Melania Trump prioritizes policy over public presence this term

By Betsy Klein, CNN

(CNN) — Melania Trump grew up attending Formula 1 races with her father in her native Slovenia.

On Thursday, America’s first lady will merge that longtime personal interest in cars and racing with a new one: foster youth.

She’s teaming up with IndyCar and Fox Corporation to launch new scholarship opportunities for young adults transitioning out of foster care, to be unveiled at a White House Rose Garden announcement alongside President Donald Trump ahead of this weekend’s Grand Prix in Washington, DC.

The event — which her external senior adviser previewed as “a plopdown on culture like you’ve never seen before” — marks a rare public appearance for Melania Trump, who has kept a much lower profile during her husband’s second term and hasn’t been seen in public since the FIFA World Cup on July 19. But it’s also reflection of how she’s charting her own course as first lady — eschewing some of the more traditional, public roles of the job while engaging behind the scenes in substantive policy work — specifically on her foster care initiative, “Fostering the Future.”

In recent weeks, for example, Trump skipped events where any of her predecessors’ absence might have been noticed: the funeral of the president’s close friend, Sen. Lindsey Graham, the rescheduled White House Correspondents’ Dinner and a recent dignified transfer at Dover Air Force Base for US service members killed in the Iran war.

She’s spent most of that time at the president’s Bedminster, New Jersey, golf club and away from the White House, which is an active construction zone amid her husband’s various pet projects. And earlier this year, aside from a surprise statement seeking to distance herself from convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, many of Trump’s public appearances were dedicated to promoting her multimillion-dollar deal with Amazon on her eponymous documentary.

But away from the glare of the cameras, sources told CNN, the first lady and her team are intensely engaged in a more focused policy operation than during her husband’s first term, when her multi-pronged “Be Best” initiative failed to gain significant traction or results.

It’s not clear what first spurred the first lady’s interest in foster care. She’s been engaged in other efforts around children — to promote the responsible use of AI, for example, and working to reunite kids separated from their families during Russia’s war against Ukraine. But her office declined to provide information about her specific motivation on this issue. (Approximately 400,000 American youth live in foster care, according to the US Department of Education, with one in five experiencing homelessness when transitioning out of the system, per the National Youth in Transition Database.) Trump’s advocacy began shortly after her husband’s first term, when she launched a series of scholarships in 2021.

Since returning to the White House, she’s pushed for an executive order signed by the president last November, which officials say has kickstarted action at the state level to track child welfare data and to end the so-called orphan tax; debuted IRA-style savings accounts for children in foster care; and secured a $25 million investment in her husband’s 2026 budget for housing and support for youth transitioning out of the system. She’s appealed on Capitol Hill for children aging out of the foster care system, and her team is working closely with Congress to overhaul programs supporting housing, education and training programs for foster youth and former foster youth, although the legislation remains stalled.

Her office, one senior administration told CNN, is “thinking much more about legacy,” including by bringing in “folks with bona fide policy chops to help implement that.”

While Trump has assembled a much smaller staff of seven — compared to more than a dozen on her team during the first term — foster youth advocates have taken note of the hiring of Sarah Gesiriech, a former USAID official who advised former first lady Laura Bush and Sen. Chuck Grassley of Iowa, as her director of policy. Trump’s office frequently engages across agencies, often with specific asks, the senior official said.

“They’re really driving agencies to take actions that will be beneficial to foster youth. Ultimately, the agencies have to take those actions, but the first lady’s office is sitting in the cockpit,” the official said.

Experts in child welfare who spoke to CNN generally applauded the first lady’s advocacy, though some privately questioned whether other policies driven by her husband’s administration have undermined the work she is doing.

“It’s good that there is a national conversation about these young people,” said Chantal Hinds, a lawyer and senior policy manager at Children’s Defense Fund of New York who specializes in historically marginalized and underserved children and families.

“However, I think that the big elephant in the room is what’s happening on the side of the administration and how those things will also impact and likely hinder the true effectiveness of some of these changes that are happening for young people,” she said.

Hinds cited cutbacks to safety net programs, like food stamps and changes to the Medicaid system, as examples of how the Trump administration “is putting families in more precarious situations,” which, she suggested could increase “the number of young people that enter the system to begin with.” Hinds also pointed to the Trump administration taking aim at transgender rights, noting that roughly 30% of foster youth identify as LGBTQ.

Her message to the first lady? Keep up the advocacy but push back on some of what her husband’s administration is doing.

The office of the first lady did not respond to CNN’s inquiry as to whether Melania Trump, who has long held an independent streak, had offered any of that pushback privately.

But Trump’s attention on foster youth has already “accelerated action,” the senior official said, leading to more acceptance in some political corners of what’s typically been a bipartisan issue. That’s been the case for something called “kin licensure,” a policy advocates have long pushed for that enables relatives and family members to register to become licensed foster parents.

“We’ve had some red states say, ‘Hey, thanks so much. We were hitting some brick walls with our legislature. Now that we’ve been able to say this is related to the Trump Fostering the Future initiative, it got us over some of those initial hurdles,’” the official said.

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