New Poll Ranks America’s First Ladies — Melania Trump’s Approval Rating Sparks Nationwide Debate
A new survey ranking America’s First Ladies has reignited one of the most reliably divisive conversations in modern politics — and the results, depending on where you stand, will either feel entirely expected or genuinely surprising.
The poll, conducted by YouGov and based on responses from 2,255 Americans, placed current First Lady Melania Trump at a net approval rating of -16. That number puts her near the bottom of the historical ranking — but not at the very bottom. And it arrives at a moment when a documentary about her life is drawing significant attention, having earned $7 million in its opening weekend.
The full picture is more complicated than a single number suggests. And Melania Trump’s story — long before the poll, long before the White House — is one that resists easy summary.
What the Poll Found
The YouGov survey asked 2,255 Americans to evaluate a range of former and current First Ladies, producing net approval ratings that reflect the gap between positive and negative views of each woman.
At the top of the ranking, by a considerable distance, was Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, whose net approval rating of +56 placed her in a category of her own. No other First Lady in the survey came close to that figure.
Several former First Ladies recorded strong positive ratings across the broader sample. Rosalynn Carter led the remaining group at +32, followed by Nancy Reagan at +25, Lady Bird Johnson at +23, Barbara Bush at +21, Michelle Obama at +21, and Laura Bush at +19. Each of these women drew enough support across ideological lines to produce clearly positive overall scores.
Melania Trump’s -16 rating placed her near the lower end of the ranking. She scored better than Hillary Clinton, whose -17 made her the lowest-rated First Lady in the survey. Jill Biden, at -9, fell between Clinton and Melania Trump.
YouGov described its methodology clearly: a random sample stratified by gender, age, race, education, geographic region, and voter registration, then weighted according to gender, age, race, education, 2024 presidential vote, 2020 election turnout and presidential vote, baseline party identification, and current voter registration status.
The poll also noted a pattern consistent with broader political trends: Melania Trump’s approval ratings differed significantly between Republican and Democratic respondents, reflecting the sharp partisan divide associated with her husband’s presidency.
The Presidential Rankings
The same poll also surveyed 20 former and current American presidents, and the results were equally striking.
Donald Trump ranked last among the 20 presidents surveyed, with a net approval rating of -20. Joe Biden finished second from the bottom. Nearly 48 percent of respondents rated Trump’s performance as poor, with an additional 6 percent describing it as below average.
Who Melania Trump Is — Beyond the Numbers
The poll numbers capture a political moment. They do not capture a life.
Melania Trump was born Melanija Knavs on April 26, 1970, in Novo Mesto, Slovenia — making her the second foreign-born First Lady in American history. The first was Louisa Adams, wife of President John Quincy Adams. That distinction alone places her in historically rare company, regardless of approval ratings.
She grew up in Slovenia and enrolled at the University of Ljubljana, where she studied architecture. In 1987, she made the decision to leave her studies and pursue modeling — a choice that, within a year, led to a contract with a modeling agency in Milan. She appeared in magazines including Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar, and GQ, establishing herself in the fashion industry through her own work before any association with her future husband.
When she met Italian businessman Paolo Zampolli, he assisted her in securing a work visa to the United States. She received her green card in March 2001 and became a US citizen in 2006, according to PBS. She has consistently maintained that she arrived in the country legally and never violated the terms of her immigration status.
She met Donald Trump at a Kit Kat Club event during New York Fashion Week in 1998. He was with a date that evening, but sought her out regardless. The couple married in 2005 in a ceremony at Bethesda-by-the-Sea Episcopal Church in Palm Beach, Florida. She is his third wife and 24 years younger than him.
Facts That Tend to Surprise People
Melania Trump speaks several languages — she has identified Slovenian, English, French, Serbian, German, and Italian — though she has acknowledged she is not fully fluent in all of them. The linguistic range reflects a life lived across cultures and countries long before the White House became part of her story.
She is the first Catholic First Lady since Jacqueline Kennedy — a distinction that has received relatively little attention given the volume of other commentary surrounding her time in the role.
As First Lady during her husband’s first term, she launched the Be Best initiative in 2018, focused on promoting physical and emotional wellbeing among children and addressing issues including online safety and cyberbullying. She has continued to be an advocate against cyberbullying — a cause that generated its own commentary given her husband’s social media history, but one she has maintained consistently.
She has also been described, by multiple accounts, as a deeply hands-on mother to her son Barron Trump. During his childhood, she reportedly did not use nannies and raised him largely herself — a choice she has spoken about with evident pride and which has contributed to her image as someone who separates her public role from her personal priorities.
The Documentary Factor
The poll arrives alongside a surge of renewed public interest in Melania Trump, partly driven by the recent release of a documentary about her life.
The documentary earned $7 million during its opening weekend. Amazon reportedly paid $40 million for the rights and an additional $35 million for promotion — figures that reflect the level of public curiosity about a woman who has remained, throughout years of intense media scrutiny, notably difficult to fully read.
That difficulty — the combination of elegance, reticence, and an apparent comfort with maintaining distance from the expectations placed on her — is perhaps the quality most consistently associated with her public persona. She has never been a conventional political spouse, and she has not particularly tried to be.
What the Numbers Actually Tell Us
A net approval rating is a measurement of a particular moment in time, filtered through the lens of a particular political climate. The women who score well in historical polls — Jackie Kennedy, Rosalynn Carter, Barbara Bush — benefit from the softening effect of time and the absence of contemporary political friction.
Melania Trump is being evaluated in the immediate present, by a sharply divided electorate, at a moment when attitudes toward her are inseparable from attitudes toward her husband’s presidency. That context does not invalidate the numbers. But it does mean they reflect something more specific than a settled historical verdict.
What the poll captures clearly is the extent to which American public opinion on political figures — including those who did not seek elected office themselves — now divides almost entirely along partisan lines. The First Ladies who score well across both parties tend to be those most removed from current political conflict. The ones who don’t tend to be those most closely associated with it.
Melania Trump’s -16 sits within that pattern. So does Hillary Clinton’s -17. So does Michelle Obama’s +21, which reflects strong support on one side and significant opposition on the other producing a number that, in a less polarized era, might have been considerably higher.
A Story That Doesn’t Fit Neatly Anywhere
From a small town in Slovenia to the most scrutinized address in the United States, Melania Trump’s path is genuinely unusual — even by the already unusual standards of the women who have occupied the role of First Lady.
She built a career before her marriage. She learned a new country’s language and eventually its citizenship. She raised a son largely outside the public eye in a household that was never far from it. She launched initiatives she believed in and maintained a personal distance from expectations she apparently had no interest in meeting.
Whether the poll numbers associated with her reflect a fair assessment of her time in the White House, or primarily a measure of how Americans feel about the broader Trump era, is a question the numbers themselves cannot answer.
What they do confirm, with some clarity, is that almost no one feels neutral about her. And in that respect — regardless of which side of the divide you’re on — she has achieved something that is genuinely difficult in modern public life.
She has remained impossible to ignore.
