Melania Trump's Official Portrait Is More Airbrushed Than Kimberly Guilfoyle's Selfies

Just a week after Donald Trump's official inauguration portrait had everyone saying the same thing, Melania Trump's new first lady portrait has been revealed. Donald's new presidential portrait was oddly menacing and bore a striking resemblance to his infamous mugshot. And it looks like Melania is following her husband's lead — her portrait isn't quite as weird as his, but it's certainly not what we expected. Evidently, the first lady is giving Kimberly Guilfoyle's overly-edited, airbrushed look a run for its money.

Official portrait of First Lady Melania Trump pic.twitter.com/RgTqqKae4h

— Trump War Room (@TrumpWarRoom) January 27, 2025

To be fair, we certainly wouldn't expect Melania's official portrait to be unedited. That said, we also wouldn't expect it to appear quite as edited as it does. The first lady looks void of all-natural skin texture, and that gives a slightly disconcerting message for the first lady to send as she returns to the White House. Symbolically, though, it's not particularly surprising that we're not seeing the real Melania in her first lady portrait, since she seems to make a point to ensure that we never see the real Melania. She has always kept private and stayed behind the scenes as much as possible. We didn't glean much about her personality during her first round as first lady. And to kick off her second round, she had a notable fashion fail at the inauguration, sporting a now infamous hat that shielded the majority of her face. So the reasonable takeaway is that we won't see much of the real Melania this time around, either. 

To some, the intense editing on Melania Trump's first lady portrait is hard to look past. It seems, though, that others drew different conclusions from the pic. Just two hours after being posted to X, formerly known as Twitter, one tweet including the photo had earned 16,000 likes. And, as almost everything with the Trumps goes, the image got pretty mixed reviews. "This photo suggests the First Lady might be on track to take a more visible role in this administration. Good," one X user noted. In the photo, Melania is wearing a suit, leaning with her hands on a reflective table. This does give the impression that she may be more involved than her 2017 first lady portrait did. In that photo, she stood with her arms crossed. It's worth noting that her first portrait looked very edited, as well. 

Other X users weren't as excited about her photo and its implications. "The 50 layers of facetune," one commenter pointed out. "Does it look like AI only to me?" another asked with a laughing emoji. Another commenter rightfully joked, "She looks like she's about to play a lawyer on a tv series." Time will tell whether the portrait really is an indication that she'll be more involved during her husband's second term. And time will also tell if we'll see her real face at any point during this presidency, or if she'll be hiding behind Photoshop, possible AI, and odd hats for the next four years.