How Melania Got Sucked Into Trump’s “Blame the Wife” Defense (2024)

Former President Donald Trump was convicted of 34 felony counts related to hush money payments he made to Stormy Daniels, an adult film star, while his wife Melania was at home with their infant son. Prosecutors said the payments were an attempt to illegally interfere with the 2016 election. Trump’s team had a different explanation: that he didn’t have the affair in the first place, but also was still trying to conceal allegations of it from his beloved wife, anyway.

The “Melania defense” didn’t work on the jury. But it is one of many examples of a telling dynamic: Powerful political men pushing the moral responsibility of their own actions onto their wives.

To Trump’s credit, he didn’t blame Melania for his alleged affairs—one with Daniels, and a more prolonged relationship with a Playboy model who says she saw Trump while Melania was pregnant. Instead, Trump denied culpability entirely, while suggesting that the hush money payment was for her benefit and protection. The same can’t be said of Sen. Robert Menendez of New Jersey, whose defense in his trial for an alleged bribery and corruption scheme boils down to “my wife did it, blame her.” Supreme Court justice Samuel Alito has taken a similar tack since evidence surfaced of an upside-down American flag hanging outside of his Virginia home, a symbol of solidarity with those who believe the 2020 election was stolen. That was soon followed by reporting about another flag, representing the extreme Christian right, hanging outside of his New Jersey beach house. The flags, Alito has said, are the work of his wife Martha-Ann. “My wife is fond of flying flags,” Alito wrote in a letter explaining why he would not recuse himself from cases related to the same issues the flags represent. “I am not.”

Wives, amirite?

These efforts to make women responsible for men’s bad acts are as old as Adam, Eve, and the apple, and are a perverse sort of marital traditionalism. Marriage, in the traditionalist and conservative Christian views, is a coming together of two people fit for complementary, not equal, roles. Men, in this tradition, are the family’s public representative, economic supporter, an unquestioned leader; women are confined to the private realm, charged with keeping a home and raising children, but are also the family’s moral center—the molders of upstanding children and civilizers of otherwise boorish husbands. Marriage, in this view, is a kind of separate-but-equal union of interdependence. Women, who are intellectually feeble and less effective economic actors, need men for financial support, basic survival, political representation, and general guidance. Men need women for gentle moral encouragement; wives are the “angels in the house,” and in their softness and submission are supposed to inspire men to work hard and to be decent people.

The idea that it is the role of a wife to police a man’s moral decisionmaking is a very old one, and continues to creep into our political discourse on gender, marriage, and society. Much of the concern about declining marriage rates, for example, has been framed as a social threat because untethered men, unchecked by the better angels of a female partner, will descend further into crime, drugs, poverty, and unemployment. “The idea that young men are civilized by women and marriage may seem as corny as Kansas in August,” Stephen Pinker wrote in a 2011 book, “but it has become a commonplace of modern criminology.” Abstinence-only education, which was especially pervasive in the 1990s and 2000s but still persists across the U.S., routinely tells young people that boys will push for sex and it’s up to girls to be the sexual brakes in any relationship so that both parties stay pure.

Assuming women are more inherently moral and decent than men may sound flattering. In reality, it’s often used to blame women for men’s bad behavior—even when those men are among the most powerful around.

When Hillary Clinton was first lady, she was widely demonized as an ambitious overreacher who improperly inserted herself into politics, a woman who did not stay in her designated lane. Later, when she ran for president, she found herself blamed for some of her husband’s political policies, even ones she had little or no hand in crafting. The archetype of the woman as a subservient, supportive moral center of the family can only exist if there’s a comparatively domineering, wicked model: The ambitious, scheming wife who leads her husband astray, or at least fails to correct him.

Trump’s Melania defense places her in the first category, a beloved and decent wife whom he could not stomach disappointing. Menendez and Alito place their wives in the second: Women of their own minds, who did their own thing and whose independent decisions have now landed innocent yet extremely powerful (and public) men in hot water, through no fault of those men’s own.

The United States is in a strange cultural moment when it comes to gender equality. An anti-feminist backlash seems to be in full force as American women see our rights rolled back to a time before we were allowed to vote. At the same time, a rising hypermasculine right is gaining traction with explicit misogyny and male grievance. Tradwives are a social media trend, largely for men who seem turned on by the fantasy of wholesale female submission. “Pronatalist” voices are gaining more airtime by blaming women for not having enough babies, thus ushering in social and economic decline. And conservative legislators are putting a series of mechanisms into place to force women and girls to have babies whether we want to or not. Victorian-era lines between good women and bad ones seem to be reemerging, especially but not exclusively on the right.

These assumptions and stereotypes that divide the angel at home from the independent Eve run deep, despite centuries of feminist work to counter and disprove them. Trump’s employment of them to make himself look like a conscientious husband seems to have failed. Menendez’s use of them to blame his wife for the crimes he’s charged with are being tested in a court of law; Alito’s similar strategy is being tested in the court of public opinion. Perhaps the American public has finally wised up to the fact that women are people, not either angels or she-devils—but that hasn’t stopped many powerful men from recently hanging their innocence on claims that their wives are either too virtuous to disappoint, or too independent to be trusted.