Does Melania Trump really think being First Lady is an opportunity to make more money?

Well, it looks like we’ve all been underestimating the First Lady of the United States.

We’d been painting Melania Trump as a powerless trophy wife who made a deal with the devil. We’d made memes saying she’s trapped in a loveless marriage to a brutal dictator powerful man. We’ve been crafting up our Free Melania placards and tying ourselves in feminist knots arguing about whether she deserves our scorn or our pity.

Turns out, she deserves neither.

Because Melania has not been intending to sit-out this awkward First Lady business in New York City's Trump Tower, rearranging Barron's ties and trying to pretend this was not her Real Life, as we had all assumed.

Yesterday, court documents showed us Melania, 46, had been plotting to make lemonade out of the lemons she inherited back in 2005 when she became Mrs Donald Trump The Third. $150 million worth of lemonade, to be exact, in the form of jewellery lines, clothing brands, skincare and perfume.

This had been her cunning plan until the dastards at The Daily Mail stepped in, and defamed her by reporting the lie that Melania was once an escort.

Behold, this quote from the lawsuit filed by her lawyers yesterday:

Plaintiff had the unique, once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, as an extremely famous and well-known person, as well as a former professional model and brand spokesperson, and successful businesswoman, to launch a broad-based commercial brand in multiple product categories, each of which could have garnered multi-million dollar business relationships for a multi-year term during which Plaintiff is one of the most photographed women in the world.

Legalese translation: In the four (please let it only be four, please let it only be four) years that Melania Trump is First Lady of The United States Of America, she is going to be very, very famous and she had big plans to capitalise on it.

Then the Daily Mail printed lies about her past, besmirching her reputation and jeopardising her ability to make said millions, because the women who would have bought her perfume may have decided they no longer wanted to smell like a woman of questionable repute.

The Trump lawyers are arguing that now, The Daily Mail ought to pay Melania the $US150million she would have made. Y'know, to make things fair.

There is so much wrong with this picture it's hard to know where to begin.

For starters, a tabloid publication printing lies about a high-profile woman. The Mail's (untrue) schtick that Melania was an escort is tedious in its predictability. Every beautiful model is not a sex worker.

Melania and The Donald have been together for almost 20 years, since he spied the then-model across a room at a New York Fashion Week party in 1998 and "went crazy" (his words).

In 1999, the new-ish couple call into the Howard Stern radio Show and Melania - who's naked at the time, Trump says - assures Stern that she and Donald are having sex once a night, "sometimes more."

"We had great chemistry and energy," Melania told Larry King in 2005.

I know. I'm sorry. It takes all sorts.

Cheap shots aside, what is truly awful about the details of the lawsuit is the impression it gives that for the Trumps, the presidency of the United States is just one long product-placement opportunity, like an episode of Keeping Up With the Kardashians Goes To Washington. With a side of fascism.

Until recently, Melania had a line of cheap jewellery and watches selling on the home-shopping network QVC . Her first line sold out in 45 minutes. Her fifth, not so much. Then she launched a caviar-based face-cream that sold for $150 a jar. She told ABC News that her son Barron, then 7, loved to use it. "I put it on him head to toe. It smells very, very fresh, he loves it," she said.

On inauguration day, a White House press release pointed to her QVC line in a link, quickly taken down when someone decided that being able to buy cheap knock-offs of the First Lady's earrings from the First Lady herself was kind of... awful.

After all, you can already buy anything that Trump's daughter Ivanka wears, eats and sits on, thanks to her burgeoning 'lifestyle brand'.

But is it true that the First Lady is a business genius with grand plans for expansion, or is she just being used for one of her husband's anti-media crusades?

After their wedding, Melania - a model who left Slovenia when she was 17, travelling to Milan, Paris and eventually New York -  told Larry King she didn't need Trump to buy her expensive bags: "I make a lot of money myself, so I know what how it is to work and what money means."

But much has changed since then. Not least, she became a mother, and Trump has always been pretty clear on that role: "I know Melania. I'm not going to be doing the diapers, I'm not going to be making the food, I might not even see the kids, frankly..." He told King in that same interview.

Indeed. “I am a full time mom; that is my first job,” Melania told Parenting magazine in September, 2013. “The most important job ever. I started my business when [Barron] started school. When he is in school I do my meetings, my sketches, and everything else. I cook him breakfast. Bring him to school. Pick him up. Prepare his lunch. I spend the afternoon with him.”

Being a political spouse is not an easy role. Finding a meaningful way to play it is particularly tricky. But seeing it as licensing opportunity? That's new.

It seems that the Daily Mail's infamous and fictitious story may have saved us from Melania, The Fragance, Melania, The Travel Tote and Melania, The Fine Line Eraser.

Could things get any stranger? Don't answer that.

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