THE NEWS that Trump and Melania had separated spread when the New York Post wrote about it on January 11 (the same day the 60 Minutes interview aired), with the headline: “Trump Knixes Knauss: Donald-Dumped Supermodel Is ‘Heartbroken.’ ” The story quoted unnamed people close to Trump—at the time, that was widely assumed to be code for Trump himself—saying that he had initiated the breakup. Regardless of the facts, the Trump spin was always going to be that he was the man in charge (and that he had “dumped” a “supermodel”).
Two days later, Melania apparently counterpunched. A different Post writer filed a story sourced to a “pal” of Melania’s—which at the time was interpreted to mean that Melania was playing Trump’s game and speaking to the press herself. In this version of events, Melania had dumped Donald after discovering a towel smeared with another woman’s makeup in his Trump Tower apartment. She suspected he was cheating on her. In fact, according to someone who saw the two women, Melania had even crossed paths in the building with Kara Young, whom she knew had dated Trump. A Trump friend said that he had wanted Melania to find out that Young had been there, to see how she would react. Details of exactly when and how they broke up are still unclear, but afterward, Trump spoke of her to reporters as casually as if he had just let a favorite housekeeper go: “Melania is an amazing woman, a terrific woman, a great woman, and she will be missed.”
Trump would read how others missed her, too. The Globe and Mail wrote, “Most of the construction workers canvassed at the base of Trump World Tower this week chuckled at the idea of their boss running for higher office, though their eyes grew wide at the thought of a Slovenian underwear model as First Lady.”
The timing of the split meant that the Melania and Trump relationship lived on in a number of glossy magazines that were about to go to press—or had already. George magazine had committed to featuring Trump on its February/March issue cover, with Melania about to plant a kiss on his cheek. The headline was “The Secret Behind Trump’s Political Fling.” News of the Donald-Melania breakup caused some last-minute shuffling. Editors found a quick fix: they cropped the photo. It still showed Trump with Melania, but the picture showed only her lips, and she could have been any woman. Inside was an extended profile by Christopher Byron, the noted financial journalist who died in 2017. It delved into Trump’s life, career, finances, and the general American zeitgeist of a celebrity real estate developer considering a run for president.
Byron seemed especially impressed by Melania’s arrival during his interview with Trump at Mar-a-Lago. He wrote, “This vision, emerging from nowhere, wrapped in a towel you could have fit in a Taj Mahal tote bag, trying to clasp it to her nakedness with one hand, while shaking my hand with the other, and saying, ‘I’m so flattered to meet you. Donald has told me so much.’ ” In last-minute edits, the breakup—but not Melania’s correct age—was worked into his story.
Even the beautiful 26-year-old model, Melania Knauss, whom he paraded around as his potential first lady until their recent breakup, is something of an illusion. The press has taken to describing her as a fashion “supermodel,” in much the way they uncritically fawned over his first wife, Ivana, as a top model and an “Olympic skier,” two images that Trump did much to help cultivate. But just as Ivana seems to have been, at most, a barely known model prior to hooking up with him, Melania Knauss was largely unknown prior to her yearlong romance with Trump. She earned a good living, to be sure. But her status as a supermodel, whatever that means, was bestowed by the media only after Trump began incessantly introducing her that way as she hung on his arm at public functions.
A bigger editing problem was the sidebar about Melania, written by Sean Neary, under the headline “Meet the First Babe.” The original layout featured a full-page photo of Melania in a tiny black bikini and a half-page photo spread of women from Trump’s past—his ex-wives and six women identified as girlfriends. The smaller spread was headlined “Dealer’s Choice,” with the women’s faces displayed on gold poker chips. In the updated layout, Melania was demoted to just another poker chip, under a newly plural headline, “Meet the First Babes.” In the story that was not published, Trump described Melania as his “possible wife number three” and “a potential first lady.” There was also a description of Melania and Trump in their apartment: “ ‘Isn’t she gorgeous?’ glows her boyfriend, Donald Trump, as he puts his left arm around her, strategically placing his hand on her backside, where it remains for the next 10 minutes. ‘As far as supermodels go—and unfortunately I know them all—she is the most beautiful.’ ”
According to a copy of the original version of the story that was spiked because Melania and Trump broke up, Melania raved about Trump and took a swipe at Hillary Clinton, who would be a guest at the Trumps’ wedding five years later:
Knauss is already thinking about moving into 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. “Mr. Trump would be a great leader,” she says, settling into a plush couch. “And as first lady, I would serve the nation. I would help the country be a better place.” Unlike New York Senate candidate Hillary Clinton—who, Knauss says, “should run somewhere else”—this would-be presidential partner promises to take a back seat to her husband. “I will be social. That is the right thing for the woman to do,” Knauss explains in her accented English. “I will campaign with him, support him, be there for him…”
Knauss says she would give up all the glamor to take on the duties of first lady. “It would be an honor,” she says. “Life will not be that different if we go on to the White House. I will continue to do charity work and attend social events.”
