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It was at Manhattan’s trendy Kit Kat Club that Donald Trump first met Melania Knauss in September 1998. He was fifty-two years old and a billionaire. She was a twenty-eight-year-old model.
Then living in a one-bedroom Manhattan apartment, Melania was no party girl but later explained, “It was Fashion Week, and it was a fashion party, and we were both invited, and that’s where we met.”
Trump brought a date to the party. At the time, Trump was separated from Marla Maples, whom he divorced in 1999. Having spotted Melania at the party, Trump took advantage of his date’s trip to the ladies’ room to chat her up. However, Melania knew of Trump’s reputation, confirmed by the fact that he had come to the party with a date and was now asking for her number. Melania refused. Instead she asked Trump for his contact information.
“If I give him my number, I’m just one of the women he calls,” she remembered. Melania wanted to see if he would offer a business number. “I wanted to see what his intention is. It tells you a lot from the man what kind of number he gives you. He gave me all of his numbers.” They had “a great connection, we had great chemistry, but I was not starstruck,” she said. “And maybe he noticed that.”
Melania told her best friend, Edit Molnar, a fellow model, about the encounter. Molnar said Melania was turned off by the fact that Trump had asked her out while with another woman. Giving him her number was “absolutely out of the question.”
“Melania said, ‘He’s here with a woman. I am absolutely not giving him my number,’ ” recalled Molnar. “She wouldn’t even consider it.”
Back at Trump Tower, Donald told his longtime aide Norma Foerderer about her.
“He said he met a beautiful, beautiful, fantastic girl at a party in New York,” Foerderer told me. “He thought she was stunning, and she was a brunette, not a blonde.”
Melania called him when she returned from a modeling trip, and they began dating. In the early stages of their relationship, Melania was on her way into Trump’s triplex in Trump Tower for a trip they had planned that afternoon to Mar-a-Lago. Out came Kara Young, a model whom Trump had dated for almost two years before meeting Melania.
Melania walked into the apartment and broke up with Donald on the spot.
“Women were positively shameless in pursuing Donald—but not Melania,” Foerderer said. “To see these women throw themselves at him…no shame.”
Indeed, when Hillary Clinton said in a BBC interview that Trump, based on his own statements in the Access Hollywood audio recording, was an “admitted sexual assaulter,” she overlooked the fact that in boasting about touching women’s private parts, Trump was making it clear that the women in question welcomed his advances and therefore the encounters were consensual. “And when you’re a star, they let you do it,” Trump said on the tape. “You can do anything.”
But Melania was no groupie and meant what she said. Trump may have billions, but he was not going to push her around. She called Mar-a-Lago to have her clothes returned to her, impressing Trump and spotlighting her character.
“She called me and asked me to please pack up her things and send them back with Mr. Trump, and I said okay,” Trump’s former butler Tony Senecal recalls. “And then I cleared it with him. He said do what she wants. So I packed up her stuff, and they went up on the plane.”
Over the course of the next week, Trump wooed her back, promising to be monogamous. “The next week, she was back,” Senecal remembers. “When she called me, her suitcases were still on the plane in New York. When they came back and she came back, I just carried them back into the mansion kind of laughing.”
Originally Melanija Knavs, Melania was born April 26, 1970, in Slovenia, then part of Yugoslavia. She Germanized her name to Melania Knauss. Her father, Viktor Knavs, is a onetime auto dealership manager. Her mother, Amalija Ulčnik, worked developing patterns at a factory that manufactured children’s clothing. They met when Viktor was the chauffeur for a nearby town’s mayor, and they married in 1966.
Amalija spent evenings after work sewing clothing for herself and her two daughters, Ines and Melania. Once she learned to draw, Melania sketched her own designs, and her mother or sister sewed them. Melania also made her own jewelry.
Melania’s parents arranged for her to attend a technical high school before she went on to the University of Ljubljana to study architecture. Having begun modeling at the age of sixteen, she signed with her first modeling agency in Milan at the age of eighteen. Working in Paris and Milan, she appeared on the covers of European editions of Vogue—an exotic, dark-haired Slavic beauty.
