DEMOCRATIC GUESTS, THE MANSION FOREVER AND A 26 KILOS (WEIGHT) DRESS: THE WEDDING OF DONALD AND MELANIA TRUMP
About to validate (or not) their stay in the White House, we review the lights and shadows of the most extravagant marriage that has ever inhabited it.
At the time, the wedding of Donald Trump and Melania Knauss on January 22, 2005 was an event that belonged to the world of show business, high finance or cross-sectional celebrities. Proof that you should never take anything for granted is that in just over a decade, that couple would end up acquiring deep political significance, becoming one of the most powerful and influential people in the world. Private and public life were more intertwined than ever, showing that neither was fully understood without the other.
As always when it came to Donald Trump, the wedding was a show of power. Starting with the setting: Mar-a-Lago, the luxurious Palm Beach property built in the 1920s by Marjorie Merriweather Post and acquired by him in '85. A mixture of palace, resort and golf club of the highest order in which Trump's private mansion occupied 58 bedrooms, 33 bathrooms and dozens of rooms in Mudejar, Neo-Gothic or Rococo style filled with antiques, chandeliers and covered coffered ceilings of gold leaf. In such a setting gathered a guest list of bells, the living demonstration of the groom's influence. There were entertainment personalities like Anna Wintour, Bruce Willis, Simon Cowell, Heidi Klum, Shaquille O'Neal, Tony Bennett, P. Diddy or Billy Joel, who performed at the party. Also in attendance were journalists and press moguls of fame Katie Couric, Mort Zuckerman, Chris Matthews, Barbara Walters, Matt Lauer or Kelly Ripa; politicians like Rudy Giuliani and the Clintons were not lacking. Proof of how small the world is - or certain worlds are - is that against Hillary Trump would end up competing in elections more than a decade later, with the result that we all know.
Another of the highlights of the day was the wedding dress, a strapless model in off-white satin full of pleats and ruffles designed by John Galliano for Dior. "The dress of the year", Vogue named it on its cover (in Spain, Hello! It exclusively published the photos of the link). The numbers associated with it were as grand as those of the rest of the event: over 550 hours of making 1,500 diamonds and pearls were sewn to a fabric with a final result of 23 kilos in weight. For the party, the John Galliano was replaced by a lighter but almost as spectacular Vera Wang.
In a way, the bride that was inside the dress was also another status symbol: Melania Knauss, a beautiful model 24 years younger, complacent and with a highly publicized lack of demands on both sides. A wife whose features and body were literally a model for the rest of humanity and a character that made him demand nothing of her husband. She did not give problems, did not argue or demand anything. "I am not a nagging wife," she would declare herself. The dream of a certain type of masculinity come true.
Melania was born under another name in a country that no longer exists. Melanija Knavs is still today the most illustrious daughter of Novo Mesto, a large town in present-day Slovenia, then Yugoslavia. As a young woman, Melanija moved to Ljubljana to study architecture and design at university, but her stature and attractiveness had already led her to a more lucrative - even by communist standards - modeling career. In Milan in 1995, she met the businessman and founder of a modeling agency Paolo Zampolli, who offered to get her a visa to work in the United States. She accepted, and in 96 Melania - already with her westernized name of hers - landed in an apartment in New York's Zeckendorf Towers. According to her roommate, photographer Matthew Atanian, to Vanity Fair, the young woman did not follow the usual crazy lifestyle of twenty-somethings in the capital of the world. She only went out to dinner in the company of older men and came home very early, and this was not usual either. She was not a party girl or scandal; it focused on her job that took her to travel to exotic destinations very frequently. When she was at home she would demonstrate her discipline by using “ankle weights to walk around the apartment and common areas,” and, in what seems like a gag about the usual response from models when asked about their beauty secrets, “ I strictly ate five to seven vegetables and fruits every day and drank plenty of water. What she wanted was to earn money as a model ”.