After the split, Neary did manage to get Melania on the phone to confirm the breakup and to update his story with her thoughts on Trump. His final published story was boiled down to a few paragraphs and noted: “Just two weeks later, sources close to Knauss say she dumped the 53-year-old real estate mogul after she began to suspect that Trump was cheating on her. ‘I’m not going to stay home and cry,’ Knauss told George in her first interview after the breakup. ‘Other girls would do that, but not me. I am confident in myself and who I am.’ ”
Neary said Melania also offered a new perspective on politics. The story that ran quoted her as saying:
Before the breakup: “I will campaign with him and be there for him.”
After the breakup: “I will have to follow the election a bit more closely and listen to all the candidates.”
Neary said in a recent interview that he thought it strange that Melania repeatedly referred to her boyfriend as “Mr. Trump.” But he remembered her as “lovely, personable, and intelligent,” adding, “She seemed to be proud to be in the situation she was in, and of who she was with. She was in a position of power.”
The Trump-Melania split also happened after an article in Talk magazine had gone to print. The February 2000 issue hit newsstands in early January and featured a two-page photo of Melania in a red bikini and stiletto heels sprawled across a carpet bearing the presidential seal with the words “A Model First Lady.” Accompanying Melania was a smaller photo of Trump, sitting in front of an American flag while talking on a red phone.
At the time, Amy Brill, a young writer assigned to profile Melania, seemed to be almost winking at readers. The idea of Melania Knauss in a presidential campaign, let alone as first lady, seemed like a joke. But there was Melania, talking it up seriously, like a political spouse, without the slightest whiff of irony. Melania wore a robe for the interview, before she removed it and posed for the photograph in her bikini on the rug.
“You play a role,” Melania Knauss says, very quietly. “It’s a beez-ness.” She has an Eastern European honey whisper.… When Knauss speaks, she does so in the manner of a cat on the verge of sleep. But she can shed this pose in a heartbeat.
In politics, “you need to know how to deal with people,” Knauss says brightly. “You need to choose the right people to work for you. You need to make the right decisions and stand by them. And,” she finishes, “you need to know how to run a beez-ness.”
Brill asked Melania if she was very different from her boyfriend, and she said no. What about the age difference? “I don’t feel the age difference because we are still so young in the mind, and it is so enjoyable. We enjoy the life.” As to what kind of first lady she would be:
“I would be very traditional,” she says. This is something of a stump speech for her. She’d emulate Jackie Kennedy, Betty Ford. “I will do social obligations, social events. I will do charities. I love children. I think Make-A-Wish Foundation is great.” Knauss trails off, sips a diet Coke carefully. There’s Barbara Bush to consider, Nancy Reagan. Hillary, too. Hillary perhaps especially.
“Jackie is traditional,” says Knauss. “Hillary—she is not. She is the opposite.” Knauss is thinking now: “I don’t think it’s wrong. I think Hillary is a great woman.”
In this 2000 article, Melania raved about Trump’s political appeal and ability to connect with people, saying his supporters were so fervent that they would scream his name when they saw him. In 2016, as people stood in line for hours and yelled his name at Trump rallies, Trump told others that his wife had long been a true believer.
In 2019, Brill told me that Melania struck her as “smart, polite, and savvy” during the interview. “She was quite intelligent,” she said. “She was very measured and very thoughtful and very soft-spoken and very polite. It was sort of ‘not a word out of place.’ She’s the opposite of a loose cannon.” She said Melania seemed to view what she did that day for the article—pose in a bikini and high heels, then chat about being a traditional first lady—as just two different roles to play. “She’s a model—she does whatever she’s told to do in front of a camera,” Brill said. “Being a first lady is a different job where you do different things. I don’t think she saw the irony at all.”