In Milan, Melania met Paolo Zampolli, founder of ID Models Management, who invited her to join his agency in the United States. He told the New York Post in 2005 that she was a “homebody” and not a “party girl” like many young models. When Melania wasn’t modeling. she spent her time reading, watching old movies on television, and designing clothes.
“It was unusual for her to go out. She never went to clubs or bars,” Zampolli said. “She never dated anyone in New York before Donald. She only went to movies by herself and to the gym.”
After arriving in New York City in 1996, her image appeared on a Camel cigarettes billboard in Times Square. The leggy beauty began posing in the catalogs of Lord & Taylor and Bergdorf Goodman.
Zampolli described the future Mrs. Trump as determined and very professional when it came to her career.
“This is a woman who modeled for Camel cigarettes on a huge billboard in Times Square but stayed home all the time,” he said. “She was absolutely business oriented. She took her career very seriously. She came to do a job. She didn’t come for any other reason. So she was doing what a model should be doing—go to the gym and go to work.”
Soon, the biggest names in fashion photography were shooting her, and she was gracing the covers of Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar, British GQ, and New York magazine. Her major layouts included the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue, Allure, Glamour, Vanity Fair, and Elle, and she appeared in TV commercials.
Manolo Blahnik, the designer of sexy, expensive women’s shoes, called her a “true beauty” and declared, “She has IT.”
On January 22, 2005, a little over six years after they met, Trump and Melania were married in Palm Beach at the Episcopal Church of Bethesda-by-the-Sea. When Trump considered having their wedding televised, Melania put her foot down. The offer to broadcast the wedding had come from NBC, home of Trump’s The Apprentice.
Melania registered for her wedding at Frette, the Upper East Side luxury linen store, where she asked for sets of cream-white, 500-count cotton bedsheets from Italy, $1,195 for a set. Trump bragged that he paid $1.5 million for her diamond ring after getting a 50 percent discount.
Melania’s older sister, Ines Knauss, an artist, was Melania’s maid of honor. The bride wore an embroidered couture dress from Christian Dior whose ornamentation alone required more than five hundred hours of stitching, at a cost estimated at more than $100,000. For her “something old,” Melania carried rosary beads that are a family heirloom.
The press and the paparazzi were out in force, with helicopters buzzing the celebration and shooting photos of the dozens of celebrities. The 350 guests who attended the reception at Mar-a-Lago included Bill and Hillary Clinton, Rudolph W. Giuliani, Barbara Walters, and Tony Bennett. Billy Joel sang “Just the Way You Are.”
As for their honeymoon, Trump said in an interview with Larry King on CNN shortly after the wedding, “Why would we leave Palm Beach? We have the most beautiful palm trees—they don’t call it Palm Beach for no reason. So why are we going to leave the gorgeous, beautiful house called Mar-a-Lago and venture out onto some tropical island where things aren’t clean?”
Vogue concluded that Donald was “lucky” to marry Melania and said that the designer Tom Ford had suggested that she do something about his often joked-about hair.
Her response: “I like him the way he is.”
Asked by Larry King if Trump is a control freak, Melania said, “I don’t think so. Maybe he makes demands in his business because he needs to. You know, he’s kind of a general. He needs to have people in line. But not at home. We are very equal in the relationship, and that’s very important. You know, to marry a man like Donald is—you need to know who you are, and you need to be very strong and smart and, you know, he needs to know that he could rely on me sometimes.”
Sophisticated, poised, and beautiful, Melania Trump is the second first lady to have been born outside the United States. The first was Louisa Catherine Johnson Adams, the wife of the sixth president, John Quincy Adams. She was born in London. Melania has another distinction: She is the only first lady to have posed nude.
“We have incredible sex at least once a day,” Melania told shock jock Howard Stern over the phone in 2000. “Sometimes even more.” Asked what she was wearing, Melania said, “Not much.” Trump boasted to Stern about how she looks in a very small thong. Melania shrugged it off.
