AUSTIN — First lady Melania Trump, despite irking some traditionalists with her removal of 10 crab apple trees from an iconic spot, stood in the very same White House Rose Garden Tuesday night and urged Americans to give her husband four more years.

While President Donald Trump’s personality turns off many voters — to the point where some GOP candidates this year tell people to focus on policies, not the person — Melania Trump has steered clear of exerting obvious influence on his weightiest decisions. And that’s a popular stance with most voters, experts said Tuesday.

“She’s off the center stage,” said presidential historian Douglas Brinkley of Rice University. “People have found her likable and respect her.”

Before she spoke in the Rose Garden before an audience that included Trump and an audience that included many people not wearing masks, a video played highlighting her accomplishments. She took the podium to a standing ovation.

“I know I speak for my husband and my entire family that we have never forgotten the people who took a chance on a man who has never been in politics,” she said.

She acknowledged the coronavirus toll and extended sympathies to those who have lost loved ones, as well as health care workers, frontline workers and teachers who “put our country first.”

”You are not alone,” she said. “My husband’s administration will not stop fighting until there’s an effective treatment or vaccine for everyone.”

Earlier in the evening, Trump pardoned a reformed felon and oversaw a naturalization ceremony for several immigrants, and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo ended a a long tradition of secretary of state nonpartisanship with a prerecorded speech from Jerusalem supporting Donald Trump’s reelection.

The White House events, along with Trump’s scheduled speech from there Thursday, raised questions about potential violations of the Hatch Act. The act limits the political activities of federal employees while on the job or at the workplace. The president and the vice president are exempt from violations under the act, but it does apply to executive branch staffers involved in the event.

Barbara Perry, a University of Virginia government professor who wrote a book about former first lady Jackie Kennedy, said most Americans — at the time it was happening — have been uneasy with first ladies such as Eleanor Roosevelt and Hillary Rodham Clinton who almost had a “co-presidency” with their husbands.

“They don’t like a first lady to get too far advanced in the policy realm — for good reason,” she said. “They’re not accountable.”

Melania Trump, though, has perhaps erred on the side of being too disengaged, almost “AWOL,” Perry said.

“Melania is a little bit like a Nancy Reagan,” she said, referring to the wife of former President Ronald Reagan. “She’s viewed as not being really a part of people’s lives and not really resonating with the common person. And people just think she’s cool and cold.”

Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, though, who is Donald Trump’s top campaign adviser in Texas, disagrees that the first lady lacks a common touch. On a press call with Texas reporters Tuesday, he inveighed against press coverage that “just ripped her apart as being a foreigner because she dared to want to restore the Rose Garden.”

Such news media coverage, Patrick said, “just makes her a victim — and that only helps them.”

Both Trumps take pains to speak with kitchen workers and hotel staffers as the Secret Service brings them through secure entrances into ballroom appearances, Patrick said.

“She’s been very quiet when I’ve been around her, and very gracious,” he said. “I do think she has a Jacqueline Kennedy feel.”

Patrick referred to former President John F. Kennedy’s wife, who brought in landscape designer Rachel “Bunny” Mellon in 1962 to create the modern Rose Garden, a space outside the Oval Office where foreign dignitaries can be greeted.

Perry, who also is director of presidential studies at the University of Virginia’s Miller Center, said she was “a little stunned” to read earlier in the summer of Melania Trump’s plan for overhauling the space beside the West Wing colonnade.

“You know, it’s possible they won’t be there much longer,” she said of the Trumps.

It would be one thing if it was “their own house and it was private. And they said, ‘Yeah, we’re going to move. But we decided we don’t like the garden outside,’” Perry said. “But it’s the people’s home. And it’s the people’s garden. And it’s so tied to the Kennedys. And so when you mess with Camelot, you’re bound to come up short.”

Rice’s Brinkley said Melania Trump, 50, the president’s third wife, may wield more influence over the 45th president than is generally known. The first immigrant to become first lady since John Quincy Adams’ wife, Louisa, who was born in England, the former Melanija Knavs was born in the former Yugoslavia. A former model, she holds dual citizenship as an American and a Slovenian.

“Some people say she speaks five languages,” Brinkley said, in an assertion that the fact-checking website snopes.com says is unproven. “But nobody puts that together with their picture of her. They think of her as a fashion plate and a mom, so they don’t think she knows anything about geopolitics.”

The first lady, he added, “is a mysterious figure. Nobody knows who the real Melania is.”

2016 speech

On the GOP convention’s opening night in Cleveland four years ago, Melania Trump’s speech seemed to go off without a hitch. Hours later, however, an observer on Twitter noted that a small section of her remarks — about being raised with values and trying to instill them in her child and other American children — seemed remarkably similar to a part of Michelle Obama’s 2008 convention speech in Denver. It set off a firestorm.

