We did this to ourselves. Not the second Trump presidency, though our representative democracy, however flawed, would hold that that’s on us as well. It’s Melania I’m talking about, the film about Slovenian-American fashion model turned First Lady Melania Trump, which arrived in theaters yesterday on a wave of infamy. Melania — made by Brett Ratner, a Hollywood hack who hasn’t directed since 2014 due to multiple allegations of sexual assault that emerged at the height of the MeToo movement — attracted a lot of attention for the $40 million that distributor Amazon paid for it, an unprecedented amount for a documentary even before you take into account that the company spent almost as much again on marketing. That eye-popping price looked less like an investment and more like a hefty tribute offered up to a corrupt strongman. Melania doesn’t stand a chance of making that amount back at the box office, but it doesn’t need to. It could play to thousands of empty houses all weekend and still be a success by the perverse metrics that led to its production.

The theater at my Union Square multiplex last night was maybe 40 percent full, and judging from the bursts of applause and occasional jeers, the crowd was made up with as many Donald Trump fans as hate watchers. This shouldn’t have come as any sort of surprise. Melania, which tracks its subject over the 20 days leading up to the 2025 inauguration, isn’t a MAGA screed arriving with raised middle fingers aimed at everyone who isn’t ready to get on board with its gilt-rimmed regime — though it can’t resist a few digs at the outgoing Biden administration by way of shots of a dazed-looking Joe and an exasperated Kamala Harris. Its aims are quieter and more insidious. Instead of leaning into the political, it insistently takes the form of a glossy celebrity documentary, a genre that’s become omnipresent and that we’ve been increasingly primed to accept even though it often consists of brand building exercises masquerading as movies. (The Beckham family docs, Lady Gaga or Selena Gomez’s projects, Arnold.) It attempts to enshrine Melania as the kind of figure everyone is so desperate to get more of that they’d endure this extravagantly boring experience made up of endless treks from black car to private plane to meeting to black car.

“Everyone wants to know, so here it is,” Melania says at the start of Melania, kicking off a wooden narration full of awkward platitudes. This is a fascinatingly bold claim from a woman who showed no discernible signs of public personality throughout her husband’s first term in office, and whose legacy from that period consists mainly of goth Christmas decor and a confoundingly named public interest campaign with aims no one she meets with on screen appears to understand. And what, precisely, does everyone want to know? That Melania has very exacting taste in blouse necklines? That she loves white and gold as a color combination? That she’s a fan of Michael Jackson? This is the sort of previously forbidden knowledge that Melania deigns to let us in on. There’s a formula here, one that’s been ingrained into us by countless hours of accepting hagiographic movies and series offering subject-approved glimpses into the private selves of various famous people. These properties make promises about unprecedented access, but of course, everything we see is highly controlled and mediated, and in exchange for overlooking that fact, we’re treated to a few carefully doled out instances of real vulnerability.

That’s the bargain Melania nominally tries to strike as well, though it’s unable to offer convincing proof that there is anything going on beneath Melania’s impeccably manicured surface. Her voiceover is a numbing litany of meaningless observations and claims like “For me, it’s important that timeless elegance shines through every element of the inauguration’s decor, style, and design.” She is never seen in anything less than full hair and makeup, and she appears to only be capable of two facial expressions — a professional smile and a neutral face. At one point, Ratner shoots her watching news of the Los Angeles fires, and zooms in on her eyes as though he could create visible emotion there through sheer force of will.

Ratner, who never appears on screen, does sometimes speak up behind the camera, and during one especially surreal moment, goads Melania into singing along to “Billie Jean” with him during a car ride with desperation that speaks to how little workable material he realizes that he’s getting. An attempt to humanize the First Lady by showcasing her grief over the loss of her mother the year before instead ends up feeling mystifyingly unconvincing, maybe because the scene in which Melania visits St. Patrick’s Cathedral to light a candle is so slickly filmed that it looks like a commercial. When one of the priests offers Melania a blessing, she accepts with the exact tone someone would use when offered a warm towel on an airplane.

The gap between Melania’s insistently anodyne tone and what’s happened in the year since it was filmed can become downright vertiginous, especially when Melania intones observations about her immigrant journey and how “everyone should do what they can to protect our individual rights.” But the people who’ll seek out Melania aren’t going to care about how distant it is from or contradictory it is to our brutal realities, or care about how little it delivers in terms of manufactured intimacy. Because the sort of celebrity documentary that Melania has been made in the image of aren’t made for general audiences — they’re made for fans who treat the experience of viewing them as another act of devotion to their idols.

