Vladimira Tomšič, who went to the same school as Melania and is friendly with her parents, tells me that her upbringing helps explain her marriage. “The secret of why he’s with her,” she explains, “is her traditional values and the importance of family to her.” In other words, that bearskin-rug photo is a red herring: Melania is the ideal wife for the conservative base. She is, in fact, positively biblical—Trump’s perfect “help meet,” his “suitable helper,” as the Bible’s description of Eve would have it.
Melania Trump is as tailored to The Donald as if a divine plastic surgeon had sculpted her out of his rib.
When he first met Melania—at a party during New York Fashion Week in the fall of 1998—Donald Trump was 52. He was brash and brassy, fabulously wealthy, the stuff of New York legend. Melania Knauss was 28, a tall, shy brunette whose face had yet to acquire the taut, plasticine squint that makes it look as if cameras are forever catching her a second before a sneeze.
“I didn’t know much about Donald Trump,” she says of that introduction. “I had my life, I had my world. I didn’t follow Donald Trump and what kind of life he had.”
Years earlier, while modeling in Milan and Paris, Melania had Germanized her last name from Knavs, changing the v to a u and adding an extra s. She had done very well in Europe, but not supermodel well, and hoped to advance her career in the U.S. Paolo Zampolli, a wealthy Italian whose business interests in New York are broad and vague, brought Melania over on a modeling contract and a work visa. Sometimes, in order to promote his models, he would send a few girls to an event and invite photographers, producers, and rich playboys.
That night in September 1998, Zampolli had invited Trump, who arrived with a date but was immediately taken with Melania. He sent his companion to the bathroom so he could have a few minutes to chat up the model he’d noticed. But Melania knew of Trump’s reputation—which was immediately confirmed by the fact that he had come to the party with a date and was now asking for her number.
She refused, and instead asked Trump for his contact information. Unimpressed with merely catching the eye of the famous billionaire, Melania was studying the situation as if testing a coin with her teeth. “If I give him my number, I’m just one of the women he calls,” she remembers. Melania was curious to see if he’d proffer a business number. “I wanted to see what his intention is,” she explains. “It tells you a lot from the man what kind of number he gives you. He gave me all of his numbers.”
When she was getting her jewelry plans off the ground, Melania sketched the designs for the collection herself, relying on a talent for drawing that her childhood friends tell me she flashed as a girl. “It’s not free; it’s precise,” Petra Sedej, one of Melania’s high school classmates, says of her art. “She has a really good feeling for this.
” Another old friend whom I met in Slovenia, and who asked not to be named, sums up Melania’s talents more generally: “People say she’s smart, she’s well-educated like Jackie Kennedy, but…” The friend pauses to find the right words. “She’s smart for the things she’s interested in, like jewelry. She’s not stupid, she’s not a bimbo, but she’s not especially clever.”
To Melania’s traditional way of thinking, Trump’s aspirations for the White House have little to do with her. The same can be said for his more controversial positions, like his general disdain for immigrants, even though his wife became an American only in 2006. “I chose not to go into politics and policy,” she tells me. “Those policies are my husband’s job.” She has opinions, she assures me, and shares them with Trump. “Nobody knows and nobody will ever know,” she says of the advice she provides him. “Because that’s between me and my husband.”
The approach is in keeping with her view of her wifely functions. “She stays in her lane,” Bloch says. “When asked, she gives her opinion, but otherwise she stays out of it.”
“The breasts are okay,” Stern replied. Then, yeah, of course Trump stays. “Because that’s important.” There are other pluses. He appreciates Melania’s restraint when it comes to Shopping While Trump. “She’s never taken advantage of that situation, okay, as many women would have, frankly,” he has said. (“I prefer quality over quantity,” Melania tells me.) Donald does his part to make things work, too. “He is a very understanding husband,” Melania once told an interviewer.
“If I say, ‘I need an hour, I’m going to take a bath,’ or I’m having a massage, he doesn’t have nothing against it. He’s very supportive in that way.” She lets him have his space; she’s not “needy” or “nagging,” as she tells me.
As for passions beyond the familial, there are a few. Melania dabbles in design. Her line of affordable gem-spangled jewelry and watches,
launched on QVC, reportedly sold out in 45 minutes during its initial broadcast. (Melania’s caviar-infused anti-aging creams haven’t sold as well, though a federal judge ruled in her favor in a lawsuit she filed against its promoters.)
While Melania enjoys the services of a chef and an assistant, there’s no nanny raising their son, Barron. That’s the mother’s duty. “We know our roles,” Melania once told Parenting.com, referring to the division of labor with her husband. “I didn’t want him to change the diapers or put Barron to bed.” The boy she calls “little Donald” wants one day to be a “businessman and golfer” and, as she told the publication, almost always dresses in suits. “He’s not a sweatpants child,” she’s said.
