Melania Trump, the ice queen
The first lady of the United States drags a sullen image of an unhappy wife. Reserved, secretive, 50-year-old Melania Trump is way smarter than you think, suggests an unauthorized biography that has just been published.
Poor Melania. Decked out with a rude and insufferable husband, as shown by her refusal to give her a hand in public. As soon as Donald Trump was inaugurated on January 20, 2017, Internet users had their fill of the image, broadcast by cameras around the world, of the sparkling smile it gave him before instantly darkening.
In the process, the hashtag #freemelania ("free Melania") flourished on Twitter as on t-shirts. A story that many love to tell themselves, so unimaginable that anyone could bring himself to have the current president as a life partner. And now appears "The Art of Her Deal: The Untold Story of Melania Trump". A seasoned political journalist for the Washington Post, Mary Jordan challenges this reductive, if not sexist, vision. Melania does not need to be released, delivered from her realm of loneliness.
The title of the book is a pun on the bestseller "The Art of the Deal" (The Art of Negotiation, Ed. Archipode), which established Trump's reputation in the late 1990s by rogue businessman. According to Mary Jordan, who investigated for five years, Melania is far more influential than it looks.
The first months of 2017, to everyone's surprise, she stayed in New York. Officially for her son Barron, now 14, to finish the year at his private school on the Upper West Side. Behind the scenes, she renegotiates her marriage contract step by step. The White House, okay, but only under certain conditions will it leave the glitzy Trump Tower penthouse.
What Melania got was, among other things, a financial guarantee for her son, securing him the same shares in the Trump Organization empire as her older half-brothers and half-sisters, Donald Jr., Ivanka and Eric. Ivana Trump’s children are heavily involved in their father’s real estate and political affairs; Ivanka and her husband Jared Kushner have become essential advisers in the White House. Relations between Donald's eldest daughter - he has another daughter, Tiffany, from his second marriage - and Melania, who is also said to have been guaranteed more money in the event of a divorce, would be freezing. The darling daughter, so ambitious that some see her already becoming president in her turn, annoys her mother-in-law, who nicknames her "the princess". When she was younger, Ivanka would give it back to him, calling it "the portrait" so little does Melania express herself.
"Hide your powers, don't talk about it." Be careful, the secret will survive, ”the song says. Melania has always been that way, secretive, discreet. But determined. Mary Jordan emphasizes how well she has adapted to please Donald, met in New York in 1998 and married in 2005 - she was then 35 years old. To figure it out, she devoured her 17 books and made sure she never stole the show. A former roommate in New York would put it this way: "[Melania] always thought that if something was very expensive, that thing was great."
Today, if Melania is listened to by her husband, who calls her after each meeting, she lives her life and he his. She moved her parents to the White House. Together with Barron, they form a close-knit quartet who converse in Slovenian, which completely baffles the secret services. And Donald Trump, "who has complained to others that he has no idea what they are talking about." Her family is the only bond she kept from her childhood in the former Yugoslavia. She compared her father Viktor, who was a taxi driver, to her husband. “They have the same family values and work hard.”
Today, she shares her privileged life with parents and sister. Viktor and Amalija Knavs, a former seamstress in a textile factory, and Ines, who has her own apartment in Trump Tower, were naturalized in 2018. In the midst of the administration’s struggle against immigration. Mary Jordan points out that how Melania came to settle in the United States remains a mystery.
Politically, observers despair of understanding the first lady. During the campaign for the 2016 election, she did not hesitate to add fuel to the fire of persistent rumors, conveyed by her husband as well as by the ultra-right, that Barack Obama had falsified his certificate. of birth.
At the White House, where the First Ladies traditionally focus on unhappy childhood, she leads the "Be Best" campaign, which aims to fight cyberbullying and drugs. Efforts ridiculed by Donald Trump's verbal and insulting eructions on Twitter. In 2018, the media got confused when, visiting a Texas migrant detention center, she wears a jacket with the words "I really don’t care, do u?" (“I don't care, do you?”) A message, White House sources said, to Ivanka and left-wing media alike.
Mary Jordan only raises a corner of the veil on Melania, so much the people around her are afraid to speak and so much she protects herself. The White House has already denounced a bunch of inventions. The Simon & Schuster publishing house drives the point home: alongside the biography, it has just published the accusatory book of the hawk John Bolton, brief presidential adviser, and has just been granted by the courts the right to publish another book she promises resounding, written by Donald's niece. In her White House apartments, Melania may be humming "no moods, no torments, no feelings."