Melania can’t, despite its efforts, make its subject look like the movie star it tries to pretend she is, but she’s not the reason people will buy tickets. They’ve come to see her husband, who saunters in occasionally and, I hate to admit it, considerably livens up the proceedings because he knows how to play to a camera. There’s small consolation to the fact that Trump, who’s posted about having seen the movie twice, surely finds it as tedious an experience as I did. Melania has been described as having an audience of one, but that intended viewer’s taste runs more toward Ratner’s earlier work, and Rush Hour 4 is going to be a lot harder to manifest than this vanity project.

For years at CNN, Don Lemon had been a thorn in the side of President Trump, frequently taking him to task during his first term over his comments about immigrants and other matters.

On Friday, the former CNN anchor — now an independent journalist who hosts his own YouTube show — was in a federal courtroom in Los Angeles and charged with conspiracy and interfering with the 1st Amendment rights of worshipers during the Jan. 18 protest at the Cities Church in St. Paul, Minn.

Lemon was arrested by federal agents in Los Angeles on Friday, along with a second journalist and two of the participants in the protest of the U.S. government’s immigration enforcement tactics in Minneapolis.

Lemon identified himself at the protest as a journalist. His attorney said in a statement Lemon’s work was “constitutionally protected.”

“I have spent my entire career covering the news,” Lemon told reporters after he was released on his own recognizance Friday afternoon. “I will not stop now. There is no more important time than right now, this very moment, for a free and independent media that shines a light on the truth and holds those in power accountable. Again, I will not stop now. I will not stop, ever.”

The scene of a reporter standing before a judge and facing federal charges for doing his job once seemed unimaginable in the U.S.

The arrest marked an extraordinary escalation in the Trump administration’s frayed relations with the news media and journalists.

Earlier this month, the FBI seized the devices of Washington Post reporter Hannah Natanson in a pre-dawn raid as part of an investigation into a contractor who has been charged with sharing classified information. Such a seizure is a very rare occurrence in the U.S.

Last spring, the Associated Press was banned from the White House. The AP sued White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt and two other administration officials, demanding reinstatement.

Even the Committee to Protect Journalists, an organization that monitors and honors reporters imprisoned by authoritarian government regimes overseas, felt compelled to weigh in on Lemon’s arrest.

“As an international organization, we know that the treatment of journalists is a leading indicator of the condition of a country’s democracy,” CPJ Chief Executive Jodie Ginsberg said in a statement. “These arrests are just the latest in a string of egregious and escalating threats to the press in the United States — and an attack on people’s right to know.”

For Lemon, 59, it’s another chapter in a career that has undergone a major reinvention in the last 10 years, largely due to his harsh takes on Trump and the boundary-pushing moves of his administration. His journey has been fraught, occasionally making him the center of the stories he covers.

“He has a finely honed sense of what people are talking about and where the action is, and he heads straight for it in a good way,” said Jonathan Wald, a veteran TV producer who has worked with Lemon over the years.

A Louisiana native, Lemon began his career in local TV news, working at the Fox-owned station in New York and then NBC’s WMAQ in Chicago, where he got into trouble with management. Robert Feder, a longtime media columnist in Chicago, recalled how Lemon was suspended by his station for refusing to cover a crime story that he felt was beneath him.

“A memorable headline from that era was ‘Lemon in Hot Water,’” Feder said.

But Lemon’s good looks and smooth delivery helped him move to CNN in 2006, where his work was not always well-received. He took over the prime time program “CNN Tonight” in 2014 and became part of the network’s almost obsessive coverage of the missing Malaysia Airlines Flight 370. (Lemon was ridiculed for asking an aviation analyst if the plane might have been sucked into a black hole.)

Like a number of other TV journalists, Lemon found his voice after Trump’s ascension to the White House. He injected more commentary into “CNN Tonight,” calling Trump a racist after the president made a remark in the Oval Office about immigrants coming from “shithole countries” to the U.S.

After George Floyd was murdered by a police officer in Minneapolis in May 2020, Lemon’s status as the lone Black prime time anchor on cable news made his program a gathering place for the national discussion about race. His ratings surged, giving CNN its largest 10 p.m. audience in history with 2.4 million viewers that month.

Lemon’s candid talk about race relations and criticism of Trump made him a target of the president’s social media missives. In a 2020 interview, Lemon told The Times that he had to learn to live with threats on his life from Trump supporters.

