TWENTY-ONE-YEAR-OLD MELANIA stood on a sidewalk in Ljubljana at the same moment Jure Zorcic rode past on his Vespa. She was, he recalled, “extra beautiful,” and he stopped to talk to her. It was not simply her eyes that made her so striking, it was “everything,” including how she was dressed. Zorcic said he and Melanija briefly dated before she left for her modeling career in Italy. “Disciplined and quiet” is how he remembered her, saying that these are common characteristics for Slovenians. She was smart, too. “She was thinking a hundred times over.”
He still remembers one outfit she wore: rich brown leather from head to toe—soft leather, like the kind found in expensive cars, accented with big gold buttons. He pronounced her “one of the nicest girls I have ever met. But why? Because always low profile, always.” She did not drink, he noticed. She was not one of the party girls letting loose as the country shed its socialist past.
They met again about ten years later in New York. Zorcic, who had made the trip with his girlfriend, left a message for Melania Knauss at Trump Tower, since he knew she was dating Trump. Two days after he left the message, he said, Melania called him in his hotel room.
Zorcic and Melania met in the café at Saks Fifth Avenue at 10:00 a.m. A man who Zorcic assumed was a bodyguard was sitting in another section, watching. They talked about life in the United States, but nothing personal. After an hour, Zorcic asked for the check, and Melania said, “What are you doing? Forget it.” She made sure it was taken care of. Then they walked to the street and Melania left in a limo—a long way from riding Vespas in Ljubljana.
But to Zorcic, she seemed still to be the same woman who had been raised in a “normal, middle-class family.” Her life, surroundings, wealth, and fame had changed drastically, and he expected that she could not possibly have remained the person he once knew, but after their conversation, he felt that in some ways she had not changed much at all.
But as Melania became a more permanent part of Trump’s world in New York in the early 2000s, she increasingly left her old life behind. The woman who enjoyed her small apartment and bought her furniture at Crate & Barrel became the woman who embraced Donald Trump’s gold-plated universe. Even before she met Trump, Melania had perfected the art of sealing off different parts of her life. In my travels around Sevnica and Ljubljana, people who had at one time considered Melania like family said she never called once and had long since moved on. People who met her in New York knew virtually nothing about her years in Europe. Many of those I interviewed in Slovenia, Europe, and New York said that they felt it was as if she wanted to erase anything that had happened in her life before she met Donald Trump. “It’s almost like she actually believes she was always Mrs. Trump,” said one.
Trump is a master image maker and mythologizer. In his telling, his wife was a supermodel from the minute they met, and then she became Mrs. Donald Trump. One seamless yellow brick road.
In an interview with Tatler in 2005, Melania herself made it clear that she never discussed past boyfriends, and that she had largely severed ties with Slovenia. “I left 15 years ago. I don’t have many contacts with people there—no schoolfriends. I go there because of my mum… the last time was about two years ago.” It was an explanation she repeated often. As early as her 1998 Paris press conference, she had stated that she had lost contact with people in her home country, an odd thing to tell six Slovenian journalists.
In 2019, I discussed Melania’s tendency to compartmentalize parts of her life with Stephanie Winston Wolkoff, who has experienced this behavior from both sides, first as one of Melania’s close friends and part of her small circle in New York and later as an outsider, after a falling-out. Winston Wolkoff was one of Melania’s few personal friends to attend her wedding, and they both raised young boys together. She had worked for Vogue and also organized the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute Gala, the famous “Met Gala,” which led the Trumps to select her as a primary organizer for many events at Trump’s 2017 inaugural. She worked on planning the details of inaugural events, down to how thick the gold border on invitations would be. As she helped Melania think about how to use her office to help children, Winston Wolkoff held White House meetings with experts on social and emotional learning—but plans to focus on that never materialized. When a controversy erupted regarding how more than $100 million raised for the Trump inaugural was spent, Winston Wolkoff received significant blame. She felt scapegoated by others around Trump, and several working on the inaugural agreed. Melania never publicly came to her defense and that, she said, was “devastating.”
