“SHE IS like a ghost,” said Jarl Alé de Basseville, who photographed Melania in New York when she first arrived in the United States in 1996. “Everyone knows her, but no one does.”
Melania’s life unfolds like the acts of a play. Act One: the little girl who grew up in socialist Yugoslavia, a country that valued conformity and sameness, where the birthday celebration for the country’s dictator was a national holiday. Act Two: The young woman who, as her nation broke apart, chased success in the competitive modeling world in Europe. Act Three: the immigrant who arrived in New York and caught the eye of a well-known real estate mogul and became his wife. Melania’s Act Four is still being written. Strikingly, when the curtain falls on one period of her life, it is almost as if it never happened. The characters, the staging, everything changes. Many of the people who knew her as a girl or working model have little or no role to play in her current world. To an exceptional degree, she no longer stays in touch. Her immediate family members are among the rare few who have known her throughout her whole life.
Classmates and neighbors of Melania’s in Slovenia never heard from her after she moved to Milan to model full-time. Almost no one from her pre-Trump modeling career was invited to her wedding. People who socialized with Donald Trump said that, apart from her parents and sister and the modeling agent who brought her to America, they never met anyone who knew her before she started dating “The Donald,” as his first wife called him. One man who hung out with Trump at the time said: “Melania just appeared one day,” adding, “She looked the part—another young model—but she was different. She didn’t bring friends. She didn’t talk about what she had been doing. She just appeared, this woman with no history.”
Differences in age and demeanor mask how alike Melania and Donald Trump are. Both are avid creators of their own history. With the help of others, Trump wrote seventeen books about himself. He burnished his larger-than-life image by starring in fourteen seasons of the NBC reality television shows The Apprentice and The Celebrity Apprentice, and by constantly angling to be mentioned in newspapers and magazines. Melania, too, has engineered her own persona, but she has done so in the exact opposite way. She watched Trump build his brand through relentless media exposure and built hers by strategic reveal and scarcity: her remarks are always brief, the tidbits she shares are often little more than crumbs, and she is skilled at ducking questions and disappearing. Her playbook is very much the Ralph Lauren one. The celebrated designer—born Ralph Lifshitz in the Bronx, son of a Russian immigrant house painter—learned early on that it pays to wrap yourself in mystery.
But the hologram that she has created leaves so much unknown that people view her in vastly different ways. She is seen as the good-hearted princess who needs to be saved from her rapacious and bullying husband, the vulnerable immigrant swept up in his presidential ambitions who cried the night he was elected, the vapid and shallow model with nothing much to say about the world, the lucky beauty who just happened to be in the right place at the right time. Yet she is none of those things.
Finding out more about Melania—her past, her motivations, her daily life—has been an unprecedented challenge. 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. Most people I spoke to would not speak on the record. Many in the Trump world are governed by NDAs (nondisclosure agreements). Some had been warned by lawyers, family members, and others close to Melania not to speak publicly about her, and many would talk only on the same encrypted phone apps used by spies and others in the intelligence community. Old photos that were once an easy Google search away no longer pop up online. I first began making calls about Melania in 2015 when Trump announced his candidacy for president. Who was this woman, so unknown and yet one of the most recognized faces in the world? After interviews with more than one hundred twenty people in five countries, a fuller, richer portrait emerged.
As I reconstructed her journey, I learned that Melania has strengths that her husband lacks, but she also shares many of the qualities that landed him in the Oval Office. In that sense, Melania is like her husband. They are both independent, ambitious, image-conscious, unsentimental, and wary of those outside their inner circle. They are both fighters and survivors and prize loyalty over almost all else. Even their signatures are strikingly similar: sharp-angled up-and-down streaks.
It’s true that their differences tend to be more obvious: she is as quiet as he is loud, as mannered as he is crude, and as cautious as he is impulsive. But in crucial ways, they mirror each other. Neither the very public Trump nor the very private Melania has many close friends. Their loner instincts filter into their own marriage. To a remarkable degree for a couple, Melania and Donald Trump have always lived quite separately; they are often in the same building but rarely in the same room. That, however, is part of their deal, and it suits both of them.
