion-rights stance. While audiobooks are not always recorded in the voice of an author, a memoir about reclaiming narratives, sharing one’s personal life and dispelling public misconceptions would seem to be a prime candidate for a narration in the author’s own voice. For some listeners keen to develop a deeper understanding of a somewhat mysterious public figure, it may be disconcerting or alienating that a robot is reading aloud emotionally charged passages over the course of the seven-hour audiobook.
Yet it’s also entirely in keeping with the former model’s desire to keep the public at a distance even while benefiting from its attention. Trump’s tenure as first lady has been defined by her absence from regular duties — an absence that has only increased during her second term, so far. She telegraphed this agenda during President Donald Trump’s second inauguration in January, when she donned a navy boater-style hat that obscured her eyes for the entirety of the ceremony.
“Melania’s outfit, austere and darkly beautiful, unapproachable and severe, conveys a steely readiness and an intentional distance,” MSNBC’s Hannah Holland wrote at the time. “We do not get access to her, perceived or otherwise.”
Earlier in May, The New York Times, citing people with knowledge of Trump’s schedule, reported that she had spent fewer than 14 out of the first 108 days of her husband’s term at the White House, and had delegated a number of the first lady’s duties to her husband in her absence. She’s mostly holed up at Trump Tower in New York or at Mar-a-Lago in Florida, according to the Times. Katherine Jellison, a historian at Ohio University, told the Times that there hasn’t been such a low-profile first lady since Bess Truman, nearly 80 years ago. Trump’s decision to delegate the reading of her memoir to a robot seems entirely fitting with her apparent quiet quitting of the first lady’s office. At the same time, her decision to herald her own AI-powered voice as a “new era in publishing” also spoke to how she simultaneously profits from her peculiar private-public status. Trump is inviting the public to see the AI-powered audio recording of her memoir as a futuristic innovation: not just a book, but an event. That Trump is championing the application of AI technology where human labor would clearly be appropriate fits neatly with a political movement allied to a capitalist class searching for ways to make human labor obsolete as quickly as possible. Trump shares with her husband a penchant for scammy business opportunities that trade on her status as a White House figure. She launched a meme coin, $MELANIA, 43 hours after her husband launched the official $TRUMP token, in a market that, as the Financial Times put it, lacks “even the level of regulation that governs the sale of Beanie Babies.” She has also scored an extraordinary sum of money in a deal with Amazon for a documentary series. The documentary is meant to provide a behind-the-scenes look at the life of the first lady. But it seems like yet another opportunity for her to try to control her image while making a good chunk of change in the process.
Zeeshan Aleem is a writer and editor for MS NOW. 