Winston Wolkoff said perhaps it is no coincidence that Melania admires old-time actresses including Sophia Loren and Audrey Hepburn. Years ago, Hollywood studios could create whatever image they wanted to for their stars. It was much easier to sell a perfectly polished story to the public in the days before the internet and social media. And there was far less questioning of the personal stories that actresses told about their lives or the images they chose to project.
Her unsentimental streak has left a bad taste with other old friends. After they no longer shared an apartment, Atanian said that he and Melania would run into each other periodically but that the atmosphere was always chilly. He remembers when she introduced him to Trump—“Matthew, this is Donald Trump”—at a Halloween party thrown by Heidi Klum. To Trump she said, “This is Matthew, my old roommate,” she explained. Atanian said Trump barely acknowledged him. Soon, he said, Melania started treating him the same way. As she climbed higher up the social and professional ladder in New York, Atanian said that he felt as if she was pulling the ladder up behind her. She seemed to be wiping him from her history. He saw her and Trump one more time, at trendy Manhattan club Spy Bar. He said that she hardly spoke to him. “She was always a nice person,” Atanian said, but he feels that she changed after she met Trump. “She’d just walk around hanging on to his arm, and that was it,” he said.
But Atanian also didn’t go out of his way to join Melania’s new world. When she was first with Trump, Atanian remembers that he and Paolo Zampolli’s girlfriend, Edit Molnar, joked about Trump’s penis size. “Don’t say this—he’s a real man,” Melania told them. She had a similar response when Atanian asked her about Trump’s over-the-top gilded apartment in Trump Tower. According to him, her answer was, “Oh, it’s so beautiful, so much class. This is the way real men live.”
Atanian said that he and Melania stayed in touch for a while, but that at some point he called and found that her number had been changed. He called Donald Trump’s modeling agency repeatedly and left messages for her. She never called back. They told him: “We gave her your message, man. If she doesn’t call you, there’s nothing we can do.” Atanian heard similar stories from others. He recounted being in Salt Lake City to photograph the 2002 Winter Olympics and running into a photographer from Slovenia. He mentioned that his old roommate, Melania Knauss, was also from Slovenia. The photographer replied: “Oh, I went to high school with her. She’s a snob. She doesn’t talk to us or any of her friends.”
Trump-era friends, however, recount a different experience with Melania. Donald Trump and Chris Christie, then the U.S. Attorney in New Jersey and later New Jersey’s governor, often met for dinner in Manhattan. In 2002, for the first time, Trump said that he would bring his girlfriend, and he suggested that Christie bring his wife, Mary Pat, who worked on Wall Street. He told Christie that he was getting serious with this one. The woman who arrived with Trump was Melania. “Melania was the only one he ever brought,” Christie recalled.
“I didn’t know what to expect when I met her the first time,” he said. “I’d heard of her obviously, because she’d been in the tabloids for dating him and for her own modeling career. So I knew the name, but I knew nothing about her. And by the end of the first dinner, it was clear to me that this was a really smart, really strong personality.”
Christie added, “That first dinner, I remember getting into the car afterwards and Mary Pat saying, ‘So she’s gotta be that beautiful and smart.’ Like she’s a home run. We would go out to dinner usually three or four times a year.” Christie noted that Melania was “up-to-date” on what was going on in the world, and readily discussed any topic that came up at their dinners, whether it was business, politics, or law enforcement. They also talked about their families. He recalls her being “incredibly relaxed,” adding, “I don’t think she felt like she was being observed, judged, that kind of thing, so she was very comfortable. We just hit it off.”
The other thing that Christie noticed was how well Melania balanced Trump. “She was very good at slowing him down.” When Trump would launch into a long commentary, making it hard for other people to say a word, Melania would gently put her hand on his arm. Trump would pivot and start asking his dinner companions questions, engaging and including them. “What became clear to me was that she was very influential with him and remains so. And she is also very candid, so if she doesn’t like something, she says it. Now, she doesn’t do it in a rude way.”
