Melania Trump, a first lady "against the tide"
For two hours every night during the Republican convention, the pandemic had almost seemed to be a thing of the past. Only First Lady Melania Trump had recalled that the United States mourns over 180,000 deaths from Covid and that the pandemic is far from over. All while she spoke in front of an audience of about 70 people, most without masks and without having swabs before entering the Rose Garden of the White House. The first lady's speech definitely emerged as the most empathic of the convention, but for many it was not enough to bridge the distance and coldness that have characterized her behavior in these four years.
Melanija Knavs was born in 1970 in Novo Mesto and grew up in Sevnica, two small towns in Slovenia, in the then Yugoslavia. Her father sold cars while her mother was a pattern maker in a children's clothing factory. From a very young age, Melania is her model; she likes her doing it and she knows this is what she wants to do when she grows up. She begins to study design and architecture in Ljubljana but she drops out after the first year. In the meantime she is in fact taking off her modeling career, between Milan, Paris and New York. In 1998, at a party in Manhattan, Melania meets her future husband, Donald Trump, who will say he was immediately struck by her beauty.
After some initial resistance, Trump's courtships are successful: the two get together and in 2005 they get married. The following year their first and only child, Barron (Donald Trump has three children from a previous marriage), is born. Meanwhile, in 2001 Melania obtained the green card and five years later the American citizenship, in a legal way, as she likes to remember when she defends her husband's hard fist against irregular immigration (even if someone mentions possible recommendations "from above" that have facilitated the process).
Despite being first lady for four years now, Melania Trump remains an enigmatic character. The images of her upset and silent next to her husband and who seems to refuse to give him her hand have made the rounds of social media, where the hashtag #freemelania, "free Melania", started. But for those who know her well, Melania is certainly not a person who needs to be "liberated" and she is indeed a confident woman who knows what she wants. In some ways, the first lady - the first to not grow up speaking English - resembles her husband: in particular, she made headlines when, in 2011, she joined Trump in demanding that Barack Obama show his birth certificate to prove. to be American. The occasions in which she has contradicted her husband are few:
famously the one in which she criticized the choice of separating migrant children from parents intercepted at the border and the one in which she pushed for the use of the mask against the coronavirus. In the four years of her mandate, Melania did not break into the hearts of the Americans from whom she, on the contrary, she has collected a good dose of criticism. The first lady was accused of copying her convention speech four years ago from Michelle Obama's speech at the 2008 Democratic convention. In June 2018, her visit to a detention center for migrant children caused a sensation. he wore a green jacket with “I really don't care, do you?” written on the back. She explained that it was a message for the "left media" criticizing her.
She recently came in the crosshairs of journalists, after a former friend of hers and a collaborator revealed that the first lady almost never used her official White House email, but also dealt with government issues by sending and receiving emails from an account. private. An issue destined to create many embarrassments for the president who, for the same accusation, launched a violent offensive against Hillary Clinton, going so far as to ask for the prison for the former Secretary of State, speaking of a scandal "worse than Watergate".
