Vandalized posters for Melania: The Movie in Los Angeles, California before its January 2026 premiere
First Lady Melania Trump has made the bizarre decision to double down on her most infamous second-term grift with Amazon, and as The Daily Beast explained, she and the company will almost certainly now be in the investigative crosshairs of Democrats in Congress.
Earlier this week, Jeff Bezos's Amazon announced a new two-part documentary series about the first lady, dubbed Melania: The Series, which will purportedly follow her exploits since her husband's second inauguration and will premiere on the company's Prime Video streaming service later this month. The series appears to be a continuation of the documentary feature, Melania, that the company released in theaters to weak box office and catastrophic reviews earlier this year.
The mere existence of that film sparked allegations that Amazon was attempting to bribe the Trump family to get in their good graces, considering that it paid $40 million to make it and an extra $30 million to market it, a completely unheard-of amount of money for a documentary. Now, despite Democrats signaling their intention to investigate companies that capitulated to the Trump administration and bribed them, the company is full steam ahead on continuing to line the first lady's pockets.
This baffling decision by both parties was the subject of discussion and mockery on the latest episode of The Daily Beast podcast, where host Joanna Coles echoed the theory from Trump biographer Michael Wolff that Melania Trump has only bothered to show up in public recently in order to create new content for a new documentary project.
"I think there's a lot of profound questions there," Daily Beast executive editor Hugh Dougherty told Coles. "The most puzzling thing about this, I have to say, is Amazon have given her — already she has taken $10.7 million from Amazon and had to declare it in her husband's filings... her production company got $28 million. The $ 10.7 million went right into the Melania Bank account."
He added further that with Democrats ready to probe "every bit of grift" from the Trump family, there is no way that these Amazon projects do not come under heavy scrutiny.
"There's already a serious amount of money going to Melania. There was no scrutiny," Dougherty said. "The Republicans weren't doing any oversight. And that's another aspect of this election. People said, 'Hold on, your job is to hold people accountable, to be a check and a balance on power.' Now, we have Democrats who are determined. They have already said some of the targets for subpoenas. Those targets already include Donald Trump Jr. because of his extraordinary business dealings. There is no way that they are not going to go after Amazon, Jeff Bezos and Trump for this, I'm going to say, 'extraordinary' documentary. We've got questions. We've all got questions."
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