Michael Wolff, the journalist and author whose books on President Donald Trump include Fire and Fury, has escalated his public criticism of first lady Melania Trump, just days after her lawyers threatened to file a defamation suit against him. Over the weekend, Wolff discussed the first lady's latest activities on Daily Beast podcasts. In a new column published Monday, he accused her of deliberately cultivating an air of intrigue in order to make money. His recent Substack writings on the first lady include Melania: Maybe We Really Love Her, Melania's Deal of the Century, and Melania: I Really Don't Care.

As Wolff notes, most first ladies champion a cause while in office — historically the primary way a role that carries no official duties or salary has been defined. Michelle Obama pursued several initiatives around healthy food and exercise, and worked with then-second lady Dr. Jill Biden to support military families. Laura Bush championed literacy and libraries. During her first term, Mrs. Trump promoted the anti-bullying initiative known as Be Best. What her second term is about, he argued, remains unclear.

"She is documenting all this absence and nothingness, and it will become part of a new Melania movie, which follows a first 'Melania' movie of almost unutterable insubstantiality which followed a book that was wholly disengaged from meaning, value, and importance," Wolff wrote on Monday. "There is no 'there' there, but she's making gobs of money off of it."

The first 'Melania' movie in question was directed by Brett Ratner and received a theatrical release from Amazon MGM Studios in January 2026, after Amazon reportedly paid $40 million for the rights. The book it followed was the first lady's 2024 memoir, also titled 'Melania.'

Wolff also argued that a distinctive feature of Mrs. Trump's second term is that journalists have largely avoided probing the reality of her life, including where she lives, her relationships, her marriage, and the path that brought her to Trump. One reason, he said, is that "it is quite unclear how to even speak of her without getting an immediate letter from her lawyers."

The biographer acknowledged that Mrs. Trump's independence from her husband could, theory, be viewed positively, whereas Hillary Clinton's independence was perceived negatively. But he contended that Mrs. Trump's version has less to do with autonomy or public purpose than with personal enrichment — a cynicism, he suggested, that conservatives may admire rather than reject.

"She is much more readily understood as a fictional character, embodying a life of improbable leaps and adventures — which is perhaps why she now seems allowed to create a fictional world for herself with its blithe disregard for the actual world," Wolff suggested. He added that "she's being lavishly paid to create this world."

In his view, this reduces the role to that of a content creator, producing material that has nothing to do with the day-to-day duties a first lady must perform. Instead, he wrote, she leans into the "famous first lady" aspect of the job.

"Her work as first lady is staging being the first lady," Wolff wrote. "This is being paid for — an outsized payment at that — by Amazon and its owner, Jeff Bezos, who is eager for good relations with the White House, and who, himself, has married a woman who too aspires to be a fictional character."

The result, according to the column, is a first lady who acts as she pleases while making millions from it.

"She announces an organization that does not exist, and will never exist beyond the announcement of it, and she can be confident she will not be dogged by questions about it because everybody understands the wholly cynical and ephemeral nature of it. What you see is simply what you get," Wolff concluded.

It remains to be seen whether the threatened defamation suit is actually filed, and whether any second-term initiative for the first lady emerges beyond its announcement.