Commentary: Melania Trump shows her tough side in interview

We learned nothing really new about either of the presidential candidates at their third and final debate, even when one of them declared outright that, as he has only hinted before, he might or might not accept the results of a democratic election - ours.

But rarely has a candidate's wife doing one of those "I've forgiven my man, and you should, too" interviews done more to change her own image than Melania Trump did this week in repeatedly calling her 70-year-old husband a boy.

When she imitated the rest of us thinking she's naïve or in any way pitiful - "Oh, poor Melania" - she certainly convinced me that yes, she is plenty tough. And perhaps as willing as Donald Trump is to exact an eye for an eye.

Was she doing that when she dismissed the GOP nominee's Access Hollywood brags to Billy Bush about grabbing women's genitals as "boy talk"? Or when she said they were behaving in a very familiar way - for two adolescents, that is? Or when she laughingly compared the behavior of the aspiring commander-in-chief to that of her 10-year-old son?

"It's kind of two teenage boys," she said of her husband's boasts to the now-fired TV host. "Actually, they should behave better, right?" To interviewer Anderson Cooper's point that the teenager to whom she's married was 59 at the time he was caught on tape, she readily agreed: "Correct, and sometimes I said, 'I have two boys at home; I have my young son and I have my husband.' "

To believe she didn't intend to say any of that is to imagine that she was speaking in a completely unscripted way. But having waited more than a week to weigh in, she would hardly have been winging it. And having had so much time to choose her words just underlined the impression that the subtext was, "You think I don't know it was my own proud husband who leaked those nude photos of me to his buddy's newspaper? Or who didn't protect me from the embarrassment of delivering Michelle Obama's words at his party's convention? And do you assume that because I was a model, I don't have brains enough to have figured him out?"

As her husband often does, she gave herself plausible deniability by also saying the opposite - arguing in his defense that he somehow couldn't have groped anyone because she's seen various other women slip him their phone numbers. She also said that his inappropriate remarks about doing whatever he wants with women were made "many, many years ago," that he was "egged on" by silly Billy Bush, and what we heard on the tape wasn't representative of the man she knows.

Most persuasive, though, was this comment: "People don't really know me." Or didn't, anyway.

"Oh, poor Melania," she said, mocking all the faux concern and then rejecting it. "Don't feel sorry for me; I can handle everything."

Asked about Obama's denunciations of her husband's words, and of the predatory behavior he's been accused of, she was so steely that, out of someone else's mouth, her words might even have been taken as threatening: "I would suggest to them to look at themselves in the mirror, look at their own actions and take care of their own families."

And just because English isn't her first language doesn't mean she didn't know exactly what she was saying when she spoke of the ills of the social media that her husband can't stay away from. Or of how hard she works to let their son know that words do matter and that speaking disrespectfully does have consequences.

She neither helped nor harmed her husband's presidential chances in granting interviews this week. But challenging as the role of candidate spouse is, she did convince me not to feel sorry for her. When she assured us that she's great, thanks, and is doing what she always does - taking care of herself, her son and her husband - I did not necessarily assume that listing her responsibilities in that order was inadvertent. I did conclude, though, that Donald J. Trump has met his match in his third wife - and might want to keep in mind that speaking disrespectfully could, as she often reminds their son, have consequences beyond this election.

Melinda Henneberger is a longtime political reporter and editor in Washington.