The couple claims they have never argued.
“We literally have never had an argument. Forget about the word ‘fight,’ ” Trump told Larry King. “We just are very compatible. We get along…. I work very hard from early in the morning till late in the evening. I don’t want to go home and work at a relationship.”
Work is Trump’s passion, Melania said. “I don’t want to change him. I don’t want to say, come home and you know, be with me. I don’t want to change him. I want to give him space, and I think that’s very important in the relationship.”
While she doesn’t have to worry about money, Melania said that growing up, “You always taking care of the money.” She said she is not a big spender and doesn’t buy an item unless she likes it a hundred percent.
“You know, I made a lot of money myself,” Melania said. “So, it’s like, I know how it is to work and what money means. So, it’s not that I would say, okay, now I will have the latest bag. I want that bag, and then in one month, that bag will be in the closet, and it’s not even…in fashion. I’m not into that.”
“She has the perfect proportions—five feet eleven, 125 pounds—and great boobs, which is no trivial matter,” Trump boasted to Howard Stern. He said he appreciates Melania’s restraint when it comes to shopping.
“She’s never taken advantage of that situation, okay, as many women would have, frankly,” Trump said.
“I prefer quality over quantity,” she said.
Melania scoffs when asked if she had had a breast augmentation or other plastic surgery.
“I didn’t make any changes,” she has said. “A lot of people say I am using all the procedures for my face. I didn’t do anything. I live a healthy life, I take care of my skin and my body. I’m against Botox, I’m against injections. I think it’s damaging your face, damaging your nerves. It’s all me. I will age gracefully, as my mom does.”
Melania has said the key to the success of her marriage is separate bathrooms.
In March 2006, their son, Barron, was born. That same year, she “proudly” became a U.S. citizen, as the White House website says.
In an interview with Parenting magazine, Melania described herself as a “full-time mom.” She said it was the “most important job ever.” The fact that after Trump became president, she remained in New York with Barron until he finished the school year underscores that.
Melania’s mother, Amalija, a timeless beauty with dark hair and sparkling eyes, and her father, Viktor, portly and friendly, with better English than his wife’s, were always present in raising Barron. Viktor would take him fishing off the dock at Mar-a-Lago.
When Barron turned four and started school, Melania unveiled her line of jewelry and watches on the home shopping network QVC.
“She’s got an amazing sense of design and an amazing level of intelligence,” Trump told the New York Times. “She’s got great ability, and I want her to run with it.”
Melania also developed and marketed a skin-care line, and one of her favorite products was a moisturizer called Caviar Complex C6, which she rubbed on little Barron’s body after his bath.
Taught by Melania and her Slovene parents, Barron speaks Serbian, French, and some German, as well as English. Barron is as gregarious as his father. One day Barron, then age two, was sitting on the couch in the lounge area of Trump’s Boeing 727-100.
“We’re flying along, and Melania had given him a bottle,” Mike Donovan, the pilot, remembers. “He took the bottle out of his mouth and said, ‘Do you want some, Mike?’ ”
When greeted by a club member having breakfast on the esplanade overlooking the main Mar-a-Lago pool, which is heated to seventy-eight degrees like the second pool on the ocean, Barron, then around age seven, called back to her, “Enjoy your breakfast!” Barron’s Mac and Cheese is always on the menu at Mar-a-Lago.
Every morning, Trump would read the papers with Barron, commenting on developments. Butler Tony Senecal remembers bringing breakfast to Barron, who was almost three, and to Melania’s parents in the living quarters.
“Tony, sit down. We need to talk,” Barron said.
Like his father, Barron did most of the talking—about his favorite subject, airplanes.
Senecal and Melania communicated by text. He texted her about Barron’s comment.
“That doesn’t surprise me,” she texted Tony. “Doesn’t surprise me at all.”
The young Barron would bounce around Mar-a-Lago, telling a bartender to look up in the sky at a certain time for daddy’s plane, which he would describe in great detail.
