For two years, the National Archives stalked Donald Trump over secret presidential records he’s accused of purloining.

More recently, as the resulting legal case against the 45th president moved haltingly through the courts, Archives leadership made much friendlier advances toward a different Trump: Former first lady Melania Trump, who’s slated to be the honored guest speaker today at a naturalization ceremony for new citizens in the rotunda of the Archives’ headquarters.

It is, to put it mildly, an unusual billing.

How did it happen that a resident of the same Mar-a-Lago estate whose bathrooms were used to store thousands of allegedly ill-gotten Archives documents won an invite to speak in the same room as the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence?

For that matter, how is it that a federal agency is giving the spouse of any presidential candidate a star turn in a heart-warming photo-op less than a month before the Iowa caucuses?

The Archives says Trump is there as a result of a personal invitation from Archivist of the United States Colleen Shogan, a Biden appointee who got to know the then-first lady during a prior stint working with the White House Historical Association. They say Trump was invited in her capacity as a former first lady, not as a candidate’s spouse. “Naturalization ceremonies at the National Archives are not political events, and speakers are not invited in a political capacity,” a spokesperson told me by email.

If only it were that easy to define something out of politics. The fact is, the optics of the Archives ceremony are terrific for Donald Trump’s presidential campaign.

In the face of accusations of being anti-immigrant, the 45th president’s team has regularly said that, in fact, he’s not against immigrants — only illegal immigration. How better to showcase that than by having the former first lady, an immigrant herself, preside over a naturalization ceremony that will swear in new citizens from Bangladesh, Guatemala, Serbia and 22 other countries? (At the very least, it could help erase memories of her 2018 visit to a migrant detention center while wearing a jacket bizarrely emblazoned with the words “I really don’t care, do u?”)

Neither the Donald Trump campaign nor the former first lady’s personal office responded to multiple requests for comment about the event. Thus far, Melania Trump has been conspicuously absent from campaign events during her husband’s effort to reclaim the presidency.

It wouldn’t be the first time the Trump political operation has used a citizenship ceremony to his advantage, a chance to soften his image with voters who might see bigotry in his rhetoric about Mexican rapists, or even his more prosaic calls for reducing legal immigration. During the 2020 Republican National Convention,........

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