L.A.’s New Form of Protest: Defacing Every ‘Melania’ Ad in Sight
The $40 million Amazon Prime documentary chronicling the 2024 election from First Lady Melania Trump’s point of view drops Friday, and Los Angeles — along with pretty much the rest of the country — wants nothing to do with it.
Shortly after Trump’s second victory, Amazon reportedly paid a record-setting $40 million for the rights to produce a documentary on the first lady, one of the first major contributions to the estimated $4 billion the Trump family has made milking the presidency for cash over the course of the last year. Viewers hoping for a sober, even vaguely honest look at the behind-the-scenes life of the president’s third wife should lower their expectations now. According to a January report from CNN, Mrs. Trump was granted full editorial control over the project, influencing everything from how she was portrayed to the film’s marketing — not that that’s going well.
In the entertainment capital of the world, promotional materials — including posters and signs at bus stops — for Melania have been defaced with Hitler mustaches, devil horns, and crude graffiti. The Los Angeles Metro acknowledged on Thursday that, “out of an abundance of caution, it had rerouted multiple buses that had been decked out in advertisement for the documentary “to areas where we were not observing that vandalism.”
In a statement to the Los Angeles Times, a spokesperson for LA Metro described the defacement of Melania-related content throughout LA as “extensive and severe.”
Perhaps most notably, members of the activist art group Indecline — best known for a series of grotesque, naked Trump statues dubbed “The Emperor Has No Balls,” unveiled across the country in August 2016 — made some, uh, let’s call them “edits” to a massive promotional billboard for the film Culver City. The group spray painted the image of the first lady — sitting on a chair in profile to the camera — to look like she was taking a shit on an American flag.
“We’re calling it ‘Melania Gives a Shit About America?’ That’s the working title of the campaign,” a spokesperson for Indecline told Rolling Stone.
“We have a 25 year history of climbing up on advertisements all over the country and doctoring them up in a number of ways, [because] we really do give a shit about this place,” they added. “Melania being an immigrant herself, and ironically, being married to the one that’s overseeing the kidnapping of immigrants and also the executions of U.S. citizens.”
“If there was a Melania documentary about her experience as an immigrant in this country, and what’s particularly happening now under her husband’s administration, I think that’s the one we’d actually want to see,” they said.
In effect, it seems not many people are interested in seeing Melania. The film will be released primarily via streaming on Amazon Prime, but its limited run in theaters has found virtually no audience. Theaters around the country have screened the film to less than a handful of viewers. An analysis by Wired found that out of 1,400 premiere day showings of the film, only two were sold out.
Behind the scenes, the documentary has even managed to alienate members of the production staff. The film was directed by Trump’s newest Hollywood fixation: Brett Ratner, who in 2017 was accused of sexual misconduct or assault by six different women. (He has denied the allegations.) According to sources who previously spoke to Rolling Stone, the documentary and its production are so toxic that over a third of the people who worked on it asked to not be formally credited for their participation.
The reaction to Melania is unsurprising, given that the documentary is dropping as the nation grapples with the fallout of the brutal killings of two Minneapolis residents — Renee Good and Alex Pretti — by federal immigration officers, not to mention countless acts of abuse by ICE agents swarming throughout American cities. The president recently returned from the global economic forum in Davos, where the nation’s historic allies and economic partners declared it was time to disentangle themselves from the chaos of the United States. Audiences across the nation are souring on the president, and a positive press tour for a propagandic documentary about his wife feels a bit like having Imelda Marcos try and sell you a pair of her shoes.
“It’s just, it’s crazy — and not totally out of step — with the administration, who’s obviously been using the White House for years as their own piggy bank,” the Indecline spokesperson tells Rolling Stone. “They’re very inept at many things, but that is the one thing they’re very adept at: cashing in.”
