In March, when Donald Trump had been running for re-election for months and his wife's absence from his campaign was becoming harder to ignore, a reporter finally got Melania Trump to comment on when she would join the fray. “Hang in there,” Melania said. This two-word quote has been widely reported; “Melania Trump hints at possible return to campaign,” read the CNN headline.

Months later, when the race is over, you have to laugh. In any case, we stuck with it – long enough to see that the answer to the question of when Melania would take on the traditional duties of a campaign wife was more or less: never.

By consistently skipping campaign events, Melania has taught the public and media to have such low expectations of her that when she poked her head out of the sand a few times in the final weeks of the election, she was astonished. That's exactly what happened last week when news outlets reported on Melania's “surprising” and “rare” speech at Trump's ill-fated rally at Madison Square Garden on Sunday. It was as if they were having a hard time believing that, for once, she was actually acting like a normal campaign partner. She also assured Fox News this week that her husband is “not Hilter.” Just in time!

To be fair, she's popped up here and there – she didn't give a speech at the Republican National Convention, but at least showed her face, and she went to that one fundraiser where a good-looking man happened to be there for a paycheck. But it's fair to say that Melania will end this election season having redefined what it means to do the bare minimum as a campaign partner in a modern presidential campaign. She dared to ask, “What would happen if I…just didn't do it?”, and it seems that this had almost no impact on her husband's campaign at all. Has she at least given the spouses of future candidates room to also fuck off and do their own thing if their husbands and wives are running for something? Honestly, probably not – this seems like one of those things that might be unique to Trump. Plus, it would mean doing something she's largely refrained from doing.

Don't be fooled by her interviews with Fox News, including the one she gave on Tuesday. What's striking as you watch is how much more focus she seems to put on selling her recent memoir than on urging audiences to vote in the election, which is just days away. While many first ladies publish their memoirs, most choose not to do so just weeks before their husband's presidential election, presumably because they don't want to be a distraction. But then “attention is high and remains monetizable,” as Carlos Lozada recently wrote in a New York Times column. “Why should Donald be the only one selling merchandise in the home stretch?”

All those absences may have taken their toll. How else could one explain what happened? Fox & friends When one of the presenters asked Melania what she thought of the “rhetoric that exists today” describing her husband as “a second Hitler.” (Was it “rhetoric” or was it a comparison he made himself? Who can say?) “It’s terrible,” Melania replied. “He is not Hitler, and all of his supporters are behind him…” The response trailed off, eventually leading to a series of headlines like this one from The Hill: “Melania Trump: My husband is 'not Hitler.'” “If Melania and her While bosses have actually strategized about when to use the mysterious former first lady to maximize her impact, they can't be pleased that the result has been a series of articles in which she entertains and ultimately rejects – but entertains! – the possibility that her husband is Hitler. This is what happens when you look through an entire campaign season.

To round out her historic run as the least supportive wife, Melania plans to spend Election Day at home in Palm Beach, she told the Fox & friends Audience. If Trump wins, God help us, but if he loses, I think there's a nonzero chance we'll never see them again.