Melania's fate changed forever when she met Donald Trump at a party organized by Zampolli at the Kit Kat Club, during fashion week in September 98. The famous mogul was accompanied by another woman, the Norwegian millionaire Celina Midelfart, But Melania was impressed, and as soon as Celina retired to the bathroom, Trump approached the then 28-year-old model to ask for her phone number. "He wanted my number, but I was on a date, so, of course, I did not give it to him," Melania said in an interview with Harpers Bazaar. "I told him: 'I'm not going to give you my number; give me yours and I'll call you ”. I wanted to see what kind of phone he gave me; if it was a business number, what did that mean? I'm not going to do business with you. " He gave her all her possible numbers, the one for her office, the one for Mar-a-lago's house, the one in New York ... After a work trip to the Caribbean, Melania decided to to call him. On her first date they went to dinner and to the Moomba club, then the epitome of the most VIP New York night, frequented by celebrities like Leonardo DiCaprio and Madonna. As Melania would say, she was immediately captivated by the overflowing energy and confidence that emanated from Trump. His roommate Atanian and his friends didn't see him that way. They laughed at her with comments along the lines of “Oh, it's little hands you like, not money, right? Curtain hair, so attractive… ”. Melania asked them to stop and she repeated: "He is a real man."
The "real man" did not hesitate to boast of his new conquest with his friends and publicly. In a telephone interview with the controversial journalist Howard Stern in 99, the first thing the announcer said to Melania was "You are so hot", and then asked what she was wearing. "Almost nothing," she replied. The conversation continued with sexual innuendo in the style of “Do you have a good night every night?” “Even more” was Melania's response. Stern then commented that she had a lot of chest to be a model and asked if she stole money from Trump's wallet. It was one of those recognizable situations in which certain types of men, "always jokingly", laugh and make offensive jokes at the expense of a woman to her face, and she must, due to the inertia of the situation, follow the joke or even up the ante if you don't want to come off as bitter or lacking in a sense of humor. When Melania passed the phone to her partner, Trump claimed that yes, she was naked in bed at the time. "I just took off my pants," laughed Stern.
Melania Knauss' modeling career obviously benefited from her affair with a man of Trump's influence. Before, she had not lacked work, but she was far from being a top model. She had plenty of it, according to the opinion of people who worked with her, hieratic and rigid, and she lacked naturalness. In 97 she had posed nude in photos that would only echo years later, but she was not a famous person at all. Thanks to her relationship with Trump, in 2000 she appeared in headlines such as GQ, posing in a session that the officials themselves described as kitsch in the Boeing 727 loaned by Trump for the occasion. She was also featured in the famous Sports Illustrated swimsuit special. That same year, 2000, Trump and she broke up for a few months, but ended up returning in a relationship that many defined as unequal, but perfect for both. "Melania was an advertisement for her virility that at the same time gave him her space", wrote Evgenia Peretz in Vanity Fair. "For her part, Melania got a luxurious home where she could enjoy her hobbies - doing Pilates and reading fashion magazines, according to People - in peace, and the promise that she would never have to go back to the dull prospects of Eastern Europe." Finally, in April 2004, he proposed to her with an appropriate one and a half million dollar ring. Melania accepted. How was she going to say no to Trump?
"Samantha, a Cosmopolitan and Donald Trump: you can not get anything more New York than that," said the voice of Carrie Bradshaw in an episode of Sex in New York shot at the time when Donald and Melania began their romance. In effect, the excessive, egotistical and uber-famous millionaire that was Trump had become one of the New York symbols par excellence thanks to his real estate investments capable of changing the panorama of the city. Thanks to the first and most successful of his, he had managed to transform the family fortune born in Queens into Manhattan money, that is, approved by the people who mattered. But Trump was not just a businessman with more or less talent for business; he was, in essence, a pop culture character, and he had achieved that by grace and grace of his marriages, especially the first, the one that united him with Ivana Trump in one of the first power couples in the entertainment industry contemporary.
Like Melania, Ivana came from an Eastern European country, Czechoslovakia, but due to their age difference, she had suffered the rigors of a childhood and adolescence in the Soviet bloc much more than Melanija Knavs would suffer. And her way of fleeing into the arms of capitalism was more complicated than starting to work as a model. Like many girls with a talent for sport, hard training at a high-performance center became both a bondage and a salvation for a highly gifted ski Ivana Zelníčková. At the age of 14, she was sent to an elite camp in Italy, where it would be her first contact with the capitalist system, and although her routine was reduced to skiing, eating and sleeping, she had the opportunity to be dazzled when visiting Vienna, which was alone. two hours from home but it was literally another world. "At the market, I saw a strawberry for the first time in February," she would write in her memoir Raising Trump. “I couldn't believe it. Did people have fresh fruit in winter? Were they available to everyone? I had no idea that such abundance could exist. For me, luxury was salt. Having veal once a month was outrageous. But there were cakes and champagne, shiny cars and fur coats. Life on the other side was much better. That day I swore to myself that I would live it. Of course, she would make up for the austerity of her childhood in spades.