On Twitter, the anti-Trump Lincoln Project ribbed her for cribbing parts of her 2016 convention speech from remarks given by the former first lady.

Virginia’s Perry cut her some slack.

“I doubt if she knew that her speechwriter plagiarized from Michelle Obama four years ago,” Perry said. “She seems pretty introverted. She doesn’t seem prone to want to go off script.”

“She’ll stick to a teleprompter and not cause any trouble,” said Brinkley, an adviser to CNN about presidential history.

Recounting how proud she was to become a U.S. citizen in 2006, Melania Trump nevertheless said America’s history -- especially of slavery -- is troubling.

“Like all of you, I have reflected on the racial unrest in our country,” she said. “It is a harsh reality that we are not proud of parts of our history. I encourage you to focus on the future while still learning from the past.”

Melania and Donald Trump have a son, Barron, 14. One reason the first lady can withdraw from view is “she can say, ‘Well, I have a young child,’” Perry noted.

Brinkley observed that Melania Trump isn’t associated with high-profile causes, such as Lady Bird Johnson’s highway beautification effort and Nancy Reagan’s anti-drug-abuse crusade. Melania Trump, though, has embraced a “Be Best and Don’t Bully” campaign and talked about it during her speech.

Her approval ratings are not necessarily tied to her husband’s. According to a Gallup poll released at the end of 2019, she was the second-most-admired woman in the country, behind Michelle Obama but ahead of Oprah Winfrey and Hillary Clinton.

The Washington Post has called her “perhaps the most press-shy first lady in modern American history.”

The first lady, though, “wears well” with the public because “she isn’t constantly up in your grill,” he said. “There’s some good will there. People think she’s the only one who can keep her husband under control.”

“They think she has shown grace and dignity, much more than her husband,” he said. “She’s an asset to the campaign because he’s been hemorrhaging support among women. That’s why he has his daughter on tonight.”

He was referring to the president’s younger daughter, Tiffany, 26, a University of Pennsylvania graduate who just earned a law degree from Georgetown University Law Center. Her mother is Trump’s second wife, the actress Marla Maples.

“My father is the only person to challenge the establishment, the entrenched bureaucracy, Big Pharma and media monopolies to ensure that Americans’ constitutional freedoms are upheld, and that justice and truth prevail,” she said in remarks critical of news media outlets and tech giants.

In unusual pieces of stagecraft, Trump on Tuesday granted a pardon to Jon Ponder, a Nevada robber-turned-activist who then spoke to the convention.

“Today, praise God, I am filled with hope — a proud American citizen who’s been given a second chance,” said Ponder, chief executive of the nonprofit of HOPE for Prisoners Inc., which helps inmates reintegrate into society.

Trump also attended a White House naturalization ceremony for five new citizens, along with acting Homeland Security Secretary Chad Wolf of Plano.

Shortly before Tuesday night’s GOP convention session aired, convention planners scratched as a speaker an Arizona woman who earlier in the day tweeted a lengthy thread from a Q Anon conspiracy theorist about a supposed Jewish plot — involving the Rothschild banking family — to enslave the world.

Mary Ann Mendoza was yanked after the tweet, according to the Daily Beast website. Mendoza, who helped found a group called Angel Moms after her police officer son was killed in a head-on collision with a car driven by an undocumented immigrant, tweeted later in the day that she had not paid attention to the entire thread, which she said “does not reflect my feelings or personal thoughts whatsoever.”

Other Tuesday night speakers included Eric Trump, one of the president’s two sons by his first marriage, and White House National Economic Council director Larry Kudlow.

“Land of Opportunity,” or the economy, was Tuesday’s GOP theme.

Convention planners even had an I’m-now-for-Trump talk by eighth-generation Maine lobster fisherman Jason Joyce. Joyce’s evocation of seafood helped counter last week’s visual of a plate full of calamari, displayed by a Rhode Islander during the Democrats’ roll call of the states.

Unlike the Obama-Biden administration, which used the Antiquities Act to put off limits many “thousands of acres” of ocean bed, without input from local residents, Trump “seeks and respects fishermen’s views,” Joyce said.

Texan Abby Johnson, formerly director of a Planned Parenthood clinic in Bryan, who says her 2009 observation of an abortion turned her into an abortion foe, said Trump has “done more for the unborn” than any previous White House occupant.

“This election is a choice between two radical anti-life activists and the most pro-life president we’ve ever had,” Johnson said. “That’s something that should compel you to action.”

CORRECTION, 10:41 a.m., Aug. 27, 2020: An earlier version of this story referred to Eric Trump as one of Donald Trump’s two sons when it should have said two by the president’s first marriage. As the story mentioned, Donald and Melania Trump have a son, Barron.