Understanding Melania Trump: 'Everyone knows her – but nobody does'
Mary Jordan, the author of a new biography, says the first couple have an unorthodox relationship – but one that works
Are Donald and Melania Trump in love? Or in a marriage of convenience? “Love is complicated,” says Mary Jordan, author of a new biography of the US first lady, “and Trump love is ultra-complicated”.
Jordan, who interviewed scores of White House staff, housekeepers and others who see America’s first couple up close, says they sleep in separate bedrooms in their many homes. “I don’t know any couple that spends as much time apart. They are often in the same building, but nowhere near each other. She rarely goes into the West Wing. She doesn’t like to golf. She has her own little spa. She likes to be isolated. She is a loner. He is a loner. They’re perfectly happy to be separated.”
But it is not quite so simple as a picture of two lives lived apart.
Jordan added: “And yet, she’s the first call he makes after a speech or a rally, because he trusts her – he doesn’t trust many people – and she watches on TV. So they have a very unusual relationship, but there is a bond there: they have a deal, right from the beginning. He loves himself, he loves his job, he’s got his own life and he spends a lot of time apart from her. And she’s absolutely fine with that.”
As unorthodox marriages go – living separate lives but joined at the hip at some deeper level – it might rank with Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt, but the comparison probably ends there. Melania Knauss, a Slovenian model, is only the second foreign-born first lady in US history and, despite 21st century mass media, is among the most elusive and sphinx-like.
Jordan, a Washington Post reporter who won a Pulitzer prize in 2003, conducted more than a hundred interviews for The Art of Her Deal: The Untold Story of Melania Trump. She paints a portrait of a woman more knowing and in control than popularly perceived. For example, Jordan writes, Melania delayed coming to the White House after Trump won the 2016 election because she was renegotiating their prenuptial agreement.
She is also more like Trump than many assume. She backed his “birther” conspiracy theory about Barack Obama and objected to friends joking about her husband’s penis size: “Don’t say this – he’s a real man.” By the end of the 286 pages of Jordan’s book, the social media hashtag “#FreeMelania” rings somewhat hollow.
Jordan has been on the Melania trail for five years and found it unusually hard to stand up even rudimentary facts.
Melania’s inner circle is small, her former staff sign non-disclosure agreements, and old acquaintances in Europe were discouraged from speaking. “In three decades as a correspondent working all over the world, I have often written about the reluctant and the reclusive, including the head of a Mexican drug cartel and a Japanese princess, but nothing compared to trying to understand Melania,” Jordan writes in the book.
She adds in a phone interview: “She was always in the news, one of the most recognized faces around the world, and I couldn’t find basic information about her. A photographer said to me, ‘She’s like a ghost. Everyone knows her but nobody does.’ .”
Jordan travelled to Slovenia, where Melania grew up, and to Austria, France and Italy, where she worked before moving to America in 1996. “She had a pretty modest upbringing, and when she arrived in New York she was around all these extremely rich people, and it was, a friend said, like she had just taken a big old eraser and there was nothing before.”
Melania met Trump in Manhattan in 1998. What did she see in him? It is tempting to recall the British comedy character Mrs Merton’s 1995 question to the magician’s wife Debbie McGee: “So, what first attracted you to the millionaire Paul Daniels?”
But Jordan observes: “Donald Trump was a different person in the 1990s. There were actually quite a lot of women who were after him. He wasn’t in politics. He was charming and fun, not the divisive, polarizing person we know now, and if you were a model, they said he was so much better than the other older rich guys following around models.”
This group of rich men were known as “the modelisers”, Jordan continues. “This was the age of the supermodel, and if you had money, you hung around, went to parties with all these people. Trump didn’t drink, didn’t do drugs and didn’t demand much. He just wanted a gorgeous woman in the photo so that he could be in the paper, and then he would go literally back to work.”
Trump and Melania married in Palm Beach, Florida, in 2005, surrounded by 10,000 flowers, plenty of gold and guests including journalists Katie Couric and Chris Matthews, Jeff Zucker, a future foe as president of CNN, and Bill and Hillary Clinton.
Fast forward a decade or so and Trump – encouraged by Melania to run for president, political consultant Roger Stone tells Jordan – defeated Clinton at the polls. In his book Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House, Michael Wolff reported that Melania had been assured by her husband that he would not become president and, come election night, “was in tears – and not of joy”.
Not so, according to Jordan. “No one has seen Melania cry about anything,” she says. “They’re both very, very hyper aware of image and appearance. Neither of them, but especially Melania, shows emotion in public. She’s not one to show her anger or her temper or yell.”
When Trump offends his wife, he can expect to be met with icy indifference. “The way she shows that she’s upset with Trump is to walk away, to be invisible, and he doesn’t like that. He likes the very good-looking younger wife at his side. So she cancelled going to Davos, for instance, in the first year, very abruptly. She didn’t get in the car with him to go to the State of the Union, a 10-minute car ride, after there were lengthy reports about infidelities with Stormy Daniels and Karen McDougal.”
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A source of potential friction is Trump’s daughter from a previous marriage, Ivanka Trump. The book discloses that Ivanka tried to get her father to rename the “First Lady’s Office” the “First Family Office” but Melania vetoed the move.
Jordan says: “Ivanka has called Melania ‘the portrait’ because he says that her stepmother talks about as much as a painting on the wall. Melania has been heard calling Ivanka ‘the princess’ because she thinks she is royalty. Stepdaughter-mother relationships probably are hard in any case, but these two women are not that far apart in age.
“They were both former models. They both could not have come up more differently. At 14 years old, when Ivanka started modelling, she was already getting in the headlines. At 16, she was on the cover of a magazine. Melania was 26 when she arrived in America, she was already considered old and nobody knew who Melania Knauss was. Melania really had to work hard in her modelling career, and Ivanka did not. It changes, but they’ve had a pretty tense relationship.”
Ivanka is not alone in exercising a political influence over the president that few officials do, Jordan found. Melania helped persuade Trump to pick Mike Pence, rather than Chris Christie or Newt Gingrich, as his vice presidential candidate. Jordan says: “Melania reads a lot. She’s hyper aware. She’ll be the one that will put a political article in front of Trump and say: look at this.”
Being the first lady is a position that she has come to embrace, and she has her eye on four more years – not least because it would allow the couple’s only child together, Barron, to remain in school near Washington. Jordan says: “She is ambitious. She’s a survivor. She’s a fighter. She likes to win.
“They’ve had had their ups and downs, for sure – she was furious about the affairs – but several people that I spoke with said there was kind of a bunker mentality during impeachment; she felt that they were going after her. Her last name is Trump. It would be a vindication of Trump if he wins in November.”