“It’s garnered me a lot of enemies,” he said. “A lot of them in person as well. I have to watch my back over it.”

Lemon never let up, but CNN management had other ideas. After Warner Bros. Discovery took control of CNN in 2022, Chief Executive David Zaslav said the network had moved too far to the political left in its coverage and called for more representation of conservative voices.

Following the takeover, Lemon was moved out of prime time and onto a new morning program — a format where CNN has never been successful over its four-decade-plus history.

Lemon’s “CNN Tonight” program was built around his scripted commentaries and like-minded guests. Delivering off-the-cuff banter in reaction to news of the moment — a requirement for morning TV news — was not his strong suit.

Lemon had a poor relationship with his co-anchors Poppy Harlow and Kaitlan Collins. The tensions came to a head in February 2023 after an ill-advised remark he made about Republican Nikki Haley, who had been running for president.

Lemon attempted to critique Haley’s statements that political leaders over the age of 75 should undergo competency testing.

“All the talk about age makes me uncomfortable — I think it’s a wrong road to go down,” Lemon began. “She says politicians, or something, are not in their prime. Nikki Haley isn’t in her prime — sorry — when a woman is considered to be in her prime in her 20s and 30s, maybe 40s.”

Harlow quickly interjected, repeatedly asking Lemon a couple of times, “Prime for what?” Lemon told his female co-anchors to “Google it.” It was one of several sexist remarks he made on the program.

Lemon was pulled from the air and forced to apologize to colleagues, some of whom had called for his dismissal. He was fired in April 2023 on the same day Fox News removed Tucker Carlson.

Lemon was paid out his lucrative CNN contract and went on to become one of the first traditional TV journalists to go independent and produce his own program for distribution on social media platforms.

“Others might have cowered or taken time to regroup and figure out what they should do,” said Wald. “He had little choice but to toil ahead.”

Lemon first signed with X in 2024 to distribute his program as the platform made a push into longer-form video. The business relationship ended shortly after new X owner Elon Musk sat down for an interview with Lemon.

Musk agreed to the high-profile chat with no restrictions, but was unhappy with the line of questioning. “His approach was basically ‘CNN but on social media,’ which doesn’t work, as evidenced by the fact that CNN is dying,” Musk wrote.

An unfazed Lemon forged ahead and made his daily program available on YouTube, where it has 1.3 million subscribers, and other platforms. He has a small staff that handles production and online audience engagement. In addition to ad revenue from YouTube, the program has signed its own sponsors.

While legacy media outlets have become more conscious of running afoul of Trump, who has threatened the broadcast TV licenses of networks that make him unhappy with their coverage, independent journalists such as Lemon and his former CNN colleague Jim Acosta have doubled down in their aggressive analyses of the administration.

Friends describe Lemon as relentless, channeling every attempt to hold him back into motivation to push harder. “You tell him ‘you can’t do it,’ he just wants to do it more,” said one close associate.

Wald said independent conservative journalists should be wary of Lemon’s arrest.

“If I’m a conservative blogger, influencer, or YouTube creator type, I would be worried that when the administration changes, they can be next,” Wald said. “So people should be careful what they wish for here.”

The primary question in all matters concerning Melania Trump is “What is she thinking?” The First Lady is an endless font of utterly puzzling behavior. So it’s fitting that at the premiere of her film Melania on Thursday night she stood before the audience and declared, basically, “Ceci n’est pas une documentary.”

“Some have called this a documentary. It is not,” she said. “My film is a very deliberate act of authorship, inviting you to witness events and emotions through a window of rich imagery. It is a creative experience that offers perspectives, insights, and moments that only few have seen.”

How could the Amazon-produced, Brett Ratner–directed film project, which was described from day one as a documentary possibly be anything else?

Surprisingly, after viewing the film, I find Melania’s statement makes sense. Not literally, but in that this collection of random words feels like something ChatGPT might produce if it were asked to describe a behind-the-scenes documentary about the First Lady and the attempt to summarize human emotions and artistic endeavor broke its little AI brain.

The first scene of Melania is jaw-dropping. As the stilettoed, impeccably styled once-and-future First Lady makes her way into a motorcade, we hear the Rolling Stones’ “Gimme Shelter.” It’s three weeks before Trump’s return to power, and Mick Jagger is warning of the impending apocalypse. The line “Rape, murder, it’s just a shot away!” blares as we zoom in on Melania. Could it be that Brett Ratner — Brett Ratner, of all people! — duped Melania into making art that actually has something to say about the return of the Trump regime, like Christopher Anderson’s brilliant and grotesque photo shoot for Vanity Fair?