Asked years ago if she would be with her husband if he were not rich, she shot back, “If I weren’t beautiful, do you think he’d be with me?” More than once, she has pushed back on the notion that she is somehow the lucky one in their marriage. She sees it as a partnership. When she met Trump in the late 1990s, he was younger, charming, and fun. Other women were also interested, but Melania landed him. She understood what he wanted from a third wife: an eye-turning beauty who kept the focus on him. From the start, she was aware of the complications included in a Trumpian life—including those involving his former wives and four children. She knew what Trump said about the things that wrecked his first marriage (Ivana was too involved in business) and his second (Marla tried to change his habits and brought too many family members around). Melania did neither. As Melania often says, in direct contrast to Marla, “I don’t try to change him.”
She has survived by focusing more on the upside of life with Trump than on his behavior. From the start of their relationship, she saw how complicated his world was. When they began dating, Marla and Tiffany, Trump’s second daughter, were still living on the top floor of the family triplex at Trump Tower, which presented an unusual arrangement for any new girlfriend. Workers built a door in the staircase between the penthouse’s second and third floor. For months until they moved out, young Tiffany would walk down the stairs and open the door to see her father and sometimes Melania would be there, too.
An advantage to dating someone who has written so much about himself is that you get to learn what he doesn’t like in a woman. When Melania dated Trump, he had recently written The Art of the Comeback, in which he shared what had gone wrong in his past relationships. Melania figured out early it was best never to discuss past boyfriends—Trump didn’t like the idea she had even fleetingly belonged to someone else. She also knew how much he liked praise, and she bathed him in it. She proved to him that she possessed his (and her) favorite trait: loyalty. When they broke up around the very end of 1999, she stayed home and avoided becoming involved with anyone else. Her patience paid off. Within a few months, they were a couple again.
“Melania is very smart and understands him,” said Anthony Scaramucci, who briefly served as Trump’s White House communications director. “With Trump, there are no costars—one spotlight on the stage.” Just before they married, Trump was asked about Melania’s “ambitions.” He said: “At this moment, she’s really only interested in what’s good for me. And I say that with the greatest respect. She’s really far more interested in me than she is in herself.”
But on January 22, 2017, Melania was most interested in a plane back to New York, and she left her husband in the White House. There are many reasons why Melania left, but her absence had a clear effect on Trump, and the longer it persisted, the more many people around the new president wanted her back.
In Melania’s absence, Ivanka was often called the de facto first lady. The duties of public office would be yet another thing to compete over. Eleven and a half years apart in age, both women had started companies selling jewelry. Both Melania and her stepdaughter were former models, although their modeling careers could not have started out more differently. When Melania was well into her twenties, she was still hoping for her career-making break. Ivanka was featured, at age fourteen, in a six-page Elle magazine spread. At fifteen, she was on the cover of Seventeen magazine and modeling for Sasson Jeans and Tommy Hilfiger. Fourteen-year-old Ivanka was quoted as saying to the Sunday Telegraph in Australia: “I’ve wanted to be a model since I was very young—ten or eleven or so. I’d be like, ‘There’s Cindy [Crawford]! There’s Claudia [Schiffer]!’ and I guess I always wanted people to say that about me.”
Ivanka and Melania insist they have a good relationship, and they continue to attend many of the same events. When Trump and Melania traveled to India on a presidential trip in late February 2020, Ivanka and Jared joined them. But the campaign, the planning for the inauguration, the move to Washington, and the early months of the administration, had intensified the friction between the two women.
It had been easier for them to keep a comfortable distance before Ivanka began introducing her father at public rallies and assuming many of the duties of a political spouse while Melania stayed home with Barron. Ivanka is a polished public speaker and has wowed audiences. Before her father’s swearing-in, she studied photos of past ceremonies, including Obama’s, and circled the prime seating spots. According to others who saw the photos, she wanted to be placed in the best position to be seen in the historic images. Ivanka also looked carefully at the parade route. An avid Instagram user, she posted many inaugural shots, including those of her and her young children heading to the parade on Pennsylvania Avenue. In many photos, Ivanka is usually the child closest to her father.