Ivana's trajectory goes through several confusing data because, for a long time, both she and Donald disguised reality before the public. The version that they maintained at the beginning, in interviews and in Donald's own books, was that she Ivana acted as a substitute for the Czech Olympic ski team during the 1972 Winter Olympics in Sapporo, Japan. However, an article in Spy magazine from the year 89 denied the fact: according to the Czech Olympic Committee, no Ivana had been part of their teams at that time. Something similar happens with the following part of the official account that they provided at that time: it is assumed that after that transformative experience in the West, she Ivana moved to Canada where she became a successful model. The reality was a bit more complicated: according to her own confession years later in her memoirs, she fell in love with fellow skier George Syrovatka, who was studying at the same university in Prague as her and had managed to move to Canada. If Ivana fled from Czechoslovakia as George had done, she would not be able to see her family again, so they devised a plan typical of their time: they convinced their mutual friend the Austrian skier Alfred Winklmayr to marry Ivana and she would obtain this an Austrian passport legally. Alfred "Fred" and Ivana were married in '72, in which it was a rigged marriage that was hidden from public opinion for years. So yes, Ivana ended up in Canada and started living with her partner, George. She worked as a ski instructor and as a model, in what for a time would sell as a successful career and actually boiled down to more of second-tier jobs as a hypermarket model. Her relationship with George was still maintained when in 76 she Ivana met Donald Trump during a trip to New York to promote the Montreal Olympics.
In the 70s, Donald had settled in Manhattan with the intention of conquering the island, and he had achieved it thanks to his testosteronic and ambitious way of doing real estate business and to having started backed with the already more than buoyant fortune of his father. He also liked the social life, sought fame, dated different women and boasted of doing it. With an agenda and contacts so close to the circles of power, it is not surprising that some of them were or ended up being famous. In fact, in the 1960s he had dated Candice Bergen when she was starting her course at the University of Pennsylvania (which he would attend for a time). He went to pick her up "dressed in a burgundy three-piece suit, burgundy leather boots and a burgundy limousine," the actress described. “I got home very early. There was no physical contact between us. He was attractive, a very handsome boy and an idiot.
The impression of Ivana recorded in her memoirs differs from that of the future Murphy Brown: “He was the first American man I dated, and I was surprised by how shy and respectful he was compared to Europeans, who went after what they were interested in. before the appetizers arrived on the table. Donald was aggressive about only one thing: getting my phone number. " However, in an interview with Oprah Winfrey, Ivana would say that she was not attracted to him at first, but she detected that she had "great potential". His relationship with George fell by the wayside and only 9 months after meeting, on April 9, 1977, Donald and Ivana were married in a discreet ceremony. Their first child, Donald Junior, was born on December 31 of that year, and he would be followed by Ivanka and Eric. The Trumps became one of Manhattan's celebrity couples. The same thing came out of Studio 54 who managed his real estate investments as a tandem. His exact position in business was complex, a mix of decorator, consultant and manager who was just as famous as he. "Donald says I'm her female twin," she declared, cultivating her image of a blonde lady with a mind for business and a body for sin, in the style of the business women of Woman Arms. In '88, Donald put Ivana in charge of the Plaza Hotel. Her salary was "a dollar a year and all the dresses she can buy." As Eva Güimil said, "Donald and Ivana turned the Trump brand into a two-headed hydra that has laminated New York with gold sconces and reddish marble and has defined the excess of the eighties better than any singularity." They were Dynasty and games like Monopoly or Hotel in real life, perched on their Trump Tower triplex, built in part by undocumented Polish workers who had been paid $ 4 an hour, a move that ended up condemning Donald in the Judged to pay a million dollars. In the late 1980s, the marriage seemed to break down. Some declared that they did not behave like a royal couple but "like ambassadors from two different countries with separate agendas." An open secret began to spread through the lies of New York high society: the New York Post reported in 1988 that a "well-formed blonde went through the shops of Trump Tower saying" Take it from Donald. It was about Marla Maples, "the Georgia peach", an actress / model and a southern beauty awarded with titles like Miss Hangover Beach Poster Girl. Later it was said that they had started her relationship in 87, although they tried to keep her in hiding through tactics such as having Marla always be accompanied by a bearded man in the acts in which she appeared with Trump. The situation was more complicated than having an official wife and a semi-official mistress. Other women, such as Catherine Oxenberg, and even personal friends of Ivana married to other millionaires whom she had seen on the deck of the Princess yacht while Ivana was not present, also roamed the mogul's orbit. It is true that it was enough to appear in a photo next to Trump to speculate on the nature of the link; It was even said that he had a relationship for a month with Argentine tennis player Gabriela Sabatini, then 19 years old. Some malicious tongues rumored that Ivana had had a lift and a breast lift to look like and compete with Catherine. As if she were the only competition.