Alas, no. As the film continues, it quickly becomes clear that this needle drop isn’t meant to be subversive. It’s more of a reflection of Donald Trump’s habit of willfully ignoring the meaning of the show tunes and classic rock bangers. Next we’re hit with Michael Jackson’s “Billie Jean” (way later in the film we learn it’s one of Melania’s favorite songs, but it’s a bizarre soundtrack for her entering Trump Tower). Then the music transitions to “Melania’s Waltz,” a dreamy, looping orchestral theme that was composed for the movie.

We never really leave this hazy, hallucinatory state. Footage of the Secret Service whisking Melania from Mar-a-Lago transitions into scenes of her giving inane directions on the tailoring of her inauguration suit, then blandly expressing her approval for the invitation, schedule, and tableware. It seems all of these design decisions were actually made off-camera, weeks before filming began. We move from a conference room overlooking Central Park to a gilded Mar-a-Lago dining room to the marble hallways of Trump Tower and back again. We’re totally sealed off from fresh air and outside reality. “Melania’s Waltz” plays again and again. It feels like we’re inside a gaudy gold jewelry box, watching a perfect MAGA-tized ballerina spin around and around. We’re trapped — but if Melania ever feels that way there’s no sign of it in this film. There’s not a second where it seems that Melania wants out of this life or has even given her strange circumstances a second of deep thought.

The dialogue has a slightly off quality, too, like Eyes Wide Shut if Kubrick directed hours of Melania B-roll. All of the First Lady’s interactions with other people feel rehearsed or reenacted. She also provides weirdly detached, substance-free narration throughout the film. In one scene, her father is being interviewed, but we don’t hear what he has to say about his late wife; Melania’s bland voice-over drowns him out. Knowing that the First Lady is a huge AI-enthusiast (the audiobook of her memoir is entirely AI-generated), I started wondering if she’d also had some nonhuman help in drafting her narration. She describes Mar-a-Lago as “more than a home. It is warm. Sunshine. Family. Friends.” At one point, we overhear Donald Trump praising their son, Barron. Melania responds robotically, “Yeah, I love him. Incredible mind.”

For one hour and 44 minutes, it feels like we might be on the verge of seeing some actual interesting content. In the back of a limo, someone off-camera (maybe Ratner) coaxes the First Lady into sort-of singing along to “Billie Jean.” Kamala Harris rolls her eyes while waiting to enter Trump’s swearing-in. Melania and Donald start to discuss whether it’s smart to walk down the street during the inauguration, considering he just survived a near assassination. Melania remarks, “Barron will not get out of the car. I respect that,” but then they agree to have the rest of the conversation off-camera. It’s like Melania, who executive-produced the project and had final cut, purposely stripped the film of any real emotions, so it’s all perfectly styled shots, no humanity allowed.

The only reprieve is when Donald Tump appears. Trust me, I never thought I’d be yearning to see more DJT. But the fact that he’s the only Trump onscreen with natural star quality is glaringly obvious, even though he’s unusually low-key throughout the film. All Donald really does is praise Melania as an amazing First Lady, make some quips to staffers, and rant about his stunning electoral victory on the other end of the phone. Yet whenever Trump’s not onscreen, all you’re thinking is Where’s Trump?

Admittedly, I am not really the intended audience here. While many journalists booked tickets in blue-leaning cities and had the theater practically to themselves, I experienced Melania in the belly of the beast (okay, slightly Trump-leaning Suffolk County, Long Island). Literally every seat in the 100-person theater was filled at 1 p.m. on a Friday. Unsurprisingly, the audience was very old, almost exclusively white, and heavily female. They clapped when Trump Force One appeared onscreen, chuckled anytime Donald said anything even mildly amusing, and whooped during the inauguration scene. Though they were silent when the president wasn’t onscreen, I only heard positive reviews as I exited the theater (one person even remarked, “Wow, that was great!”).

But, of course, people paying $17 to see Melania on premiere day are just a small sliver of the eventual audience. As I fought to keep my thoughts from drifting off as Melania fussed over the trim on her Carmen Sandiego hat, I couldn’t help but think of the millions of people who will sit down to watch this film in their own homes whenever it streams on Amazon Prime. Perhaps they’ll be hoping for some insight into the Trump administration, a peek into what it’s like to be Melania, or even just a chuckle. But this movie contains none of those things. It won’t be long before they drift off, lulled to sleep by Melania’s soulless narration.