But Ivanka’s jockeying for position raised eyebrows among those who were partial to Melania and were looking out for her interests. In the end, Ivanka sat directly behind Melania at the swearing-in ceremony. Barron sat beside his mother. Although Ivanka still had a choice aisle seat and was in plenty of photos, she was not visible in some tight camera shots. But she made her status in the family clear that night, the family’s first in the White House, when she claimed the Lincoln bedroom for herself and Jared. Ivanka knows how to look out for herself—as does Melania. Melania has been heard calling Ivanka “The Princess” out of earshot. When she was younger, Ivanka privately called Melania “The Portrait,” telling classmates that her father’s girlfriend spoke as much as a painting on the wall.
Early on, Ivanka made it clear that she planned to remain in the limelight after Inauguration Day. Already, there had been press leaks about Ivanka and Jared’s search for a D.C. home in pricey Kalorama, the neighborhood where Amazon billionaire Jeff Bezos and the Obamas have grand residences. Bill and Hillary Clinton also have a place nearby. After Ivanka and Jared rented a $5.5 million home, paparazzi waited outside their door, plastering photos in the Daily Mail and other tabloids of the designer-dressed daughter headed to work as a special adviser in the West Wing. Ivanka had easy and frequent access to the Oval Office, and was setting up her own office and initiatives.
While Ivanka dove right into White House life, Melania did not even like to be called by her new title at first. “She said, ‘Stop calling me first lady,’ ” recalled one of the people who worked with Melania after the election. The New York City mother known for sending emoji-filled texts was now being invited to give speeches around the country. For years, she and her husband had a bodyguard, but now she was being protected twenty-four hours a day by Secret Service agents. There was always someone standing guard outside her door, and the animosity directed at her husband worried her. “At the core, I think she’s a private person who’s spent a lot of time adjusting to public life,” said one person who worked with Trump on the campaign and has remained close to the family.
Other first ladies have found the sudden adjustment difficult as well, and Melania, a careful planner, likes to take her time doing things. No matter how intense the pressure during the campaign, she refused to be hurried. The election night win came as a surprise even to Trump, according to many on his campaign, and little preparation had been done for what came next. Trump had even talked about going to one of his golf courses in Scotland immediately after the election so he didn’t have to watch Hillary Clinton bask in her success. One campaign aide recalled that candidate Trump had “told the pilot [of his private jet], ‘Fuel up the plane.’ ” He didn’t receive as many votes as Hillary, but he won key states and the electoral college tally that made him president. Trump and his team scrambled to write an acceptance speech and begin a White House transition. Melania wasn’t prepared to move to Washington, either.
It did not help that the campaign revelations of Trump’s alleged serial infidelities still stung. She learned many of the reported details along with the entire nation. While she very much wanted Barron to finish his academic year in New York and not be yanked from his friends, staying in New York also bought time to prepare for her new role as first lady. She needed her own staff. Trump’s staff had already pushed back on her desire to focus on online bullying, and there was huge interest in what she might do. And, according to several people close to the Trumps, she was in the midst of negotiations to amend her financial arrangement with Trump—what Melania referred to as “taking care of Barron.”
Prenuptial and postnuptial agreements are as standard as wedding rings in Trump’s marriages. His first wife, Ivana, renegotiated hers three times; Marla, who separated from Trump after four years of marriage, walked away with such a relatively small sum that even a Trump lawyer said he felt she should have gotten more. Trump wrote about prenups and boasted about them and said any rich man who didn’t have one was “a loser.” During the presidential campaign, Melania felt that a lot had changed since she signed her prenup. She had been with him a long time—longer than any other woman. She believed she made crucial contributions to his success. There was talk that Trump likely wouldn’t return to overseeing the Trump Organization after running the country, and Melania wanted to ensure that Barron got his rightful share of inheritance, particularly if Ivanka took the reins of the family business.
While she sorted out her plans as first lady and a new school for her son, she also worked on getting her husband to sign a more generous financial deal for her and Barron. It was smart timing. “The best thing you can do is to deal from strength, and leverage is the biggest strength you can have,” Trump wrote in The Art of the Deal. “Leverage is having something the other guy wants. Or better yet, needs. Or best of all, simply can’t do without.” While in New York, Melania had new leverage. The vacant first lady’s office annoyed him. He wanted her with him.