Years later, during his father’s victory speech, Barron was understandably nodding off onstage at three in the morning. Based on that, a website started a rumor that he is autistic. Trump nemesis Rosie O’Donnell, a former host on ABC’s The View, spread the rumor but later retracted it and apologized to Melania. Schoolmates describe Barron as perfectly normal. Melania has described the boy as “very strong-minded…Sometimes I call him little Donald.”
Barron understands the need for security and is respectful of Secret Service agents. In that respect, he emulates Chelsea Clinton, whom Secret Service agents considered a model first child. As he bounded out of the owner’s quarters at Mar-a-Lago one afternoon, Barron checked in with his agent and gently tapped him on the back before heading off with him to Trump Spa, a towel over his shoulder.
In contrast to Barron, Jenna and Barbara Bush thought of Secret Service protection as a pain and treated agents as the enemy. Even though the agents dressed in casual clothes like shorts and jeans, and most people were unaware of their role, both girls resented having Secret Service agents around. Jenna would purposely try to lose her protection by running red lights or by jumping in her car without telling agents where she was going. As a result, the Secret Service had to keep her car under surveillance at the White House so agents could follow her—a complete waste of manpower. Similarly, when Barbara was attending Yale, she would sneak out of her dormitory and elude her agents.
“These girls didn’t want protection,” says a former agent who was on their details. “They would try to run from us and hide from us. They’d intentionally try to lose us, wouldn’t tell us where they were going. They’d hop in a car and take off, not notify the detail they were leaving.”
When you see Melania chatting with Trump at Mar-a-Lago and the couple enjoying themselves, you can tell this marriage will last. In person, the first lady is even more gorgeous than she appears in photographs or on television.
“I think Donald is so happy with her, and she dotes on him and their son, and they’re just a beautiful couple,” Norma Foerderer told me. “I’ve never seen Donald quite like this. He realizes how lucky he is. And he is. And she is too, mind you. They’re just darling together, and they tease and they laugh. I think I’ve seen this more now with Melania than with any other wife.”
Melania “doesn’t have a vast army of friends, but she is such a good friend,” Foerderer said. “She is very bright, and she doesn’t broadcast her intelligence, it’s just there. And she gives Donald good advice. If an issue is directed to her, she’ll come up with an answer.”
In a segment of Trump’s former reality TV show The Apprentice, Melania and Trump showed off their lavish Fifth Avenue apartment. With Versailles-like gold leaf decor and breathtaking views of Central Park, the home boasts floor-to-ceiling windows, hand-painted ceilings, fountains, paintings, lots of marble, and two huge gold-plated entrance doors. Real estate experts estimate that the penthouse would sell for at least a hundred million dollars if it were to go on the market today.
Touring the apartment, one of the contestants said to Melania, “You’re very, very lucky.”
Melania, holding a glass of champagne and motioning toward her husband, smiled and said, “And he’s not lucky?”
“I have my own mind,” she told Harper’s Bazaar in an interview. “I am my own person, and I think my husband likes that about me.”
“Trump would ask her, ‘Honey, do you think we should do this?’ ” Senecal says. “ ‘Honey, do you think we should do that?’ And she would say ‘Yes, Donald, yeah.’ They have a very equal relationship.”
Even during the grueling campaign, Trump and his wife would talk on the phone several times a day.
While the media often portray Melania as brainless, moneygrubbing, spineless, or sickened by her husband, she speaks six languages—English, French, Italian, German, Slovenian, and Serbo-Croatian—and has tremendous influence on the president and his staff. She sits in on key meetings, summarizes the points others make, and has always given the correct advice, according to insiders. In fact, contrary to a report in Vogue that she did not want to be first lady, Trump has credited her with urging him to declare his candidacy rather than vacillate about whether to run for president. Otherwise, she said, the polls will not reflect his support because people would not believe that he was serious about running. And she said to him, “If you run, you’re going to win.”