Christie sees Melania as a good judge of people and a positive influence on Trump. “If she trusts you, if she’s developed a trust for you, she is an extraordinarily warm person.” One thing many people agree upon about this time: Trump was never boring and was generous with his homes and plane. Apart from his flirtation with the Reform Party, he was not personally involved in politics, and people laughed at his self-promotional, over-the-top style. It was entertainment. In the pre-Twitter era, Trump hung out with as many Democrats as Republicans. He took Melania to interesting places and introduced her to famous people. “She thought she died and went to heaven when she met him. She loved him. People say she just married him for his money—there were other rich men she could have married. She really loved him,” said a woman who knew her at the time.
ON JANUARY 22, 2005, thirty-four years after she was born Melanija Knavs in a socialist country, Melania Knauss married one of the kings of American capitalism and became Mrs. Donald J. Trump. The ceremony was held at the Bethesda-by-the-Sea Episcopal Church, in Palm Beach, and a fleet of limos ferried the guests to nearby Mar-a-Lago for the reception afterward. Most of the three hundred fifty guests at their wedding were famous. Elton John sang. So did Billy Joel, who performed his own version of “That’s Why the Lady Is a Tramp,” calling it, “That’s Why the Donald Is a Trump.”
Some of the guests were not especially close to the Trumps but attended out of curiosity. Bill Clinton, who had left the White House four years earlier, was there, as was Hillary Clinton, then a U.S. senator representing New York and later Trump’s rival for the presidency. (One guest recounted how people approached her at the wedding and encouraged her to run for president.) Rudy Giuliani, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and Benjamin Netanyahu, who had been prime minister of Israel and would later be elected again, were also among the guests. So were some of the country’s most famous athletes, including Derek Jeter and Shaquille O’Neal. Also at the wedding was Jeff Zucker, then running NBC television programming, and now head of CNN, one of Trump’s most frequent Twitter targets.
Anna Wintour, editor in chief of Vogue, American Idol judge Simon Cowell, and supermodel Heidi Klum were also in the crowd. So were a lot of media celebrities, including Barbara Walters, morning show figures Matt Lauer, Katie Couric, Kathie Lee Gifford, and Gayle King, longtime MSNBC host Chris Matthews, daytime talk show hosts Kelly Ripa and Regis Philbin, and CBS president Les Moonves. The names alone are a reminder that in 2005, Melania did not marry the polarizing person America now knows.
Melania invited very few people she had known before she began dating Trump. Her sister, Ines, was her maid of honor. There were no bridesmaids. Her parents were there and so was Paolo Zampolli, who introduced her to Trump.
Trump, as he boasted about the lavish plans for their upcoming wedding, said he was considering hiring two of the most sought-after photographers in the world, Marco Glaviano and Patrick Demarchelier, to shoot it. Neither was keen to act as a wedding photographer, and both knew Trump would likely turn around and sell exclusive rights to the wedding photos to make money. Glaviano quoted his fee to Trump—at least $1 million, according to other photographers who heard the story—infuriating Trump. Demarchelier reportedly proposed an even higher fee. Trump told Melania he didn’t want either of them and to make sure neither photographer brought a camera—not the easiest phone call for a model to make to two fashion-world icons. But people involved in the wedding said Melania made the calls and shrugged any embarrassment off with a characteristic You know how he is. To this day, unless it involves another woman, she has shown a great ability to not be fazed by anything Trump does, explaining to others, “That’s the way he is.” But even then, she did set her own boundaries. Trump wanted to accept an offer from NBC, the network on which his television show, The Apprentice, aired, to broadcast their wedding live. Melania said no.
At the service, Tiffany Trump, eleven, handed out programs, and Ivanka read from the Bible. Don Jr. and Eric were their father’s best men. Cameron Burnett, the young son of Mark Burnett, the producer of The Apprentice, was the ring bearer. Melania’s mother brought her baptism candle from Slovenia, and the bride carried the family rosary beads. At Mar-a-Lago, an orchestra in white tuxedos played the classics: Gershwin and Porter and, naturally, “I’ll Take Manhattan.” Toasts were made with endless bottles of Cristal champagne. Trump told people the wedding was Melania’s day, and she told People magazine: “I arranged everything.” She had a wedding planner but selected everything herself, from the centerpieces to the candles lighting the walkways. Her dress was made of white satin and beaded with 1,500 crystals and her veil was sixteen feet long. Tiffany & Co. printed invitations that she designed. It was her fairy-tale wedding.