Brill said she believes that Melania was speaking hypothetically about being the first lady and didn’t really believe Trump would ever be president. But she also saw in Melania a “chess player,” someone who seemed capable of doing whatever it took to “protect her position.” Brill added, “She doesn’t seem particularly vulnerable to me, ever.”
Her article was accompanied by a memorable photo of Melania lying on a rug in what was meant to look like the Oval Office. The photographer was Patrick Demarchelier, famous for his photos of Farrah Fawcett and Brooke Shields, whose work appeared in Vogue and other premier magazines. For years, Demarchelier, who earned a mention in The Devil Wears Prada, attended dinners and parties with Trump. Melania has cited being photographed by Demarchelier as a career highlight and listed working with him on her resume as late as 2015. (More recently, his career suffered after seven women accused him of sexual harassment.)
The last of the magazines still reporting that Trump and Melania were together was Tatler’s April issue, which included an eight-page spread of Melania wearing seven different bikinis. Photos in it were shot at Mar-a-Lago. Melania reclines on a putting green, she pouts beneath the palms, she struts on stone steps, she poses with a putter.
Melania… the curvaceous Slovenian model, who first arrived on America’s shores in 1996, saw her career skyrocket when she hit the campaign trail with Donald Trump…
The 53-year-old billionaire maintains that he dumped her in order to focus on his presidential ambitions, while the 26-year-old brunette insists that it was she who dumped him. Apparently, she found out he was carrying on with an ex-girlfriend—another supermodel.
Tatler also quoted Trump’s friend Lucy Sykes, the stylist on Melania’s Town & Country shoot the year before, about their relationship: “He’d say things like, ‘She’s only with me because I’m rich,’ and she’d say, ‘That’s right, honey,’ ” recalls Sykes. “She played him at his own game.”
Tatler said Knauss “has profited from the association at least as much as Trump has. When she hooked up with him at the end of 1998, she was a little-known lingerie model.… It’s surely only a matter of time before she’s cast in the next Bond film. Watch this space.”
At the start of 2000, Donald Trump was the one to watch. The opening of the new millennium was a time of triumph for Trump. At fifty-three, he was now fully riding the Clinton-era economic boom. He had carefully cultivated his image as a lady-killer, a business whiz, master of the “Art of the Deal.” At the time, Trump was fascinated by Jesse Ventura, a professional wrestler and political neophyte who became governor of Minnesota by winning only 37 percent of the vote in a three-way race. Trump told people he suddenly realized that he didn’t need all the votes to become president, he just needed enough to win. He floated the idea of running as a third-party alternative to “Gush and Bore,” as he liked to call Republican George W. Bush and Democrat Al Gore.
The night the news of his breakup with Melania ran in the Post, Trump was out with thirty-two beauty pageant contestants at One 51, a Manhattan dance club. A few days later, he hosted more than one hundred Reform Party members at Mar-a-Lago—without his steady girlfriend. Even theNew York Times wondered: “What about Mr. Trump’s breakup with MELANIA KNAUSS, the Slovenian model he had been dating? The split was no longer a rumor, but a fact, Mr. Trump said. This raises a question: Will it be difficult to campaign without a significant other?”
Trump’s love life now had a political element.
Marriage thus far had not been a success story for Trump. His first one, to Ivana, ended badly. The second, to Marla, included the sting of having Marla caught on a beach late at night with one of his security guys. People close to Trump said they had never seen him so furious and humiliated. In January, Marla announced that she was publishing a memoir, All That Glitters Is Not Gold, and that it was not expected to be flattering to Trump. Trump is known for threatening to sue to try to stop books about him from being published. Marla’s memoir never appeared, eventually being withdrawn “by mutual consent.”
Jay Goldberg, Trump’s friend and lawyer who worked on his divorce from Ivana, said marriage hadn’t been an easy fit for Trump, who was always looking for the next thing. “I noticed in the relationship with Marla, the philosophy that there’s nothing that destroys love except for marriage… that if you have steak every night, you get tired of it,” Goldberg told me. “He was so in love with Marla when he was cheating on Ivana. Then once they got married, the fun of the chase was over.”
