When President Donald Trump met with NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte this week to discuss an urgent arms package for Ukraine, the world learned to its surprise that the usual players — military brass, intelligence chiefs, foreign policy experts — had not been the ones to shape the outcome.
Instead, the tipping point came in a private talk in the White House residence.
“I go home, I tell the first lady, ‘You know, I spoke to Vladimir today. We had a wonderful conversation,’” the president recalled.
Melania Trump’s reply cut through the diplomatic haze: “Oh really? Another city was just hit.”
It wasn’t a rebuke. It wasn’t theater. It was a simple, quiet act of moral clarity.
And it seems to have shifted the course of US policy.
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From her earliest days as first lady, Melania Trump charted her own