First lady Melania Trump has attracted far less public scrutiny than other members of the Trump family, yet she has found her own ways to profit from her position in government.

While President Donald Trump's business entanglements produce new revelations almost weekly, and businesses linked to his family-run company continue to receive major government contracts, the first lady's methods of making money off the White House have remained comparatively quiet.

The Editorial Board of the Philadelphia Inquirer wrote on Saturday morning that the pattern is part of what it called "Trump's shameless Art of the Steal." That same week, Trump launched a television advertising campaign, paid for by U.S. tax dollars, promoting himself and his "One, Big Beautiful Bill," set to a song that chants "Love me, love me" in the background.

Cryptocurrency is another shared family venture. "She launched $MELANIA, a memecoin that had an initial market capitalization of about $1.7 billion, but quickly plummeted by about 95 percent," the editorial board recalled. Memecoins are a notoriously volatile corner of the crypto market — tokens built around internet personalities or jokes that trade largely on hype rather than any underlying utility. The collapse came only after investors had banked roughly $100 million. "A lawsuit accused the designers of Melania's cryptocurrency of orchestrating a 'pump-and-dump' scheme," the board noted — a term for hyping an asset to draw in buyers, then selling out and leaving latecomers with the losses.

A Different Playbook

Unlike Donald Trump Jr., Eric Trump, Jared Kushner, and the family's cryptocurrency ventures, Mrs. Trump does not feature prominently in foreign investment, government contracts, deregulation, or business arrangements that could overlap with White House policy. Instead, she has focused on commercial opportunities that do not require formally running a major corporation or serving as a "government envoy."

That lane matters because the first lady's role is unofficial by design: the position carries no statutory duties or salary, and it sits largely outside the financial-disclosure and ethics rules that bind federal employees. Historically, first ladies have channeled the visibility of the office into noncommercial causes while in office rather than into private income.

Her brand-building centers primarily on media. The Inquirer pointed to her Amazon documentary and related content deal as the largest example of this approach, noting that she a lower public profile than other Trump family members even as the deals accumulate.

Trump biographer Michael Wolff alleged this week that the first lady's new "Davos for women" initiative — a nod to the Swiss resort town where the World Economic Forum gathers global political and business leaders each year — is, in practice, a platform for generating content for her latest film or reality show.

Critics have raised questions about whether a first lady should be able to use her White House status and public events as material for a private media project, particularly when the project's commercial value is inseparable from her unusual access to the presidency. So far, she has pocketed an estimated $40 million from the Amazon documentary. Her earnings from her memoir, titled Melania, remain unknown.

The Kushner and Ivanka Precedent

The editorial board also revisited what Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump obtained during their time in the White House. During the first Trump term, the two reported between $172 million and $640 million in outside income while working for taxpayers, according to the board. That was before Kushner received $2 billion from the Saudi Public Investment Fund, the kingdom's sovereign wealth fund chaired by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, to establish what it characterized as a "fledgling private equity venture."

While Kushner claims to be negotiating an end to the wars between Russia and Ukraine and an end to the war in Iran, he is also reportedly trying to raise $5 billion for that private equity fund from Middle East governments, even as he serves as Trump's point person in negotiating a peace deal with Iran.

"You cannot both be a diplomat and a financial pawn of the Saudi monarchy at the same time," said U.S. Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.).

If voters cast their ballots for the Democrats in November, both the House Oversight and Judiciary Committees — the panels with jurisdiction over government ethics and executive-branch accountability — plan to investigate the reports of using the government directly for profit. So far, it appears at least one Republican supports the move.