Yet, despite his track record, some people advising Trump to enter politics were nudging him toward a third marriage. The argument was that there had not been a bachelor president in more than a century. But Trump had other options besides Melania, chief among them another beautiful model named Kara Young.
Trump had first met Kara in 1995; Marla introduced them at the downtown Cipriani, where many models gathered. While having lunch with Marla, Trump had spotted Kara sitting at the counter with a friend. “Who’s that?” he asked. Marla told him, “That’s Kara Young, the Victoria’s Secret model,” and then introduced Trump to her. Two years later, when Trump’s marriage to Marla was on the rocks, Trump and Kara started dating. She loved that Trump was a fun, sober alternative to many of the men she met. On an early date when she ordered a glass of wine, he ordered one too but left it sitting untouched. Kara was charmed, and they started an on-again, off-again relationship that spanned several years.
Kara was from San Francisco, the daughter of a white father and a black mother. She was wild and exciting, gregarious, confident, and willing to tell Trump when she thought he was full of shit. She knew everybody he wanted to know—when they took Tiffany, who was around four years old, to see The Lion King on Broadway, they ended up chatting with Whitney Houston. Kara was cooler than Trump, and he knew it. Kara was also already famous, and hung out with supermodels such as Cindy Crawford, Elle Macpherson, and Christy Turlington. While Trump was a major celebrity in New York, she knew people he didn’t. He loved it when she introduced him to Naomi Campbell, Kate Moss, Robert De Niro, Jack Nicholson, and Puff Daddy (Sean “Puffy” Combs).
“With Kara dating him, he scored the ringleader of the supermodels,” said his friend Jason Binn, the publisher of Ocean Drive and Hamptons magazines. “That was his thought process.… All the girls listened to her. She was a rock star and all the girls loved her.” Kara was struck by how much Trump loved attention, and how he loved to be out, to be seen, to be written about in the press. She used to tell him, instead of people always saying, “There’s Donald Trump,” he should leave them saying, “Where’s Donald Trump?” Leave them wanting more, she told him: “It’s more alluring if you don’t go every single place or comment on every single thing.”
Trump and Melania said that they started dating in September 1998, when they met at the Kit Kat Club. Kara is unclear about her exact timeline with Trump but said that they started seeing each other in 1997 and dated on and off for years. “He was an intoxicating person, and it’s not easy to exit that orbit,” she said. For a while, at least, both Melania and Kara seem to have been orbiting together—seeing Trump at the same time. “They were concurrent for months,” said one longtime Trump associate. “I would see them. They were in and out of the office at the same time. Both of them. I’m sure they knew about each other, because Donald told me they knew about each other, so there’s no doubt about that.”
How much they actually knew about each other is unclear, but they certainly saw each other. They ran into each other at a casting call, and they saw each other at a few parties. But whatever equilibrium existed, it all blew up in late 1999.
Interviews with people who know both Donald and Melania offer some nuanced explanations. Several associates said that Trump wanted to end things with Melania, but he didn’t want to drop the axe himself. Despite Trump’s famous “You’re fired!” tagline from his television show The Apprentice, he has a long history of avoiding direct confrontations; he doesn’t like the dirty work. Some friends suspect that he stage-managed the end—that he arranged events so that Melania would see Kara or find evidence of Kara—to get out of the relationship without having to confront Melania.
But Melania didn’t give up on Trump, even though she had lots of interest from other men while she was dating Trump. Once during their courtship, a friend recalled that Melania wanted to attend a premiere in Los Angeles. Trump was unavailable, so Melania was accompanied by the heir to a wealthy family. “He was younger, good looking, everything—and his family was much bigger and richer than Trump,” the friend said. This man liked Melania and felt he had much more to offer her than Trump did. He was shocked that she showed no interest. As he put it, Melania couldn’t be “flipped” to dump Trump and take up with him. She told him that she had zero interest in anyone but Donald. Their breakup didn’t seem to change that.
