Melania Trump, a White House immigrant
How can a Slovenian model become the First Lady of a President who aims to close the borders of the United States? To decipher the Donald Trump riddle, you need to know his wife Melania
In July 2002, two years before he got engaged to Slovenian model Melania Knauss, Donald Trump traveled to the country where she was born for three hours. The couple were in London. At around eight o'clock on a Monday evening, Trump's Boeing 727 landed at Ljubljana's Brnik airport. Waiting for them were Viktor and Amalija Knavs, the parents of the formerly called Melanija, but who had changed her name some time ago. The group boarded two black Mercedes. Half an hour later they arrived at the Grand Hotel Toplice, a luxurious hotel overlooking Lake Bled.
Entering the restaurant from a side entrance, they were escorted to a table with a view. Trump and Knauss sat on one side, the Knavs and Foerderer on the other, as the Apprentice competitors would later do. The restaurant was closed for them. Between non-alcoholic cocktails (Trump grabbed a Coke) and onion scallops with fried potatoes and wild blueberries, Melania was the interpreter. Trump didn't want coffee. According to journalists Bojan Požar and Igor Omerza, as they were leaving he asked his future father-in-law: "Is this place for sale?" Before midnight he was already at the airport.
Donald Trump, it is worth pointing out, is married to an immigrant. If elected, Melania would become the first foreign First Lady after Louisa Adams (wife of John Quincy Adams, sixth president of the United States), although Adams does not really count, because her father was American and from a politically connected family who did the shuttles between England and its recently liberated colonies.
Louisa Adams played the harp, wrote satirical dramas and raised silkworms. Melania Trump, as she herself told People, does pilates and reads magazines. Born in 1970 in Novo Mesto, in what was then Yugoslavia, she grew up in a Soviet block of flats in Sevnica, a pretty riverside town where a smuggled Coca-Cola was a luxury. Later, as can be seen from his website, he began "to fly from a photo shoot in Paris to one in Milan".
Trump met him in 1998 at the Kit Kat Club in New York, during a party organized by Paolo Zampolli, owner of a modeling agency. The story of their courtship is at least as chaste as its background is equivocal: Donald sees Melania, asks for her phone number, but has arrived with another woman - Celina Midelfart, a Norwegian heiress - so Melania declines. Donald insists. The spark goes off at Moomba (a very exclusive Manhattan restaurant, now closed).
They break up for a while in 2000, when Donald toyed with the idea of running for president for the Reform Party founded by Ross Perot - Trump dumps Knauss, headlines the New York Post - but they soon get back together. He asks her to marry him on the night of the 2004 Met Gala, and today Melania, who once lived quietly in Union Square's Zeckendorf Towers, lives quietly in Trump Tower on Fifth Avenue. In the house, guests must wear shoe covers so as not to leave marks on the marble floors.
Trump's mother was also an immigrant from Scotland. His first wife, Ivana Zelní? Ková, was born in Zlín, in the former Czechoslovakia. If - as he says - he is worried by all the "people who have come from no one knows where they kill and rape and come to this country", perhaps he should think about building a wall around his trousers. Melania landed in New York to be a model. Due to an anomaly in immigration laws, models - almost half of them do not have a high school diploma - can enter the United States with the H-1B visa, the one for skilled workers, the same one that is up to scientists and computer programmers, who must however prove that they have a university degree. "The H-1B program has nothing to do with either specialization or immigration: they are temporary foreign workers, imported from abroad for the express purpose of replacing American workers at lower prices," Trump said in March. taking it out on "the unbridled, general abuse of H-1B."
Melania obtained the green card in 2001, and five years later became an American citizen. The Trump family could afford to regularize it. With the less fortunate immigrants she shows little solidarity: "I came here for work, and it went so well that I moved," she told Harper's Bazaar. “It never occurred to me to live here without papers. There are those who are like that. Follow the rules. Respect the law. Every few months he has to go back to Europe to have his visa stamped ».
In the "My world" section of her website, she defines herself as a former design and architecture student, "magnetic presence in front of the lens", "beauty with aquamarine eyes", wife, mother, benefactress, New Yorker and star of "various advertisements television, the latest of which for Aflac insurance companies ", where he appears" next to one of the most famous American icons, the Aflac duck ". Yet it is an enigmatic presence, often silent, with those eyes perpetually half closed. She has mostly been absent from the election campaign, preferring, as she says, to stay at home with Barron, Donald's ten-year-old son. She has appeared a little more often lately, hoping to attract the vote of women, given that more than one in three does not love Trump. He sticks to a repertoire of standard answers: "He's very good at negotiating", "We are two very independent people." She has a jewelry line, a skin care line (key ingredient: sturgeon eggs) and a penchant for the expression "A to Z" ("I follow everything from A to Z", "I'm involved from A to Z »,« I take care of the jewels I create from A to Z »).
