The trip follows her Oleshky ceasefire role and precedes her streaming series
Melania Trump heads to Fort Rucker, an Army post in southern Alabama, on Thursday, where she and Usha Vance are expected to speak to soldiers and their families during an early Thanksgiving visit. Vance is the wife of Vice President JD Vance, a former Marine. The two women also plan to spend time with elementary students attending school on the base.
The trip is the first lady’s third big event since the election. It follows a visit to Louisiana last weekend, where she announced a multimillion-dollar private endowment to fund scholarships for college students once in foster care. On Wednesday, she and Vance accompanied their husbands to Arlington National Cemetery in Arlington, Virginia, for the annual Veterans Day observance.
The run of appearances is part of a burst of public activity by a first lady regarded as among the most private women to hold the role, and it comes just before the Nov. 20 release by Prime Video of “Melania: The Series,” a follow-up to the first lady’s documentary from January.
There is a scene in that documentary in which Melania Trump enters the room as Donald Trump rehearses his inaugural address. When he says the line about how “my proudest legacy will be that of a peacemaker,” she offers a quick verbal edit. “Peacemaker and unifier,” she tells her husband to say instead.
The first lady is credited with recently bringing peace, if only for six days, to one war-torn city in southern Ukraine — an unusual intervention into an active war by an American first lady. The White House announced in late October that Melania Trump had brokered a temporary ceasefire in Oleshky, a Russian-occupied town that faced a starvation crisis. The pause gave time for about 800 people to leave the city and allowed humanitarian aid deliveries to residents who chose to stay. Two days after Republican losses in the midterm elections, she hosted Russian and Ukrainian officials at the White House to celebrate the temporary ceasefire.
Last week, she brought together at the White House officials from Russia and Ukraine who helped implement the ceasefire and talked about her role. “I was involved in every stage of the planning,” she said. “I reviewed demining plans, aerial images, assessed roadways and discussed evacuation routes, hospital access, vehicles and medical resources. I was made aware of the preferred dates and timing of the operation.”
She thanked the Russian and Ukrainian presidents for their cooperation and said Oleshky could serve as a model for peace between their countries. “Let Oleshky be the modest spark that grows into a lasting flame of peace,” she said. This week, U.S. officials held talks with their Russian and Ukrainian counterparts in the United Arab Emirates, but there was no breakthrough.
President Donald Trump said his wife is “doing better than the professionals” on his team, whose shuttle diplomacy between Russian President Vladimir Putin and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has yet to bring the nearly five-year-old war to a close.
The Oleshky work followed the first lady’s outreach to Putin last year as she took on the matter of helping reunite children and families separated by the war. She has so far helped return nearly three dozen children to their families.
Military families have been a recurring focus for Melania Trump. Last year, she and Vance marked the Thanksgiving season with a similar visit to Marine Corps members in North Carolina, thanking them for their service and recognizing the sacrifices their families make.
Next week, the first lady heads to New York City for the world premiere of “Melania: The Series” at Lincoln Center. The two new Prime Video episodes are billed as showing new aspects of her roles as wife, mother and first lady that were not in her documentary. The episodes begin streaming Nov. 20.
Describing the episodes in an interview on Fox News Channel’s “Fox & Friends,” the first lady said they have “more conversation, one-on-one, with me.” “There are some private questions that I will answer that people never heard before,” she said. “So it’s kind of exciting.”