One of the darkest episodes of the Trump-Ivana union dates from the year 89. She went on to say that during a fight in those tense days at the end of her marriage, he had raped her. It happened after he underwent a hair graft with a doctor she had recommended, an intervention that did not go well. Donald felt a lot of pain in her scalp and, when Ivana laughed at him, he reacted by attacking her violently, tearing her clothes and pulling a lock of her hair. Her “Then she put his penis inside her for the first time in more than 16 months. Ivana was terrified ... It's a violent assault, ”wrote Harry Hurt III in his book Lost Tycoon: The Many Lives of Donald J. Trump. "According to the version that she repeats to some of her closest confidants," he raped me. " In 1993 Ivana modified her account by qualifying: “On one occasion during 1989, Mr. Trump and I had marital relationships in which he behaved very differently towards me than he did during our marriage. As a woman I felt violated, because the love and tenderness that he normally showed me were absent. I referred to this as rape, but I don't want my words to be interpreted literally or criminally. "
In any case, it was clear that the situation was untenable, and it was blown up during the Christmas of 1989, which the Trumps spent as usual in Aspen with their children. Marla Maples was also at the winter retreat, invited all expenses paid by her mistress. And they did not take long to coincide. As we left the Bonnie’s restaurant, the following scene occurred: Ivana approached Marla and blurted out “Bitch, leave my husband alone”. Added to this was the fact that Ivana was unable to pronounce Marla's name correctly or had been mispronounced, and referred to her as “Moola.” According to other even more juicy versions of the confrontation, Trump, who was putting his skis on At that moment, he heard the discussion and decided to flee through peteneras, sliding down the mountain. He certainly forgot the small detail that his still wife had been an Olympic skier. to Donald and then back skiing down the slopes, wagging his finger in his face, ”People reported.To top off the picture, both Marla and Ivana were said to face off dressed in identical ski gear, both gifts from Donald.
The official break came immediately, in January 1990. Ivana declared things like “I'm afraid. I know the kids and I will be Donald's next project. I know what he is like. He'll just focus on us, "and Donald Jr., then 12, was reported to have said to his father," You don't love us. You don't even want yourself. You only love your money! " In the complicated divorce process, which lasted two years, Ivana ended up obtaining 25 million in cash, the Connecticut mansion, a millionaire alimony for her children and the availability of Mar-a-Lago for one month a year. The sympathies of American high society were also with her: her husband had abandoned her for a younger and supposedly more attractive woman, and had turned his position as a victim, focusing his career on successful businesses that exploited his already established personal brand . Not in vain in her cameo in the movie The Club of the First Wives, she released a message that became the slogan of the film: "You have to be strong and independent," she said. "And remember: Don't be angry, keep it all." Despite the bloody separation, when Ivana's father died, Donald accompanied her to Czechoslovakia for her funerals, and they ended up on relatively good terms as proud parents of her children protecting a public image that benefits them both. Despite marrying twice more, with Riccardo Mazzucchelli and Rossano Rubicondi, she, Ivana, kept the last name of her first husband, although she declared very proud to be “Ivana to dry. Like Cher or Madonna, I don't need a last name ”.