A few of Trump’s pals were upset with Melania, not only because her decision to remain in Trump Tower fanned rumors they were not getting along. They also wanted her in the White House because when she was around, Trump was calmer. They believed that if she were with him, he would not have been tweeting as often and acting as impulsively. The opening weeks of his administration were marked by personnel clashes, embarrassing leaks, and a controversial travel ban that caused major protests at airports. Trump held a seventy-five-minute press conference on February 16, repeatedly denying any chaos and saying, “this administration is running like a fine-tuned machine,” and adding, “I’m not ranting and raving.”
“That woman! She will be the end of him,” Thomas Barrack, Trump’s friend who chaired his inaugural, was overheard saying at a meeting, as he talked about Melania remaining in New York. “She is stubborn. She should be with her husband. He is the president of the United States.” As the weeks passed, more people around Trump began to appreciate Melania for what she brought to their relationship. At least one of Trump’s older children even called her, urging her to spend more time with their dad, telling her that he needed her balance. Melania knew that some people in New York dismissed her as a gold digger, but now, finally, others were starting to realize her worth.
But staying in New York carried a high price. Melania hadn’t realized the overwhelming cost and inconvenience caused by the security measures needed for Barron and her in a large urban area—it was costing millions of dollars a month. The Secret Service sought more funding. The New York Police Department said a conservative estimate for its costs alone was $125,000 a day. Simply getting Barron to his classes unleashed massive traffic problems around his school, Columbia Grammar and Preparatory School on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. Many of the other parents were busy, wealthy people, and some began to seethe over the disruption and inconvenience, including delayed drop-offs and pickups and being told to “hold” for Melania and Barron. Parents also worried about the safety of their own kids, even with the constant presence of the Secret Service. Not to mention that many of them were progressive New York Democrats who had voted for Hillary Clinton and couldn’t stand Trump.
Melania knew protesters stood in front of Trump Tower every day holding signs and shouting that her husband hated immigrants and women. Hundreds of thousands of people signed an online petition demanding that the Trumps pay the “exorbitant” costs of her choosing to remain in New York. And the longer she stayed, the greater the speculation that her decision to remain in New York meant that their marriage was on the rocks. On Valentine’s Day, Melania did not return to Washington. Stephanie Winston Wolkoff, the senior adviser helping her set up her White House office, had just told CNN that Melania was “committed” to preserving Michelle Obama’s First Lady’s Kitchen Garden. Her husband was in the White House, tweeting about “illegal leaks.”
Melania did not like what was being written about her. For years her experience with the media was fielding softball questions from fashion magazines; now, instead of receiving questions about her beauty regime or fashion choices, she was being asked what, as an immigrant, she thought of her husband’s tough border policy. She had little control over the script or photos being published. She told people that no matter what she did, she would be criticized, and that she would do what she wanted. Melania had said that she would stay in New York until the school year ended, and she stood her ground.
That didn’t sit well with everyone around Trump. Barrack, who was in close touch with Trump, began asking Melania’s friends to get involved in “domestic issues,” which to them was interpreted as urging her to “lay off the prenup renegotiations” or, as another put it, “get down to Washington.” Barrack was seen as closer to Ivanka than to Melania. While Melania stayed in New York, Ivanka continued to establish herself in the West Wing, notorious for its cramped and limited working spaces. According to several people, she was eyeing real estate in the East Wing as well, the domain of the first lady. Among other proposals, Ivanka suggested renaming the “First Lady’s Office” the “First Family Office.” Melania did not allow that to happen. It was tradition, and she was not going to let her stepdaughter change it. Ivanka’s office remained in the West Wing.
Melania’s delay in moving from New York initially put her at a disadvantage. Even some of the staff positions and budgets that would have been available to support the first lady’s office were gone, diverted to support those in the West Wing, including Ivanka. Especially in the first two years of the administration, some in the White House felt that the West Wing was actively putting up roadblocks and purposely not lending support to the first lady’s office. But others believed that it was just an oversight in the chaos.