After he and Melania, in a strapless white dress, descended the escalator at Trump Tower to announce on June 16, 2015, that he would make America great again, his campaign took off. A week later, a Suffolk University poll had him in second place in New Hampshire among the large 2016 Republican primary field.
Like the first ladies before her, Melania makes appearances to call attention to worthy causes. In West Virginia, she visited a day-care center for babies born addicted to opioids. She urged attendees at a United Nations luncheon to set good examples for children. She invited experts and people affected by drug addiction and opioid abuse to the White House for a listening session and told them she planned to “use my platform as first lady” to help as many kids as possible. She took her first solo trip—to Canada—to support Americans participating in an athletic competition for wounded service members and veterans.
Melania kept former first lady Michelle Obama’s vegetable garden at the White House, where she encouraged the children helping her in the garden to make healthy eating a priority.
“I’m a big believer in healthy eating because it reflects on your mind and your body,” she said before telling the group to “come with me and have some fun.” She later pulled leeks from the ground and clipped an artichoke from a nearby plant. “I encourage you to continue and eat a lot of vegetables and fruits so you grow up healthy and take care of yourself…. It’s very important,” she told the visiting children.
Melania’s promotion of worthy causes did not stop supposedly pro-immigrant liberals from making fun of her foreign accent as she recited the Lord’s Prayer at a Trump rally in Melbourne, Florida. Pro-immigrant comedian Chelsea Handler chortled that Melania “can barely speak English.”
Both Melania and Trump picked up on the fact that Angella Reid, who had been appointed chief usher by Obama, was difficult with the White House residence staff. An African American, Reid was the White House’s first female chief usher, who oversees the operation of the residence portion of the White House. But Trump and Melania let her go. To replace Reid, Melania announced that Timothy Harleth would serve as chief usher, leaving his position at Trump International Hotel to oversee a residence staff of more than ninety people a seven-minute walk away along Pennsylvania Avenue. With more than a decade of hospitality and leadership experience, Harleth had supervised more than 110 employees as director of rooms at the hotel.
Saving taxpayers money, Melania employs just twelve aides, compared to Michelle Obama’s twenty-four. Trump employs 377 people at the White House, compared to Obama’s 476.
More than previous first ladies, Melania accompanies her husband on trips to express empathy for victims of natural disasters such as Hurricane Harvey that hit Texas, Irma that hit Florida, and Maria that hit Puerto Rico. But Melania’s most important role never comes out.
“She is a very powerful behind-the-scenes force,” Sean Spicer tells me. “I don’t think people fully recognize how influential she is and what a grounded political sense she has on her own.” Spicer says, “There are times when you’re in the room and see it, and she’ll weigh in on a decision, and it’s not just a yes or no. Instead, it’s, look, based on this scenario, here’s what makes sense. She always seems to have the pulse on the right move and the right person at the right time. When she weighs in, it’s always spot-on. She knows where he is, where he should be, and how we could move an issue.”
Whether in the Oval Office, on Air Force One, or in the residence, “When she’s around and she feels strongly about an issue or an event or whatever it is, she’ll make her position known,” Spicer says. “The thing is she really thinks about his positioning. Melania knows how to sort of read him and read the situation. She will say, ‘This is not good for you. This is not consistent with what you said.’ She really has his best interests at heart. She knows when to pick her battles, and she’s always entirely right.”
Melania reads widely, both publications and articles on the Internet. As she said to me at Mar-a-Lago while sitting next to Trump at dinner, “I read every one of your articles,” referring to the ones I send her.
Melania gives Trump both positive and negative articles that she thinks he should read. She also tips him off to people who come off well on TV in support of him.
An independent thinker, Melania does not necessarily take sides with one faction or another within the White House staff. However, “Melania didn’t want Ivanka or Jared or other people coming and seeing the president up in the residence for business. She definitely put her foot down on that,” Bannon says.
“I think Melania does all the stuff of being a first lady because she’s just very proud of it,” Bannon says. “She’s very low-key. She’s not the type who’s doing over-the-top waving. She never tries to draw attention to herself.”