Meanwhile, Marla's relationship with Donald, which had lasted for years, had not been fully consolidated, although he liked to show off that young blonde beauty queen, displaying her like a trophy. In fact, he tried to pressure her into posing nude for Playboy, negotiating the rate himself, in a deal that ultimately fell through. Trump seemed to have taken a liking to the idea of women fighting for his attention, so he did not hesitate to feed that fame to promote himself through a tactic, at best, bizarre. According to David Cay Johnston in his book How Donald Trump Was Made, in June 1991 the NBC Today show reported that Trump had just left Marla Maples for Carla Bruni. Several newspapers took up the issue and a People reporter called Trump's office for information. Within minutes she was called by a certain John Miller, who claimed to be Donald Trump's PR. He claimed that the mogul could not speak in person because he was so busy, “they call him beautiful and important women non-stop”, and dropped the names of Madonna, Kim Basinger and Carla Bruni. John Miller explained that his boss had not left Ivana for Marla, but that he was "going to leave anyway and Marla was there." He confirmed Carla Bruni's story and commented that she had left Eric Clapton for Mick Jagger, and later, the singer "for Donald." And he explained his sentimental situation like this: “He is living with Marla and he has three other girlfriends. When he makes up his mind, he will be a very lucky man. In competitive terms, he is tough. He was for Marla and he will be for Carla ”. When the People reporter contacted Marla to verify the situation, she replied “I am shocked and devastated. I have felt betrayed to the fullest ", but she denied believing any relationship of the still official partner of hers with Carla Bruni:" I think everything is being invented to carve out a playboy image. Bruni herself would later say that Trump had called her a few days before, and that she, telling him that her sister Valeria Bruni Tedeschi was going to visit her in New York, he offered her a free room at the Plaza Hotel, something that she I agree. She denied any kind of relationship with him, calling him "the king of vulgarity." When the People article was published, it was revealed that public relations John Miller was actually Donald Trump faking a false identity to spill false information about himself. He ended up recognizing it to the journalist. But when Carla became Sarkozy's wife in 2008, Trump brought up the rumor again in an interview with Howard Stern. He defined Carla as a woman not as attractive as she seemed, "with very little breast" and dropped that he could not be more specific about her relationship because she wanted to be on good terms with France. "Trump is a lunatic," Carla stressed.
For Marla and Donald to get married, their daughter Tiffany had to be born (when the baby was not even a year old, Trump was making jokes in public about what her future bra size would be). Two months after the arrival of the little girl, in December 1993 the couple were getting married at the Plaza Hotel before 1,100 guests. Many predicted that the couple would have a fleeting life, and it is true that they did not last long. It was said that Trump had caught his wife red-handed with one of his bodyguards, and he was still married to Marla when she was seen in the company of models like Kylie Bax, Allison Giannini or Rowanne Brewer Lane. The official divorce came in 99, when he already knew Melania, and shortly before the prenuptial agreement expired which specified that Marla could only access two million dollars in the event of a breakup. Trump took care of Tiffany's expenses and education, although she did not have a very close relationship since she moved to live with her mother in California (Trump himself would admit that Donald Jr. and Ivanka tried to remove Tiffany from her will. ). Marla had a low-intensity career in show business, with cameos in movies, appearances on television shows, and a participation in the reality show Dancing with the Stars (Ivana stated that she had been contacted first and only called Marla after your refusal). In recent years she has oriented her interests towards meditation and spiritual life.
With Melania already present in his life, Trump was seen with other women, such as Kara Young, but in the end the mogul, even more popular thanks to the television show The Apprentice, decided to marry the Slovenian model. To avoid having too much relationship with his new in-laws, Melania's parents ended up living in New York, and when Barron was born a year after the wedding, they took it upon themselves to take care of him as well as his daughter. In fact, the little boy spoke English with a bit of an accent, as Slovenian was his mother tongue. At first Trump did not seem very happy with the arrival of this new child, and it was said that he had demanded that Melania regain her physical form as quickly as possible after the pregnancy. Along the same lines, he joked with Howard Stern assuring him that if Melania suffered a horrible accident that disfigured her, he would continue to love her ... as long as her breasts remained intact. That was the way it stood, with unspeakable photo shoots like the one in which the new Trumps posed on Trump Tower, with Barron on a giant stuffed lion and a helicopter peering out of a window in a demonstration of wealth that exceeded considerations of wealth. good or bad taste, when Donald decided to run for president of the United States for the Republican party. Already in the 1980s, Ronald Reagan had sent him a letter inviting him to be president, and his former Ivana assured that he might have campaigned for the presidency in 1992, “if the scandal (of their separation) had not had place".
Compared to the hyperactive Ivana, Melania had shown few signs of having personal interests beyond the upbringing of little Barron and her closest family circle. She had started a jewelry project and collaborations with manufacturers of cosmetic creams that did not have a long life. When it came time to campaign, she kept quiet in the background, facing the overwhelming presence of, for example, then-first lady Michelle Obama. "I choose not to do politics in public because that is my husband's job," she assured. “I am very political in private life, and between my husband and I I know everything that is happening. I follow him from A to Z. But I chose not to be in the campaign. I chose it. I have my own criteria. I am my own person, and I think my husband likes that about me. However, her husband did use it, even passively, as a tool through his usual means of communication, Twitter, posting a photo of Melania next to one of Heidi Cruz, the wife of his opponent in the Republican primaries Ted Cruz , with the text: “a picture is worth a thousand words”.