Several people close to Trump have said that Melania understood him better than any woman he had dated. He had published several books, and as one friend said, Melania seemed to have read the whole shelf. “There is high maintenance. There is low maintenance. I want no maintenance,” Trump wrote, in The Art of the Comeback (1997), coauthored by Kate Bohner. Melania certainly was that, and she also didn’t make herself too available to the man who had said that nothing was more attractive to him than something he couldn’t have. Trump had written years earlier: “The same assets that excite me in the chase, often, once they are acquired, leave me bored… For me, you see, the important thing is the getting, not the having.” A friend of Melania’s explained, “She always knows the direction where she wants to go. She’s not scared to go to the next step, and for that you have to have a lot of brains.”
THROUGH THE winter, Trump continued to play Hamlet, contemplating both women and avoiding a decision. And as he thought about his political prospects, there was a new question to consider: Who would make the best political spouse? Trump called his friends and reviewed the pros and cons: “Melania or Kara?” Some advised him that Melania could be great, because she was a head-turner and loyal—there would be no whiff of scandal, no drama, no tell-all book. But they also noted that she was an immigrant who spoke English with a pronounced accent, which might be a negative for some voters, and she didn’t like to speak in public. Even New York tabloids, the bibles of all things Trump, were still confused in late 1999 about her background and reported it in different ways. The Associated Press wrote about how little was known about where she came from. “Knauss’ past is as mysterious as her German-sounding name,” the wire service reported. Some reports said that she was Slovenian; others, Austrian. Trump told some people she was partly Italian. “She’s Croatian,” said one modeling agent she worked for. “No, maybe she’s from Slovenia?”
Kara was gorgeous, famous, and well respected, and she would add star power to Trump’s candidacy. She was also biracial, which could be a plus or a minus, depending on the voter. Kara had been married and had a young child, and while she found Trump fun to be with, friends said that Melania seemed to be much more committed to being his partner for the long term. Melania praised him constantly. She had few friends and a small family and seemed focused solely on Trump. She was always impeccably dressed, her hair and makeup just so, never sloppy, always camera ready. “I don’t even know if she goes to the bathroom,” said one friend, laughing.
“She is always perfect, put together,” the friend added. “For me their relationship is not bizarre. She’s from a small town in a small country and that has always driven her to make the extra effort to stand out.” The woman said that Melania proved to Trump that she was not like any other woman and “embedded that image in his eyes.” Melania was careful to always shine but to never outshine her boyfriend. She continued to do exactly what Trump liked during their breakup period. She stayed in; she dated no one. “Would another girl do that?” a friend said. “She was smart. She knew how to get him back. If she wanted to get back with him—and she did—this was the way to do it: prove her loyalty.”
Trump began telling people he was impressed that she turned down dates. He could go out and it would not mean much, but she couldn’t—and she seemed to understand his rules. That’s not to say that Trump’s behavior didn’t infuriate her sometimes. During the breakup period, Matthew Atanian recalled phoning Melania just to check in. “How’s it going with Trump?” he asked. “Oh, I don’t go out with him anymore—he’s a pig,” she replied, according to Atanian’s recollection.
But she also still wasn’t going out with anyone else. She waited.
“He asked me which girl I should choose, and I said Kara because I never really liked Melania that much,” said one longtime Trump associate. “I could tell that was not the answer he wanted. He had made up his mind. He said Melania was ‘central casting.’ ”
Phillip Bloch, who worked as the creative style director of Trump’s Miss Universe pageant, met Melania around this time, when she accompanied Trump to a fashion show and caused a commotion. After watching Melania with him over the years, he believes it would be hard for Trump to find a better match. “She’s glamorous and presents very, very, very well—and she doesn’t say much.” Bloch knew other women Trump dated, and he knew that Trump wanted someone who made him look good but who also wasn’t “too showy.” “She is very gracious and polite and steady. She’s the complete opposite of him, really. Which is why I think that’s kind of the secret to her success.”
But even a year after they got back together, Trump was still talking about Kara.
On May 10, 2001, former Daily News gossip columnist A. J. Benza, who had gone out with Kara Young before she dated Trump, appeared on The Howard Stern Show to promote a book. Trump called in, and he and Benza ended up shouting at each other. “I had been very successful with your girlfriend, I can tell you that,” Trump said, gloating. He added: “A. J. doesn’t like Trump for one reason: I stole his girlfriend. I took her away like he was a dog.” Benza threatened to whack Trump with a baseball bat, and Trump taunted him: “Any girl you have, I can take from you.”