Ivanka is both especially close to her father and spent far more time around him than his other children. Not only did father and daughter work closely at the Trump Organization but she also had played a key role in his campaign, and now was the child with the most active role inside the White House. With Melania away, Ivanka used the private theater, with its plush red seats, and enjoyed other White House perks. Some said she treated the private residence as if it were her own home. Melania did not like it. When she and Barron finally moved in, she put an end to the “revolving door” by enforcing firm boundaries.
In those early months, Ivanka seemed to get involved in every major issue. In May, the New York Times wrote an article headlined “Ivanka Trump Has the President’s Ear: Here’s Her Agenda,” in which the reporters described the first daughter as being determined to act as “a moderating force in an administration swept into office by nationalist sentiment.” The article stated that Ivanka planned to review executive orders before they were signed, and that, according to officials, she had already weighed in on “climate, deportation, education, and refugee policy.” In an interview, she told the Times, “I’m still at the early stages of learning how everything works, but I know enough now to be a much more proactive voice inside the White House.” That would turn out to also include weighing in on details such as the décor of the Oval Office.
Ivanka had enlisted a decorator from the Trump Organization, and a gold shimmery silk fabric wallpaper was selected for the office walls. Stephanie Winston Wolkoff, Melania’s adviser in the first lady’s office, knew Melania would want to decorate the Oval Office. She also thought that the type of fabric would not look good on TV and told Trump so. Soon Winston Wolkoff and Melania, with Trump’s blessing, were making their own plans for the office. In the end, Trump avoided any showdown between his daughter and wife by putting off a costly overhaul. On his own, he chose a combination of furnishings used by previous presidents: Bill Clinton’s gold curtains, a rug designed by Nancy Reagan, and George W. Bush’s pale sofas. Winston Wolkoff said it still felt like a clear win for Melania.
All the while, Melania stayed out of the news, away from the microphones, while others were busy promoting themselves. Melania didn’t need to trumpet that she had the president’s ear, because she already did. In fact, when Trump heard a TV commentator talk about the outsize influence of his children, he laughed and said, “Do you think I became successful by listening to my kids? They listen to me.” People working in the West Wing say they have heard Trump criticize Don Jr. and Eric and even Ivanka for doing or saying something that the president thought was not helpful, but none could recall hearing him say anything negative about Melania. He appreciated that she didn’t need publicity, and that she didn’t boast about her influence, saying little more in interviews than, “sometimes” he listens and sometimes he doesn’t.
At the White House, Trump felt he was surrounded by people who were constantly jockeying for position and focused on their own self-interest, and he valued Melania’s loyalty and insights more than before he entered politics. Sean Spicer, the president’s first communications director, explained the dynamic this way: “Melania is very behind-the-scenes but unbelievably influential. She is not one to go in and say, ‘Hire this person, fire this person.’ But she lets the president know what she thinks, and he takes her views very seriously.” Rather than tell Trump what to do or not do, Melania’s style is to give her opinion, and in the end, “he tends to agree with her,” Spicer said. Often, if Melania was present for a discussion and spoke up, “The president would say, ‘She is right,’ and that was the end of the discussion.”
Spicer recounted having dinner with the president and first lady and seeing how Trump constantly solicited his wife’s opinion. He found their banter fascinating, a seamless back-and-forth, with one speaking and the other interjecting. “It’s almost like watching color commentating on a game. They are a team,” Spicer said. More than a dozen past or current White House officials interviewed attributed Melania’s influence to the fact that Trump believed that just about everyone else had an agenda, except Melania. He believed she had no ulterior motive and just wanted him to succeed. Trump’s wariness of others has grown during his presidency, as people he hired for high-profile jobs have left his administration and then criticized him publicly.
Melania tells him what she believes is resonating with voters and what is not. According to Spicer, the first lady is a “voracious consumer of news and information” and has “her finger on the pulse of not just what is going on issue-wise, but what is in her husband’s best interest.” She focuses less on policy than on positioning him in front of an audience. Spicer explained her style as being dramatically different from others’ in and out of the West Wing. “There are people who go to the president and say, ‘Here is what we should be doing.’ ‘Here is what the country should be doing.’ ‘Here is what the party should be doing.’ ” That is not Melania. “She knows exactly who he is as a person, what he believes and what his brand is about. She really understands positioning him. She says, ‘This is who you are. You don’t need to do that.’ ”
Others’ agreement with Melania has become something of a loyalty test for Trump. In conversations, he will sometimes ask, “This is what Melania thinks. What do you think?” Spicer recalled a phone conversation he had with Trump after leaving the White House. Spicer made a comment, and Trump replied, “You know what? Melania says the same thing. You are right.”
