Was Melania’s letter to Putin written by ChatGPT? We read closely for clues

In theory, it was perhaps a noble gesture: First Lady Melania Trump sending a letter to Russian President Vladimir Putin pleading for the safety and welfare of the children. In practice, it was, well, a bit barmy.

What children was she hoping to protect? Ukrainian children? Russian children? Both? Trump didn’t say. “Every child shares the same quiet dreams in their heart,” her letter began, “whether born randomly into a nation’s rustic countryside or a magnificent city-center.”

From this opening, one thing was clear: Hillary Rodham Clinton’s “It Takes a Village” this was not.

As a long-time writer, editor and writing professor at both the undergraduate and graduate levels, one of the first rules of craft I talk about with my beginning writing students is how the specific is better than the abstract. The reader can’t visualize war-torn Kherson, for example, without some definitive, visceral details and description. A June 2024 report by Yousur Al-Hlou and Masha Froliak that appeared in the New York Times provides a good example:

[T]he rumble of artillery fired by Russian troops advancing on Kherson City, the region’s capital, was already reverberating through the hallways. The doctor and her fellow caregivers faced a wrenching dilemma: how to protect the dozens of vulnerable children.

They were all infants and toddlers, and some had serious disabilities, such as cerebral palsy. Some had living parents who retained limited custody over them, while others had been removed from troubled homes or abandoned.

“Who else would have stayed behind to look after them?” Dr. Lukina said about her decision to remain with the children. “Imagine if we all turned our backs and left?”

Note the unambiguous details: The advancing Russian army, “the rumble of artillery,” Ukrainian children and a doctor determined to protect them. Al-Hlou and Froliak have conjured an immersive, evocative experience on the page that is rooted both in reality and emotion. This is the kind of writing that can move hearts. The specific becomes universal, extending an invitation to the reader to stand in the shoes of the doctor and other Ukrainians.

Of course, it’s probably unfair to expect someone who is not a writer by profession to conjure prose like this on the page. But Trump’s letter reads as if someone did not make much of an effort.

That’s why some have begun to speculate that the first lady’s letter might have been written not by a White House staffer or intern, but by a generative AI program like ChatGPT. With stock phrases such as “the next generation’s hope” and “a dignity-filled world for all,” and references to standing “against the forces that can potentially claim their future,” Trump’s letter reads as clinical and aloof, absent of any true emotion — a performance, phoned-in rather than heartfelt.

So I decided to run an experiment. I asked ChatGPT to write a letter from Melania Trump to Vladimir Putin about protecting children. My request was politely refused. When I tried again with a more general request — “Write a letter about protecting children” — my efforts were rewarded.

Children, it said, “are the foundation of our future.” Their “potential” should be nurtured and their “innocence” defended. They should be “free to dream, grow, and thrive.”

As bromidic as the AI letter was, it was better written and more cohesive than Trump’s. But then again, it lacked this iconic line: “Mr. Putin, you can singlehandedly restore their melodic laughter.”

The first lady’s references to music and laughter might seem to invite comparisons to Whitney Houston’s 1985 hit “The Greatest Love of All,” which declared, “Let the children’s laughter remind us of how we used to be.” But Linda Creed’s lyrics are, at least when interpreted by The Voice, nothing if not sincere and genuine. (And, as a Whitney stan, I don’t want to sully her reputation — she really did engage in charitable work for children — with such a comparison.)

So: if Melania Trump’s letter were a song, it would be PowerSource’s “Dear Mr. Jesus,” the — thankfully — forgotten treacly appeal to “Please don’t let them hurt your children” that inexplicably crossed over from the Contemporary Christian charts to become a Billboard Hot 100 hit in December 1987. Sung by a six-year-old girl and designed to tug at the heartstrings, the song about child abuse implored, “we need love and shelter from the storm” and left listeners with an overwrought question: “Won’t you keep us safe and warm?” Instead, it caused a lot of listeners, not to mention music critics, to roll their eyes.

The thing is, there’s an alternate universe in which Trump’s letter to Putin could have made a powerfully effective diplomatic statement. After all, she was born Melanija Knavs behind the Iron Curtain in what was then the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. While her family was comparatively well-off — her father became a car salesman for a state-owned company — and Yugoslavs, under the rule of the maverick communist president Marshal Josip Broz Tito, enjoyed what was thought by many to be a more “human” socialism, with more freedom in business and travel than citizens of other communist countries, Trump doubtless saw the negative effects of an authoritarian government and a mismanaged economy. By the 1980s, when she was entering adolescence, Yugoslavia descended into an economic crisis. With the country’s foreign debt exceeding $20 billion, living standards fell by over 40%. Inflation reached 2000%. Historians say the deprivation contributed to the growing ethnic tensions of the polyglot state, which led to the Bosnian War in the 1990s.

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But Trump has never been concerned with exerting soft power along the lines of previous first ladies like Michelle Obama, Hillary Rodham Clinton, Laura Bush, Nancy Reagan or even Jacqueline Kennedy, who is purported to be a model for Trump. (As for the Kennedy comparison, an “old friend” from Slovenia told GQ in 2016: “‘People say she’s smart, she’s well-educated like Jackie Kennedy, but…’ The friend pauses to find the right words. ‘She’s smart for the things she’s interested in, like jewelry. She’s not stupid, she’s not a bimbo, but she’s not especially clever.’”)

The first lady also has a checkered history when it comes to her prose. At the 2016 Republican National Convention, Trump stumbled into a plagiarism row when she gave a speech with sections that appeared to be taken directly from First Lady Michelle Obama’s address to the Democratic National Convention eight years earlier. (In “Melania,” her memoir that was published last year, Trump blamed the situation on campaign staff members.) The text and graphics for her “Be Best” booklet, released in 2018 as part of her campaign to prevent childhood bullying, were strikingly similar to a pamphlet published by the Obama administration.

The banality of her letter to Putin was itself a choice — and was completely on brand, for Melania Trump has always been just as opaque as her prose suggests. She herself could have been created by a MAGA version of ChatGPT: The trad wife from the 1950s and before, who is seen and not heard, who takes her political cues from her husband and whose philanthropic concerns are confined to, as she once memorably said, “many, many charities…Many different charities involving children” — there’s that amorphous term again — “involving many different diseases.”

Writing a sincere letter, in which Trump was specific rather than general, would have meant calling on Putin to stop his relentless, unprovoked and indiscriminate bombing of Ukraine. It would have noted that at least 716 children have been killed in Ukrainian territory since Russia’s war of aggression started in Feb. 2022, and over 2,000 have been injured. It would have mentioned the estimated 737,000 children who have been displaced within Ukraine, and the more than 1.7 million who are refugees, according to a report issued by the United Nations Human Rights Office. It would have called out the Russian president for the Ukrainian children — more than 20,000 — who have been abducted by Russia, some of whom have been forced into reeducation camps or paramilitary groups in an effort to turn them into Russian soldiers to fight against their own country.

Such a letter would have also necessitated a policy break with her husband, who, after a brief period in which he mildly criticized his friend “Vladimir,” seems to have fallen back under the Russian president’s spell in the wake of their Alaska summit.

Being specific on the page requires research, a fidelity to facts and a willingness to be bold — in this case, in the name of Ukraine’s children. Empathy, understanding and change are the potential rewards. While it’s not realistic to assume that such a letter from Melania Trump would have moved and provoked an about-face from Putin, it would have at least served as a moral clarion call for the rest of the world — and burnished the first lady’s slender White House legacy in the process.