Her husband seems to consider her mainly for her physical abilities: "Where's my supermodel?" He shouted from the stage of a meeting at the University of Pennsylvania in 1999, shortly after he had Melania take him to the Howard Stern talk show to speak. their "incredible sex" and the fact that she didn't have cellulite.
It would be tempting to dismiss Melania as a mannequin, to be appreciated more for her proportions than for her personality. A mannequin, however, whose clothing choices are mostly ignored by the American public. Monica Lewinsky ran out of stock of a lipstick, Sarah Palin launched the rush for a line of glasses, but there is no "Melania effect". Her outfits are surprisingly casual. His most memorable look remains that bear skin, diamond bracelets and nothing else sported for A bed in the clouds, the GQ report of January 2000.
In short, Melania Trump is the perfect body to hang a brand on. We admired Michelle's arms because we felt like we could have them too, if only we were as busy as she is, but nobody talks about Melania's legs (apart from her husband).
Unlike Teresa Heinz Kerry, who had fun with her childhood in Mozambique, Melania is a foreigner who shows no affinity with her country. Unlike a Carla Bruni who entered the Elysée after four decades of social life, she is a model with a past as a nun. She has stayed away from "social life," and had "no previous boyfriends," photographer Antoine Verglas told The Washington Post. On the Yonder News website, the journalist of Slovenian origin Andrej Mrevlje wonders if Melania could experience a transformation similar to that of Veronica Lario, the ex-wife of Silvio Berlusconi: "She had given three children to Berlusconi and lived in luxury, like Melania. Then she met an intellectual, the philosopher and former mayor of Venice Massimo Cacciari, and she radicalized. Tired of her husband's behavior, she filed for divorce and began the sunset of the Berlusconian era, after an entire country had failed to get rid of him ".
To Melania, Trump gave her surname. For the throngs of Americans who get excited in front of the namesake skyscrapers, steaks and video games, this makes her a winner. Not being able to marry him, to become a Trump they would have to be his children. Infatuation with Donald Trump is in fact a collective adoption fantasy. The outlines of the Trump family tree, however, are very fluid. Speaking of Ivanka, the eldest daughter, Donald said: "She is five feet tall and has an amazing body." (She calls her father "one of the greatest advocates of women"). Ivanka, executive vice president of the Trump Organization, played the role of replacement spouse for much of the election campaign. He accompanied his father on stage when he announced his candidacy in June - while Melania was watching -, advises him on strategies and travels with him around the country.
Meanwhile, Melania talks about "my two children, the big one and the little one". Of Trump's eight nephews, two are roughly the same age as Uncle Barron. Donald nurtures this paternal dynamic by reaffirming the desire to "protect" people. Its slogan "Let's make America great again" means "let's make it rich again". And what better way to beat cash than by latching onto a wealthy relative? That evening on Lake Bled remains Trump's only visit to Slovenia. It has been written that, of the 450 invited to the Trump wedding, only three - Viktor, Amalija and Melania's sister Ines - were Slovenians. “He speaks English, period. And that's okay, "Melania told Harper's Bazaar of her husband. “I'm not the kind of wife who tells you learn this or learn that. I'm not a pain in the ass ».
Yet Melania seems to have introjected many aspects of Donald's culture: his antihistoricism, his imperturbable brazenness, the false dichotomies between criminals and deserving citizens, between women who ask for nothing and pain in the ass wives. Like Donald, she doesn't drink too. He never goes out of line, not even with some joking criticism. "I like him the way he is," she says of her husband's hair. He even embraced Donald's characteristic pout. Melania is the extreme incarnation of the pact with the Americans. If Obama's promise was 'I am you', Trump's is 'you are me'.
In her book Hidden Power: Presidential Marriages That Shaped Our History, Kati Marton argues that since the presidency involves great physical isolation, the role of the First Lady - the the first person the president speaks to in the morning and the last person to whom he speaks in the evening - is crucial. Marton defines the presidency as a job for two, a combination of life and work. “If we suddenly found ourselves with a First Lady model, to whom we can look only for the clothes she wears, it would be a significant turning point, with serious consequences I believe,” Marton tells me. "If the President has a brilliant and well-connected partner who can be heard and tell him what's going on in the country, or if he's doing stupid things, like the best First Ladies have done, we are the ones to benefit from it." A passive First Lady, according to Marton, can harm not only her husband, but the country. And Melania Trump, he concludes, would be "the most inexperienced and least prepared First Lady in history".