For a number of factors that historians will debate for a long time, the unimaginable happened and Trump was first elected Republican candidate and then defeated Hillary Clinton in the 2016 election, becoming president of the United States. Michael Wolff tells in his book Fire and Fury that when the results of the elections came to light Melania cried, not with joy, precisely. From the beginning, it was clear that things were not going to be done in the orthodox way there and that the presidential couple was going to be just one more manifestation of this. Melania took five months to move into the White House; She preferred to remain in New York, arguing that Barron had to finish the course, but according to Mary Jordan's biography, what Melania wanted was to renegotiate her marriage contract to favor Barron in the future inheritance, who felt that she was not on the same footing as the three oldest children of her husband.
Once at the official residence, Melania and Donald settled with separate agendas (the most common) and in different areas of the huge building, with the exception that Melania's agenda took longer than usual to build. There was speculation about what "cause" the new first lady would find, because it seemed that many thought that, simply, there was nothing that interested her. Her wardrobe choices, in the case of a former model and a woman with, yes, great interest in fashion, became the main topic of conversation about Melania Trump. That rigidity that according to her roommate had made it difficult for her to become a great model appeared again in the role of her first lady. She always looked as flawless as she was inscrutable and robotic. Most of the time, she was silent, not giving statements or showing a hint of naturalness or truth. It is not surprising that with such a lack of tangible elements to comment on beyond her static hairstyle and her colorful dresses, the public ended up creating bizarre theories about her.
An example of the strange and dizzying times we live in is that there is speculation about whether the first lady of the United States lives “kidnapped” and tries to send messages (like Britney Spears) through her gestures or her clothes. Throughout these years we have witnessed rumors about a false Melania, a doppelganger (as in her day they spoke of doubles for Franco or other dictators) who emulates her in public appearances. Since the appointment in January 2017 we have become familiar with hashtags such as #SaveMelania, #SadMelania and Free Melania (Candice Bergen even appeared in a hoodie with this slogan). There has also been much talk of a silent war between Ivanka and Melania, as the president's daughter seemed more willing and better prepared to act as first lady, and even authors such as Michael Wolff claimed that she and her husband Jared Kushner had reached an agreement for which Ivanka would one day run for president.
Of course, the rumors about the president's infidelity and inappropriate or criminal behavior have not stopped. In addition to the Stormy Daniels scandal (who claimed to have had a brief affair with Trump in 2006), People reporter Natasha Stoynoff said that in 2005, in Mar-a-lago, Trump had pounced on her, kissing her, as Melania left the room. Contestants of Miss Universe and Miss United States, and participants of The Apprentice, have declared the same, already after marrying Melania. About this, she made ambiguous statements like "I know who I married" or "It's all politics."
Underlying Free Melania is the idea that she is a victim in the arms of a villain. Few seem to expect anything from Trump, and the level of successive scandals is such that it seems that none of them ever unleash serious consequences because some cover up others. That his wife remains by the side of a man famous for his sexism, his misogyny, his contempt for women belonging to another era but still very much alive today, famous for "grab them by the pussy", could only be explained in terms of what She feels trapped and remains in that marriage for the sake of her son, a prisoner of her education, her circumstances, and her life. However, there is a more pragmatic version of the first lady and her marriage. She is the one who presents a person much less innocent and a victim of what some want to believe, who encourages the same value system that her husband defends. A person who manifests himself almost exclusively through his wardrobe, and that is why he wears a pith helmet, a colonial garment loaded with meaning, during a trip to Egypt or covers a Zara jacket with all the intention with the message “Really I don't care, do you? ", while visiting the border between Mexico and the United States in full controversy over the separation of families with minor children in detention centers. Books by former collaborators of the presidential couple, some as compromising as that of Stephanie Winston Wolkoff, a former advisor and friend of Melania, feed this story. In her work, Wolkoff assures about the recurring fantasy in part of the public of Ivanka and Melania being able to positively influence Trump or even flee from her side: “These women were never heroines trying to free themselves. Melania is not cloistered by the mud, she is rather rolling in it. Melania told me in her own way that she was not part of the solution, she was part of the problem. Not talking and not fighting the problem is part of the problem ”.