While Melania often agrees with the advice of aides, “Sometimes she’d be the first one to weigh in with a point,” Spicer says. In some cases, she will let an aide know that she is on his or her side when that person is under attack from her husband and presumably will let Trump know how she feels as well.
Melania lets Trump know when her intuition tells her an unsavory character is trying to gain access or take advantage of him.
“Melania knows who the bullshit artists are,” Bannon says. “She knows the promoters, the guys looking out for themselves and not Trump, and she lets him know it.” He adds, “You could write something negative about the president. If it had justification, she’ll show it to him.”
“Those of us who have the privilege to know her and work with her also acknowledge and appreciate how brilliant she is,” Kellyanne Conway says of Melania. “She has amazing instincts, political and otherwise. She reads people exceedingly well. Her own story as an immigrant who heard about this wonderful place called America is inspiring. She was a little girl in Slovenia and came to this country to pursue her dreams. She is a successful entrepreneur in her own right, and is a devoted wife and mother.”
Stunning though she is, Melania is modest. “Great pictures! But not the best of me,” Melania wrote to me, using a smiley face, of a photo of the two of us at a Trump New Year’s Eve party at Mar-a-Lago.
All first ladies influence their husbands and their administrations to some degree. In the case of Laura Bush, “If it’s a particular interest of the first lady, we will pay attention to the funding for those programs, and they will always prevail,” Clay Johnson, George W. Bush’s high school friend and Yale roommate who became deputy director of the Office of Management and Budget, told me for my book Laura Bush: An Intimate Portrait of the First Lady. Johnson said Laura’s influence extended beyond budgets. OMB routinely asked for her opinion or suggestions on appointments and on issues affecting agencies that deal with subjects of interest to her, such as education, the arts, women’s rights, AIDS, libraries, the humanities, and juveniles with social problems.
Bush himself also bounced policy questions off Laura. “I don’t believe he sits down with her and says, ‘I have six policy items I want to go over with you,’ ” Johnson said. “Rather, issues come up in informal conversation. She is very smart and very wise and can give him an objective, big picture perspective that after an hour or so with the policy people, he may have lost. As an example, the president will talk to her about civil service reform issues. She will say, ‘Do you really want to do that, or do you really want to make a change in leadership at a time like this?’ ”
Secret Service agents were dismayed to overhear Michelle Obama push her husband to be more aggressive in attacking Republicans and to side with blacks in police shooting controversies. Having listened to their talk in the presidential limousine, a former Secret Service agent says, “Michelle’s agenda goes back to when she said about her husband running for president, ‘For the first time in my adult lifetime, I am really proud of my country.’ ”
Unlike either Laura Bush or Michelle Obama, Melania interacts with aides and discusses policy questions, helping to focus policy or strategy. While Laura is a devoted reader of literary works, Melania devours articles on current events and policy issues. Melania also took control of events on the White House grounds, saying all planning and scheduling must go through her.
Melania has confided to aides that she tries to get Trump to cool it when he feels he is under attack and a counterattack will only make things worse, calling more attention to the problem. A prime example of his self-destructive tendencies was Trump’s decision to bring pointless legal action to stop the publication of Michael Wolff’s book Fire and Fury, hyping its sales. Sometimes Trump listens; most of the time he does not.
The one piece of advice Trump has never followed from Melania is her constant suggestion that he stop sending tweets to his forty million followers, the greatest number of any world leader.
“She would tell him that he shouldn’t tweet so much, put the Twitter away, just do not tweet,” Priebus says. “No tweeting. Stop tweeting. Slow down on tweeting.”
“That might be one area where she won’t win,” Spicer says. “But that’s probably the only one.”
At his age, Trump is “not about to change,” says Trump’s friend Chris Ruddy, CEO of Newsmax Media and a member of Mar-a-Lago. “He won’t stop saying things that rub people the wrong way. And he will not stop tweeting—nor should he—though perhaps there should be a process for reviewing his tweets before posting.”