Melania Trump tends to take a backseat to Donald Trump, and it's for good reason. While she is seen as a gorgeous "businesswoman" by most Trump supporters, even then most die-hard Trump Train riders can't help but think she's "kind of retarded" when she speaks. In fact, when Mrs. Trump voice is presented to test subjects solely as "a person who has been living in the United States since 2001," people from both left and right accuse her of being a lazy immigrant who's not trying to learn English. When researchers add that she plagiarized a speech and claimed her own husband discussing getting laid by other women was "boy talk," many American men said they found her to be mentally retarded, similar to Donald Trump's view of deaf actress Marlee Matlin.
Generally, however, Mrs. Trump was seen in a different light when images of her face and body accompanies her words, with her accent suddenly becoming "cute" or "sexy" rather than "menacing" or "annoying." And not one test subject called her retarded after seeing a photo of her in a bathing suit. In a related study, photos of American-born women of Mexican heritage often received a much lower positive rating by white American males, including one photo of Sonia Sotomayor. One respondent said of Associate Justice Sotomayor, "She should go back to Mexico." Keep in mind that not one male suggested Melania Trump return to her country of origin once her photo was revealed. Not even Bill Clinton, who was volunteering as a male test subject in the hopes he'd be able to reveal something important about male behaviors while meeting college girls. When told she may have worked in the United States illegally with a tourist visa, the men again did not seem to care.
On the other hand, when Melania Trump's photo was presented with 50 other images of women in political office, she was picked most often as "the woman I'd most like to nail with my flag pole." Not since Jackie Kennedy has a potential First Lady won that contest, so researchers were excited about those results. Hillary Clinton did not place in the top 80%.