Melania is as fastidious a wife as she is a mother, which Donald appreciates. Things come easy with her. “I work very hard from early in the morning till late in the evening,” Donald told Larry King in 2005.
“I don’t want to go home and work at a relationship.” To the twice-divorced Donald, Melania is terrific. He’s never heard her fart or make doodie, as he once told Howard Stern. (Melania has said the key to the success of her marriage is separate bathrooms.)
He can trust her to take her birth control every day, he boasted to Stern; she’s just amazing that way. She has the perfect proportions—five feet eleven, 125 pounds—and great boobs, which is no trivial matter. Stern once asked Trump what he would do if Melania were in a terrible car accident, God forbid, and lost the use of her left arm, developed an oozing red splotch near her eye, and mangled her left foot. Would Donald stay with her?
“How do the breasts look?” Trump asked.
It’s easy to think America has changed a lot since Hillary Rodham Clinton was chastised in the early ’90s for her ambition as First Lady—refusing to sit at home and make cookies. But our conception of a presidential spouse hasn’t evolved much. Michelle Obama, a Princeton graduate and legal hotshot who was once her husband’s law-school-era mentor, has been mainly confined to dealing with soft issues: childhood obesity, planting vegetables.
Rather than Hillary or Michelle, it was Laura Bush—a teacher who supported her husband’s turning from bottle to Bible—who seemed most suited to Middle America’s idea (or at least a man’s idea) of a First Lady. Of course, the paragon of them all is still Jackie Kennedy, endlessly glamorous and endlessly tolerant of her husband’s philandering.
Those who know Melania say the Jackie template isn’t a bad one for her to aspire to.
“She’d be great at picking out the china patterns; she’d be a classic First Lady,” says stylist Phillip Bloch, who has worked with both of the Trumps and attended fashion shows with Melania. But unlike Jackie, who met John Kennedy when he was already a congressman, Melania wasn’t signing on to be a political spouse when she met the notorious Donald Trump in 1998.
Melania had signed up for a life of conspicuous conspicuousness, one she dutifully chronicled on Instagram and Twitter up until about a year ago, when her social-media accounts—unlike those of her husband—went silent with Trump’s entrance into the race. There was Melania in a white robe, working with her “glam team” of stylists, perched on a gilded throne, overlooking Central Park. Here she was, head to toe in white, posing on the Trump jet. There she was, relaxing at “#home #NYC” on a Thursday night, in a room that looked like a fevered baroque dream. In one of her last posts—right before somebody deemed it advisable to slam shut this opulent little window on her life—she snapped a parting selfie in a gold-mirrored bathroom. “Bye! I’m off to my #summer residence.”
In this respect, she is just like her husband. She’s alluringly opaque. She makes meaningful eye contact and emphatically repeats affirmative, folksy banalities—she “has a thick skin,” she takes things “day by day,” she follows the news “from A to Z”—until the interviewer either is transported into a supra-verbal understanding or decides it’s pointless to press for specifics.
But unlike her husband, Melania is reserved, polite, and steady, say those close to her. “There is a peace in her,” one old friend from Slovenia tells me. She is a homebody. She’s rich, but not a socialite; she prefers family to the It set and retires early after events.
This image of a retiring homebody, of course, is not the one that Trump’s enemies present when they conjure her in the White House. Ahead of Utah’s primary, allies of Ted Cruz
posted a photo from a shoot for a 2000 issue of British GQ in which a naked Melania is lying on her stomach on a white bearskin rug. “Meet Melania Trump. Your next First Lady,” read the ad, aimed at conservative Mormon voters. “Or, you could support Ted Cruz on Tuesday.”
Trump shot back in a cryptic, menacing message that he would “spill the beans” on Heidi Cruz and then re-tweeted two photos, side by side: one, a mid-sentence Heidi, looking like a gargoyle; another, a bronzed, blue-eyed Melania, looking like a fox. “The images are worth a thousand words,” the caption read, though Trump’s tweet itself was really communicating only four: “My wife is hotter.”
Those were, in some ways, simpler times. But things change quickly—which is perhaps the enduring fact of Melania Trump’s entire improbable life—and when your husband works up a plan to make America great again, the very same Clintons you once smiled with on your wedding day can now become your family’s mortal enemies.
And you can think, as Melania Trump says she does, that it’s no huge deal, really. “This is it, what it is,” Melania tells me. “It’s all business now; it’s nothing personal.”
Of course, Melania had the foresight to imagine that politics would bring chaos. Donald’s first wife, Ivana, may have wanted Trump to be president, but Melania, his third, was never hot on the idea.
“When we discussed about it, I said he really needs to make sure he knows he really wants to do it, because life changes,” Melania says.
“I didn’t know much about Donald Trump,” she says of being introduced. “I had my life, I had my world.”
