At the annual Congressional Picnic last week, President Trump joked that he might need to “get rid of” the first lady because there is “only room” for one star in his marriage — a comment that immediately drew late-night mockery and raised eyebrows even as it was delivered in jest.
The 79-year-old president made the remark on the South Lawn of the White House while standing beside his wife, 56. She smiled and laughed continuously as Trump praised her recent success before pivoting to the punchline that would soon circulate across late-night television.
“We’re truly blessed to have such a first lady. She’s been so popular,” Trump began, before launching into a recap of his wife’s recent box-office success. “She did a movie, it became number one. She then went to streaming, it became number one.” Then came the swerve: “And I say there’s only room, remember this, for one star in a family, so I better get rid of that.” He added, almost as an aside, “That’s not, that’s not so good.”
Trump continued heaping compliments at the picnic, telling the crowd, “She’s been amazing, and people love her.”
The Documentary Hovering Over the Joke
The “star” Trump was needling about is, by box-office math, a genuine one. His wife’s Amazon-MGM documentary, “Melania,” premiered globally and scored the biggest opening of any non-musical documentary in more than a decade, despite an avalanche of bad press.
Controversy has shadowed that success from the start. The film was directed by Brett Ratner, the disgraced Hollywood filmmaker whose involvement raised eyebrows before a frame of footage was released. Members of the crew publicly admitted they hoped the film would flop. It was brutally review-bombed online ahead of its premiere. Ticket sales, critics noted, were rumored to be propped up by forced bulk buying.
Amazon founder Jeff Bezos was cornered about whether the multimillion-dollar project amounted to a bribe to the Trump administration. Bezos rejected the accusation that the movie was a way of buying influence, calling the claim unfounded, but he conceded that he could understand why people might perceive it that way.
Colbert Sharpens the Knife
Two nights after the picnic, Stephen Colbert devoted a segment of his CBS late-night show to the moment. The 62-year-old host did not bother pretending the line was an ordinary husbandly tease.
“It was a pretty weird thing to say to your wife, but at least he’s finally got a use for that greeting card,” Colbert said, before reading from a mock card: “Roses are red. I love a gardenia. Time for you to go back to Slovenia.”
The riff played on the first lady’s Slovenian roots and tapped into a long-running joke about the apparent emotional distance between the Trumps in public.
A First Lady Increasingly Off Script
The picnic flap arrives during a stretch in which Melania Trump has displayed an unusual willingness to chart her own course. On a recent date, she stepped before cameras at the White House to deliver an unequivocal denial of any relationship with the late financier Jeffrey Epstein or his convicted associate Ghislaine Maxwell, dismissing the “lies linking me to the disgraceful Jeffrey Epstein.”
In that same appearance, the first lady called on Congress to hold public hearings allowing Epstein’s victims to testify on Capitol Hill — a request that directly undercut messaging from the West Wing, where the president and his top lieutenants have sought to downplay the Epstein matter and argue the country is ready to move on.
Epstein pleaded guilty in Florida in 2008 to state charges of soliciting prostitution from a minor and served 13 months in jail under a controversial plea agreement. He was arrested on federal sex-trafficking charges in 2019 and was found dead by suicide in his cell while awaiting trial. Maxwell is serving a 20-year federal prison sentence.
The Republican-led House Oversight Committee deposed Bill Clinton and Hillary Clinton about their knowledge of Epstein and Maxwell. The Trumps have not been questioned.
The first lady’s intervention reportedly rankled parts of the West Wing. A handful of officials were taken aback by the timing of her remarks. One official said there was disagreement among those close to Melania Trump as to whether to proceed with the remarks, given that the story had died down, while noting that the first lady wanted to go on the record with a firm denial. The president, according to the same reporting, was aware his wife planned to speak.
Set against that backdrop, Trump’s South Lawn quip about needing to “get rid of” his wife reads less like a stray joke than the latest chapter in a marriage being narrated, often awkwardly, in real time. Whether it was an off-the-cuff dig, a clumsy compliment, or something else, the line did what so many of the president’s remarks about Melania Trump tend to do: it traveled further than he likely intended, and into rooms where the laughter was not nearly so generous as hers.
