Melania Trump traveled with her husband late last week to Western North Carolina to visit communities hit hard by Hurricane Helene.
"I want to thank our great first lady for coming today," President Trump said. "She really wanted to be here."
The first lady was seen comforting people who had lost their homes — an early glimpse of her stepping back into the role for the second time.
"I have much more experience, much more knowledge," she told Fox and Friends in October about a potential return to the role.
This time, she was ready and packed to move into the White House on day one, a departure from the first administration when she waited several months in order for her young son Barron to finish his school year.
"The perceptions that she didn't want to do the job before because she came later, I think are all erased now," said Anita McBride, director of the First Ladies Initiative at American University.
"By breaking precedent, she made it easier for anyone that comes after her to potentially do the same thing," said McBride. "It was a way to advance the position the same way Dr. [Jill] Biden advanced it by having a job outside the home."
McBride said there's an increase in "self-assuredness" that comes from having already been first lady.
"Mrs. Trump walks into the role of first lady the second time knowing how the White House works, knowing what she needs in her own personal staff," she said.
Trump told Fox and Friends she will make sure her new team doesn't have "their own agenda," a hard-learned lesson after she was secretly recorded in 2018 by an adviser and confidante who went on to write a tell-all book.
Expanding her platform
The White House press team did not respond to a request for comment about the first lady's goals for the next four years. But the first lady has said she plans to expand her Be Best initiative, an awareness campaign focused on the effects of social media on children, including online bullying, and the impact of opioids on young people.
She has said she hopes to get more backing from the tech industry — a group that has clamored to show support for her husband — than she did before.
"I invited all of the streaming platforms to the White House," she told Fox of the first administration. "I had the roundtable and I didn't have much support from them."
Another factor that's different this time is the absence of Ivanka Trump from the West Wing. Ivanka Trump, who previously served as an adviser to her father and met with Cabinet members and foreign leaders, doesn't intend to take a formal role in the new administration. That may create more space for the first lady to be the sole female family representative for the administration.
"At the end of the day, Melania Trump has always been a woman that has done it her way, and she will pick and choose how she wants to deploy her time and influence and not what other people want her to do," McBride said.
That likely includes where she will be at any given time — the first lady has already said she plans to move between the White House, New York and Palm Beach.
'I have my own thoughts'
Known for keeping her cards close to her chest, the first lady is getting more comfortable sharing details of her life — at least on her own terms.
"Some people, they see me as just the wife of the president, but I'm standing on my own two feet, independent. I have my own thoughts," she told Fox and Friends ahead of the inauguration. "I don't always agree [with] what my husband is saying or doing, and that's OK."
After being absent from the campaign trail, she published a memoir the month before the election.
In it, she shares instances where she felt she'd been wronged, including a 2016 incident in which she says her convention speech wasn't properly vetted, leading to plagiarism charges.
"From then on, I realized the importance of being intimately involved with every detail of my public life," she wrote.
She writes about advocating her husband to end his administration's policy of family separation for detained migrants at the southern border. A day after he ended the policy, she flew to Texas to visit detained children.
Getting on and off the plane, she wore what became an infamous green jacket with white splotchy letters that read, "I really don't care, do you?" It caused an uproar.
"It was for the people and for the leftwing media who are criticizing me," she later told ABC News. "I want to show them that I don't care."
In her memoir, she writes about her support for abortion rights, calling bodily autonomy an "essential right that all women possess from birth."
It was a rare public break with her husband, who has taken credit for overturning Roe v. Wade, gaining headlines a month before the election as her husband worked to express a more nuanced position than he did during his first campaign.
The memoir is just the beginning in a new chapter of access to the first lady. She is currently shooting a documentary about herself that follows the transition from the election to moving to the White House.
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