If you take the role of the First Lady seriously, then it's worth trying to figure out who Melania is as a person. The most in-depth biographical account is represented by Melania Trump: The Inside Story (Melania Trump - The secret story), a book by Bojan Požar and Igor Omerza published in English in mid-February for Kindle (the paper version comes out in June), a book that a Trump spokesperson called it "a liar and biased, a pile of lies."
Požar is Slovenia's foremost tabloid journalist, Omerza a former politician and editor, and together they turned every stone in Novo Mesto, Sevnica, Ljubljana and beyond. Melania emerges as a calm and confident girl who, despite the political turmoil that surrounded her late adolescence - Slovenia became independent in 1991 -, has never wanted to do anything other than model. “She was interested in everything that had to do with fashion and beauty, and she soon discovered that she had a talent for design and creativity,” Požar and Omerza write.
For her, the turning point came in 1992, when the Slovenian women's magazine Jana organized her Look of the Year. It seems that the competition was fierce and the stakes very high. Jana promised that the winners would "take their place among the most famous and beloved European models, sharing the market, the fame ... and the money with them." The top three would have signed contracts in Europe (in Paris, Milan and Vienna). Melania, who had already shot a shampoo commercial, came in second. The details of her modeling career between 1992 and 1996, when she moved to New York, are a bit hazy, but she still achieved some success, working for magazines.
The two journalists have a conflicted relationship with Melania: a Trump lawyer threatened to sue Požar after an article in which he claimed she had her breasts replaced. But their account is exhaustive, and supported by documents and photographs. Despite some excesses of dubious taste ("Apparently Donald is the first man she slept with"), they are persuasive in arguing that he has a tendency to embellish biography as Trump does buildings. Her mother, Mika Brzezinski told the journalist, worked "in the fashion world" as a "fashion designer". But as Požar and Omerza show, the woman was actually an employee of the Jutranjka, a state textile factory, where she printed fabrics. The two deny other lies: she declared that she arrived first in The Look of the Year competition, and on her website she claims to have graduated in Architecture and Design at the University of Ljubljana, which she left in the first year.
Melania has the same majesty as her husband, if not more. Most aspiring First Ladies want people so much to please that they border on the absurd - addressing a black audience, Teresa Heinz Kerry called herself an "African American" - but she prefers to appear as an aspirational model. Not only does she avoid joking about her husband, but she takes herself very seriously. The least American thing about Melania is this. He does not try to win over others by laughing at himself. She proudly flaunts the 25-carat diamond (a gift from Trump for the 10th anniversary), her formal lifestyle ("He's not a kid running around in a suit," he said of his son Barron), his many homes ("Bye bye! I'm going to my #campagna residence ").
In 2011, when Donald joined those who challenged Barack Obama's Americanness, she appeared on the Joy Behar Show: Behar: "What is this obsession with the birth certificate? When did you meet, did you also ask her? ". Melania: "Well, I had to show mine anyway, because if you want to become an American citizen, you need a birth certificate. I have a Slovenian. Do you want to see President Obama's birth certificate or not? '
Behar: "I've seen it."
Melania: "That's not a birth certificate."
Behar: It's a live birth certificate, which is what they issue in Hawaii. If her husband were right, no Hawaiian could ever run for president. '
Melania: «However, it would all be much simpler if President Obama just showed it. It's not just Donald who wants to see it. It's the American people! "
And the fact that you still have a Slovenian accent, and that even your bilingual son Barron had it for a while, doesn't stop Trump from making fun of Jeb Bush who "speaks Mexican", the language of his country of origin. of his wife Columba, thus cleverly associated with illegal immigrants. It takes guts to make "la Melania", as the program called it. Can you imagine, even for a moment, the self-confidence it takes to be the First Lady of the United States? In private, according to many, Melania is a pleasant person.
In her book The Fortune Hunters: Dazzling Women and the Men they Married, Charlotte Hays reports comments that she is "too kind for New York." We must therefore conclude that this detached image of him is intentional. Sometimes it even seems to make fun of American parents who work. "I don't have a nanny," she told Harper's Bazaar. “I have a chef, I have my assistant and that's it. I do it myself "(" There is a girl who takes care of Barron, "Donald admitted to the Post).
The ostensibly non-egalitarian Trump marriage - where male dominance catches the eye as much as the Louis XIV furniture in their attic - can also be interpreted as a marketing tool. It is the announcement of the rescue to the males who feel mistreated. "I don't deal with them directly," Donald said, speaking of the children. “I'll put the money in, then it's up to you. It's not like I'm picking them up and taking them to Central Park now. ' In corporate terms, it is a limited liability company, where Donald is the managing partner. His vision of women corresponds to his vision of the world: no reciprocity. A one way flight.
