In scandal's wake, Melania keeps her distance from Donald. Do we care?

Well, one thing that happened was the disclosure that Donald Trump’s lawyer arranged a $130,000 payment to a porn star, reportedly to keep quiet about her decade-ago affair with Trump.

In the swirl of news over the last week, Melania’s defection — which was announced on the couple’s 13th wedding anniversary — didn’t get much public attention. (Yahoo News White House correspondent Hunter Walker asked the White House how the Trumps celebrated, but got no answer.) To the many rules that Mrs. Trump’s husband has rewritten in the past two years, add one more — that the public will always care how a politician’s wife reacts to news of his infidelities.

Until Trump changed everything, the public was insatiably interested in what the wronged spouse thinks. When Bill Clinton was accused of Oval Office dalliances, for instance, Hillary Clinton at first became his fiercest defender, blaming the charges on a “vast right wing conspiracy.” She also became the subject of endless speculation about whether she would stay in the marriage or leave. The photo of the couple walking forlornly toward the presidential helicopter, with Chelsea between them holding each of their hands, ran with countless stories about the tense state of their marriage.

When John Edwards was found to have fathered a child out of wedlock, attention also focused on his wife. Some publications were reluctant to cover the story at first, in part out of respect for Elizabeth Edwards, who was fighting cancer at the time. At first Elizabeth defended her husband, but then she announced she was separating from him.

Ditto for Eliot Spitzer’s payments to prostitutes, when much of the coverage centered on why we expect wronged women, like his wife, Silda, to stand publicly — and clearly miserably — by their husband’s side. Or Anthony Weiner’s lewd texting, when as much ink and energy was dedicated to why his wife, Huma Abedin, stayed with him (eventually they divorced) and what price she would pay in her own career for his behavior.

The meme of the wronged wife, and the public’s outrage on her behalf, became an entrenched part of popular culture. The TV show “The Good Wife” rode it for seven seasons.  In the musical “Hamilton,” the title character’s admission that he had an affair leads to brief glee from his political opponents, which abruptly ends with the words “his poor wife.”  That segues into a wrenching solo, and the rest of the show focuses more on her anger and eventual forgiveness than it does on the political price he paid.

There has been, to be sure, much speculation about the Trump marriage: The way he left her behind when the couple arrived at the White House on Inauguration Day; how her smile turned to a frown during the ceremony; how she didn’t move to the White House for months, and swatted his hand away when he reached for hers on a tarmac; and, most recently, how the photo she chose to tweet on the first anniversary of his taking office was of herself not with her husband but with the military escort who accompanied her to her seat.