Sophie Gilbert

And I'm not sure that it demonstrates the sort of clout in culture's world, at least, that they were hoping to show.

Yeah, our colleague Spencer Kornhaber wrote a really good piece about this recently and about how Trump is desperate to control culture, to put his stamp on it, to have his, you know, his word be law and to be in charge of what happens.

And he famously loves music and DJs at Mar-a-Lago from his iPad.

But what he can't control, Spencer argued, was what people actually want.

Like he can't manage to be the person who controls public taste.

And I think that's the thing that Melania is butting up against.

And from what I can tell, the audience is going to see it.

They have been very divided along party lines.

Like the idea that this would be a film with mainstream appeal, I think it's just not, it's not happening.

It came up in the movie, but not in a meaningful way.

I mean, it was fascinating because there were all these moments in the film where Melania would say things that sounded nice, but were completely at odds with things that her husband is doing and really sort of crumble under any gentle prodding or like not even interrogation.

But there's no, there's sort of no deeper analysis of that in the movie.

So she does have this scene with the White House interior designer who's an immigrant from Laos who says, you know, you and I, we're the American dream or something like that.

And there's no, like the moment doesn't even really land because you're not allowed to consider what it means that these people are decorating the White House that Trump will live in while he is also, you know,

staging mass deportations of immigrants.

Like there's none of that tension.

And so all these moments sort of, they felt very strange to me because none of it makes sense.

Like it's all in conflict with what we know if we're following politics in this moment.

But the director of the movie does absolutely nothing to sort of dig at that tension in an interesting way.

Brett Ratner is a Hollywood film director.