The depth of Melania’s influence, as well as her operating style, can be seen in one of the key decisions from Trump’s campaign: his July 2016 vice presidential pick. Over the July 4 weekend, Trump summoned Indiana governor Mike Pence and his wife, Karen, to the Trump National Golf Club in Bedminster, New Jersey, a property set amid rolling hills about an hour outside of New York City. Melania and Barron—and often Melania’s parents—have spent large parts of each summer there.
Longtime Republican operative Paul Manafort was leading the vice presidential search, but it was Melania whom Trump assigned to spend time with the Pences. Trump was also considering, as running mates, then–New Jersey governor Chris Christie and former House Speaker Newt Gingrich. Melania knew Christie well and had met Gingrich. Pence was very conservative, deeply religious, and from the Midwest—all of which stood to help Trump with conservatives still wary of a New Yorker who was once a registered Democrat. Trump also recognized that he needed someone who could help him navigate Capitol Hill, which touched off speculation among pundits that Gingrich had the edge. But Trump arranged the entire weekend so that Melania could get acquainted with the Pences.
Melania and the Pences ate meals together, and she spoke at length with both of them. Afterward, she gave Trump her assessment, telling him that they were good people, and that Mike Pence had a big advantage over Gingrich and Christie: he was not too ambitious. She believed that he would be content in a number-two spot and not gun for the top job, which was something she could not say about the other two. “She played a big role. It was beyond consulting,” said one person with direct knowledge of the selection. “She thought he would be a loyal adviser, not an alpha.”
Another telling moment for Melania came when Trump asked Pence to give his opinion of the other contenders. Pence highlighted their strengths. When Trump asked Gingrich and Christie the same question, “they were total assassins,” a former administration official recounted. Melania took note of their ability to unload on a rival and urged her husband to pick Pence. She thought that he was the most likely to stay in his lane, step aside, and let Trump be Trump.
Ivanka, Don Jr., and Eric also met with Pence, a social values conservative who had signed restrictive abortion laws and opposed both same-sex marriage and the right of gay people to serve in the military—both of which worried some in the Trump campaign. But whatever other advisers thought in the end, Melania had made the case for the Indiana governor in a way that appealed to Trump.
This was the pattern that would repeat itself inside the White House. Melania would not weigh in on many issues, but when she did speak up, her words mattered. Christie told me, “The idea that she is not a big influence in the administration is just dead wrong. She picks her spots when she wants to speak assertively, but when she does, the president listens.” It became clear to those working in the West Wing that Trump placed significant value on those Melania liked (such as counselor Kellyanne Conway) and those she didn’t (including chiefs of staff Reince Priebus and, eventually, John Kelly). “He absolutely consults her on personnel matters,” Christie explained, noting that Melania “doesn’t waste a lot of words.” It also became clear that one of the most lethal places to find oneself was in Melania’s crosshairs. As one former White House official said: “People cross Melania at their own risk—and that risk is, ‘off with your head.’ I’m not kidding… You are gone if she doesn’t like you.”
Melania moved into the White House on June 11, 2017, with almost no fanfare. She is not nearly as active on social media as her husband. But on moving day she posted a picture out a White House window with a view of the Washington Monument. She had just replaced the White House chief usher, who had worked for the Obamas, overseeing a residence staff of nearly a hundred people and everything from family dinner menus to the residence’s budget. Instead, she selected Timothy Harleth, who had been the director of rooms at the Trump International Hotel in Washington. Donald J. Trump might not be able to live at his local Trump property, but that did not mean that the Trump property could not, in many ways, be brought to him. And his wife, the newly arrived first lady, would be the one to do it.
In the end, her arrival was not much of a story. Melania was now in the White House, quietly beginning the latest remarkable chapter in her highly improbable life.