Even after the midterm elections delivered a rebuke to Donald Trump, his presidency, his party and even his family, Amazon does not appear worried that audiences no longer have an appetite for more of its hagiographic content about his wife, Melania Trump.

Amazon announced that a two-part docuseries, “Melania, the Series,” will be released on Prime Video on Nov. 20, extending a partnership that began when it paid $40 million for the rights to make “Melania,” the original documentary about the first lady. After the film was released last January, critics panned it for being pro-Trump propaganda and a “shallow, sycophantic” portrait of its subject.

The new series promises to show previously unseen footage of Melania Trump preparing to become first lady in January 2025, and of the period immediately following her husband’s inauguration. This footage was filmed by director Brett Ratner, who also made the original documentary.

But the results of the midterm elections could lead to a reckoning for certain corporate executives, tech moguls and media figures who tried to curry favor with Trump by making donations to his inaugural fund or by settling lawsuits with him. Many questioned whether, in releasing “Melania,” Amazon and its founder Jeff Bezos were trying to ingratiate themselves to Trump, with a business affected by regulations and government contracts, the New York Times reported. Employees in Amazon’s entertainment division were told that company leadership had mandated the film’s release.

But the Nov. 3 election results revealed “a seismic backlash against Elon, Zuckerberg, Bezos, and their fellow Big Tech overlords who leveraged Trump and policies that prioritized the oligarchy over regular people,” writes Hollywood industry expert Matthew Belloni in his Puck newsletter.

With the Democrats about to take control of the House and Senate, plans are brewing for broad investigations into potential corruption, which could include “the brazen capitulation and slobbery (expletive)-kissing of the past two years,” Belloni said. That could even include hauling someone like Amazon executive Mike Hopkins before congress. Hopkins is the senior vice president and head of Prime Video and Amazon MGM Studios, and he presumably greenlit the Melania documentary, as well as the upcoming series.

Belloni wondered if Hopkins would be asked to testify under oath about “the outrageous $40 million bribe disguised as a rights deal” that Amazon paid to make Melania Trump’s documentary.

Actually, the documentary cost Amazon a reported $75 million, if you factor in the $35 million in marketing, according to the New York Times. Once it was released in theaters, the documentary earned only $16.6 million. And while that amount is pretty good box office for a documentary, Amazon still ended up paying a lot to Melania Trump to help burnish her reputation.

Even by the Trump family’s “low standard,” it “seemed shameless” for Melania Trump to take this money and for Amazon to pay it out, wrote Variety chief correspondent Daniel D’Addario. “Melania Trump was willing to accept a staggeringly large check but seemed not to feel even the slightest twinge that would have prompted her to offer something, anything, to earn the fee,” he said.

If Melania Trump’s documentary did as well as it did in theaters, the backdrop for this meager success is the belief that her husband’s 2024 popular-vote election victory didn’t just mean he was “more popular than ever” but that “our society had fundamentally changed,” D’Addario said.

“In Trump’s first term and through the Joe Biden presidency, corporations took tones between studied neutrality and resistance,” D’Addario added. Following the 2024 election, corporate America flocked to Trump, with Bezos and his soon-to-be-wife Lauren Sánchez among the guests of honor at Trump’s inauguration and eager to be seen at Mar-a-Lago or a White House state dinners.

“As such, a film about how Melania prepared for (her husband’s) inauguration had a grim civic-duty feel,” continued D’Addario. He said the documentary consisted of Trump’s wife walking in and out of rooms in the company of “random stylists and decorators burbling in her wake.” He said it also included a scene that could be said to speak to the state of American culture in the aftermath of the 2024 election.

“Want to see America?” D’Addario asked. “This was it — an oligarch’s wife flatly bragging to camera that she’s always had an intuitive feel for design, and charging you for the privilege of being in her company.”

D’Addario noted that Melania Trump’s documentary manage to come out the month before Trump launched his war against Iran, which is seen as a turning point for his fortunes. Vice President JD Vance is among those who cite the unpopular war as one of the factors that lost Republicans Senate and House seats Nov. 3.

With the staggering GOP losses, Trump “has lost control of the national conversation,” D’Addario said. And with that, it’s possible that Bezos and other tech moguls and media figures will care less about trying to make him happy, D’Addario added.

But then there is the Melania Trump docuseries. Given the timing, it had to have been prepared ahead of the midterms, and perhaps it was made with that hope that Trump would retain both his political power and his dominance over the culture.

An Amazon spokesperson did not want to respond directly to a New York Times query about why the company was going ahead with the release of “Melania: the Series” this month. Instead, the spokesperson referred to statement the company released with the documentary in January. It said, “We licensed the film and series for one reason and one reason only — because we think customers are going to love them.”

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