On this, the strangest of inauguration days in America, one huge lingering question is how much Donald Trump will continue to factor into our lives after his presidency. But take comfort in this, at least: Melania Trump, dressed in funereal black and sunglasses to catch the chopper out of town, is saying goodbye to all that.

She’s been planning the exit for weeks, even as her husband suggested he might stick around. While Trump wasn’t accepting the results of the election—not accepting, in this case, means actively encouraging his ardent followers to riot against the election results at the Capitol—Melania was quietly packing up. CNN reported that she had “bit-by-bit overseen the moveout for weeks” and that shipping her items to Mar-a-Lago or storage was a “semi-clandestine operation.”

Determined to leave immediately, Melania is not letting things like tradition or good manners weigh her effort down. She reportedly outsourced the 80-some-odd thank-you notes written to staff who had taken care of the family in the residence, though they were signed “Melania.” A CNN source also said that, as of a week prior to her transition to private citizenship, she hadn’t established any sort of entity to keep her Be Best platform alive, nor had she reached out to the incoming first lady, Jill Biden, the way most first ladies have for their successors.

Four years ago, Melania arrived at the White House wearing Ralph Lauren and brought a gift, a “lovely frame” by Tiffany & Co., according to her predecessor Michelle Obama, who was made to scramble to figure out the breach in protocol. It was Melania’s effort to do something kind and polite for the family, whose nationality she had questioned as part of a racist conspiracy theory. Fast-forward, and both Trumps have declined to invite both Bidens to their home of three-some-odd years, though in Melania’s case, who knows whether that’s because she didn’t know she should, didn’t have the staff to set it up, or, most likely, didn’t want to. (Jill Biden had already been second lady, so maybe she thought her successor wouldn’t need as much of an introduction.) She’s now leaving her post as the first lady with the lowest approval rating of all time.

Melania did, however, offer some words about her time in a pretaped video released Monday, which contained the usual, lite fare. “I have been inspired by incredible Americans across our country who lift up our communities through their kindness and courage, goodness and grace,” she said. “The past four years have been unforgettable. As Donald and I conclude our time in the White House, I think of all the people I have taken home in my heart and their incredible stories of love, patriotism, and determination.”

That was the only mention of her husband, the former president, and she denounced violence while plugging her childhood-well-being platform, Be Best. “Be passionate in everything you do,” she said. “But always remember that violence is never the answer and will never be justified.”

And: “In all circumstances, I ask every American to be an ambassador of Be Best. To focus on what unites us, to raise [sic] above what divides us, to always choose love over hatred, peace over violence, and others before yourself.”

Be Best, Melania’s main project as first lady, took a lot of heat over the years. It started off big and bulky and a year and a half late, and never really took shape from there. Even the name’s ungrammatical flair felt like a trap. When Be Best is in part an anti-bullying program, how best to point out that its title made slant sense without sounding like one was making fun of those for whom English is a second language?

The program became an ungainly catchall for anything the first lady did, whether she was visiting addiction treatment facilities or reading to children or talking about online safety with teachers. There were missed opportunities for real work: She rarely lobbied Congress on behalf of Be Best’s myriad efforts. In one memorable moment, she failed to mention the coronavirus at all to a room full of educators at the annual National Parent Teacher Association conference in Virginia. It was March 10, 2020.

Though she picked up the pace of her appearances over the years, either making stops for Be Best, campaigning with her husband, or traveling abroad with him or solo, she often spoke in prepared remarks, if at all. They were usually full of platitudes like the ones in her farewell address, and useful for eliding any detectable personality. That made it all the more shocking to hear her speak off-the-cuff, using her upset voice in a phone call with her former friend and aide, Stephanie Winston Wolkoff, who leaked it to press this past fall.

In the absence of words, her clothes and expressions were often left to speak for her. It’s possible that her biggest success during her time in the East Wing was driving the public and press mad with gestures—a slap of the president’s hand, a smile that vanishes as quickly as it came—and with clothing choices that, in theory, could have been a statement: pussy bow, pith helmet, the white pantsuit.

Think of the inauguration four years ago. She looked like she was going to make a real go of this first lady thing. She wore a Ralph Lauren suit (American designer! business!) in powder blue. It had a midcentury shape to it and so it recalled Jackie O (beloved, worldly first lady!). Her hair was swept back in a sensible low chignon (business again!). She was playing the part.

But actors come and go from a stage, and that’s what Melania did. Any idea that she would support American fashion brands fell away, as she never really did it with any consistency. (Obama had made explicit efforts on that front, mentioning J.Crew on Jimmy Fallon, for example, and wearing fledgling designers like Jason Wu to the first inaugural ball. Perhaps that is another odious comparison.)

As Winston Wolkoff told me and anyone else who asked, Melania was frustrated by attempts at interpreting “meaning” in her clothing, so much so that she wore a message on her back at the border in June 2018: a Zara jacket that said, “I really don’t care. Do u?” Though her official mouthpiece Stephanie Grisham said it meant absolutely nothing, just another case of folks reading too much into things the first lady wore, Melania eventually said in a rare interview that it was about the press, and how she doesn’t care what they say about her, while also claiming she is the “most bullied person in the world.” It echoed her husband’s bent toward hyperbole and self-pity.

Otherwise, she wore what she felt appropriate for any occasion, usually some American, or more likely European luxury label that would be at home in her former Upper East Side milieu. Without any real personal style of her own beyond luxury, she usually looked as if she was wearing really expensive costumes on a movie set. Looking back, the inaugural Ralph Lauren comes across as just that.

When I think about her legacy, I always come back to the first lady’s own words, written in a tweet that’s still up from way back in 2012: “What is she thinking?” Melania wondered. The mystery, the implied intrigue, the invitation to guess at something you can never know.

With the question she paired a photo of a beluga whale, appearing to laugh at us before slipping back away beneath the surface, invisible again.

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