It was late July when voters last heard from the potential first lady of the United States.
Melania delivered her speech at the Republican National Convention in Cleveland, and then later stood with her husband, balloons dropping, waving to the crowd in what is starting to feel like a premature farewell to the campaign trail.
Since then, she has not spoken publicly and has largely vanished from view, leaving a trail of questions and voids in her personal biography.
It was only Wednesday night — after a seven-week absence — that Melania Trump appeared at a campaign event, sitting in the audience.
Her long silence followed the fiasco over her convention speech, parts of which turned out to have been plagiarized.
Then she took her website down after revelations that there was no record she had obtained a college degree, as her site had claimed. While the issue of illegal immigration is central to her husband’s platform, neither Melania Trump nor the Trump campaign has produced documentation to prove how the Slovenian immigrant got a visa to work in the United States or how she obtained her green card in 2001.
Melania has said she has been “at all times in full compliance” with immigration laws; Donald Trump has said his wife is “so documented.”
Even as the campaign declines to fill in details of her life story, Melania has deployed an attorney to beat back news reports probing her past. Last week, the former fashion model filed a libel suit against a blogger and a British newspaper for reports that she once worked as an escort.
Otherwise, nothing. A news conference at which her husband promised to address immigration questions has yet to happen.
The Trump campaign did not respond to multiple requests for comment, nor did it respond to specific questions about her past, or her future involvement in the campaign.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/after-convention-stumble-melania-trump-has-largely-vanished-from-campaign/2016/09/08/c887d576-6bab-11e6-8225-fbb8a6fc65bc_story.html?wpisrc=nl_draw2&wpmm=1