Maybe she’s made for Washington after all. It wasn’t always this way. Once upon a time, a man could marry his Slovenian sweetheart, invite Bill and Hillary Clinton to the lavish wedding, and only the society pages would bother with it. “It was completely different than it is now,” Melania Trump tells me, recalling those bygone days of sanity, speaking in her now famous accent, a kind of dreamy Transylvanian.
Back then, in 2005, it didn’t seem odd that she and Donald Trump would mark their happy occasion with the former president and First Lady, then a senator from New York. “When they went to our wedding, we were private citizens,” Melania reminds me. Just two private citizens getting hitched at the groom’s 126-room Florida palace. He in a tux; she in a $100,000 Dior dress that laborers’ hands had toiled upon for a legendary 550 hours, affixing 1,500 crystals—jewels fit for private citizens like them. A pair of ordinary people, really, uniting in matrimony in the presence of Rudy Giuliani and Kelly Ripa, as Billy Joel serenaded the couple and guests slurped caviar and Cristal in the shadow of a five-foot-tall Grand Marnier wedding cake.
