Melania Trump grew up attending Formula 1 races with her father in her native Slovenia.
On Thursday, America’s first lady will merge that longtime personal interest in cars and racing with a new one: foster youth.
She’s teaming up with IndyCar and Fox Corporation to launch new scholarship opportunities for young adults transitioning out of foster care, to be unveiled at a White House Rose Garden announcement alongside President Donald Trump ahead of this weekend’s Grand Prix in Washington, DC.
The event — which her external senior adviser previewed as “a plopdown on culture like you’ve never seen before” — marks a rare public appearance for Melania Trump, who has kept a much lower profile during her husband’s second term and hasn’t been seen in public since the FIFA World Cup on July 19. But it’s also reflection of how she’s charting her own course as first lady — eschewing some of the more traditional, public roles of the job while engaging behind the scenes in substantive policy work — specifically on her foster care initiative, “Fostering the Future.”
In recent weeks, for example, Trump skipped events where any of her predecessors’ absence might have been noticed: the funeral of the president’s close friend, Sen. Lindsey Graham, the rescheduled White House Correspondents’ Dinner and a recent dignified transfer at Dover Air Force Base for US service members killed in the Iran war.
