First Lady Melania Trump wasn’t at last week’s summit in Alaska with her husband President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin – but she was there in spirit.
Trump handed Putin a letter from his wife, appealing to him to remember the innocence of the children caught in the midst of the fighting between Russia and Ukraine, and to put an end to the violence.
“In today’s world, some children are forced to carry a quiet laughter, untouched by the darkness around them — a silent defiance against the forces that can potentially claim their future,” the first lady wrote. “Mr. Putin, you can singlehandedly restore their melodic laughter.”
At the end of the letter, which was shared on social media by Attorney General Pam Bondi, was the first lady’s signature, which looked rather familiar.
And it sparked wild speculation online.
It didn’t take long for people to remark how similar it looked to the president’s.
“Donald Trump and Melania Trump’s signatures. So weird,” said one person on X, who shared a side-by-side image of the two. “That’s IDENTICAL to Trump’s own signature…”
“Melania has the same type of signature as Trump…odd…” wrote a Facebook user.
“Why she have the same sharpie a** signature as Trump?” said another, referring to the president’s favorite pen.
“No way is that her signature,” said another. “She didn’t write it and Trump signed it,” someone else said on Facebook, without evidence.
Others questioned why the first lady’s signature appears to have changed over the years, with one user asking Elon Musk’s Grok AI chatbot, “Why did Melania Trump change her signature?”
“Melania Trump’s signature evolved after her 2005 marriage, shifting from a flowing cursive style (as Melania Knauss) to a peaked, stylized one resembling Donald’s,” Grok replied. “Analysts suggest it’s for branding unity, quick signing via autopen or to reflect tenacity and privacy. No official reason given.”
The chatbot’s answer actually tallies with the opinion of Bart Baggett, a handwriting expert who has testified in criminal cases. He said the style with its “angular letters” and “long downstrokes” is all about the Trump “brand.”
“She’s got angular writing that’s a fast, analytical line. She’s had that long before she met Donald Trump,” Baggett said.
However, Melania’s handwriting and signature has “morphed” into Trump’s in the last 10 years, the expert noted.
“Her current handwriting is almost like a brand, like a logo, and I think she morphed it a little bit more into matching Trump’s as she bought into the brand,” Baggett added.
The signature on the letter to Putin is an “aggressive” one, which tied in with the powerful display of a B-2 Stealth Bomber flying overhead as the two leaders met for the first time last week, the expert said.
“[Trump] did have a bomber fly over their meeting, he did have a red carpet. He had a lot of pomp and circumstance,” Baggett said. “So there’s a lot of pressure about how powerful we are as a country and so that doesn’t surprise me that it’s a more aggressive signature.”
“You don’t want a heart and flowers on your letters,” Baggett added, referring back to a handwritten note Melania penned in 2017 to the patients of a children’s hospital in Italy.
Baggett, who stressed that he has not examined the letter to Putin personally, poured cold water on the conspiracy theory that the first lady’s signature was forged in any way.
“I don’t see any nefarious thing about her letter,” Baggett said. “Those conspiracy theories, I think, are just grasping at straws.”
Chatter online turned to Trump’s Sharpie, the marker he raved about during his first term, and he has used to sign dozens of executive orders since his return to the White House.
“Did she borrow his Sharpie?” one person joked on X.
Well, quite possibly, according to Baggett, who said the Sharpie is typical of the Trump brand.
“I think a Sharpie probably was used, and it is very typical of his brand,” he said, referring to the signature on the Putin letter. “For some people, if you write really heavy, Sharpies are [a] really good instrument. People that write heavy are more passionate.”
The marker has become a trademark of the president’s.
“I was signing documents with a very expensive pen and it didn’t write well,” Trump said in a 2018 HBO documentary in partnership with Axios. “It was a horrible pen, and it was extremely expensive.”
“And then I started using just a Sharpie, and I said to myself, ‘Well wait a minute, this writes much better and this cost almost nothing,’” Trump said.
Reddit and X users were also wildly speculating whether the first lady used an autopen—which has become one of the president’s go-to attack lines on his predecessor Joe Biden. Earlier this year, Trump began accusing Biden of using the mechanical device to sign pardoning documents, rather than doing so by hand. Trump claimed, without providing evidence, that Biden had no knowledge or approval of the documents.
“Did Melania use Donald’s autopen?” asked one X user.
“The autopen can only have one signature preset,” jested another.
The Independent has contacted the White House to inquire whether the first lady did, indeed, use Trump’s Sharpie or an autopen to sign the letter to the Russian dictator.
Unfortunately for the autopen conspiracy theorists out there, until there is a definitive answer – it will remain a mystery.
“If [Melania] has an autopen, we don’t know about it,” Baggett concluded. “But [the signature] doesn’t really deviate too much from her known handwriting,” the expert said. “She’s got angular letters, she’s got a very similar Trumpian style of ‘aggressiveness,’ which I’ll call triangles.’”