Appearing on the cover of Vogue is the holy grail for a model, and Melania landed on the cover in her wedding dress. She had chosen a design from Dior that she had shopped for in Paris with Vogue’s famous style guru André Leon Talley. On the cover was the headline “Donald Trump’s New Bride: the Ring, the Dress, the Wedding, the Jet, the Party.” Inside, the accompanying story was headlined “How to Marry a Billionaire.” Writer Sally Singer, traveling with the Trumps on his private plane, captured an exchange between Melania and Trump:
She says with a laugh, “Doesn’t anybody care what the bride wants?” She turns to Donald. “You said, ‘Do everything and I’ll just turn up.’ ”
“That’s right, I did,” Donald admits. “I’ll just turn up in my suit. Black tie.”
“You’re wearing a white tie,” Melania informs him, “and a white cummerbund. They’re already hanging in your closet.”
Donald laughs delightedly. “Isn’t she spectacular? Aren’t I lucky?”
Glamour magazine later listed the nuptials as one of the “7 most spectacular weddings of all time.” Among the other six were those of Princess Diana and Prince Charles, Grace Kelly and Prince Rainier, and Jacqueline Lee Bouvier and John F. Kennedy. Getting mentioned alongside global royalty was seen as a patented Trump publicity move. To many guests, the wedding provided a glimpse of Melania’s role in her relationship with her new husband: she was a star, but it was unmistakably a Trump production. It was the moment Melania became fully absorbed into Trump’s world. Before a crowd of Trump family, Trump friends, Trump business associates, Trump sports and media pals, and Trump golfing buddies, Melania became a Trump.
Becoming Mrs. Trump meant signing a prenup. Questions about their financial agreement surfaced about a year after Trump and Melania started dating. “Donald Trump’s name is synonymous with a lot of things, but not the least is the phrase ‘prenuptial agreement.’ Do you know what that is?” Good Morning America correspondent Don Dahler asked Melania in their early December 1999 interview. He seemed to be making sure Melania understood the question.
“Yes, I know what it is,” she said.
“Given his history with acrimonious divorces, with bitter divorces, would you even consider signing one with him?” Dahler asked.
“You know, everybody has different opinions, so let’s see what happens,” she replied. Dahler looked surprised, like she couldn’t be serious. “Different opinions about?” he asked.
“About the prenuptial agreement, about sign it, not to sign it. Everybody decides what—you know, what is inside of them,” she said with a smile.
“So you’re not ruling out anything?” he asked.
Melania paused for a couple of long seconds. This was chess in front of a national audience. She knew that in addition to an audience of millions, an even more important audience of one was surely watching. “No,” she said.
Donald Trump had a highly public track record of protecting himself with ironclad prenups. When he married Ivana in 1977, she signed a prenup that was renegotiated several times. When they divorced, Ivana challenged their agreement in court, demanding $2.5 billion, half of what she estimated his net worth to be at the time, and asking for half was not outrageous. Actress Amy Irving had recently divorced Steven Spielberg, and her attorneys successfully argued in court that the prenup written on a napkin didn’t count. Irving had been married to Spielberg for four years and ended up with almost $100 million.
There are varying accounts of exactly how much Ivana got. But in the end, the prenup largely held, and Trump kept the vast majority of his wealth. According to the New York Times and other published reports, Ivana settled for $14 million in cash, a Greenwich mansion, an apartment in a Trump building, and access to Mar-a-Lago for one month a year. Ivana would later write that it was “too weird” to go to Mar-a-Lago so she bought her own place in Palm Beach. Trump also agreed to pay $650,000 a year to support the couple’s three children. When Trump married Marla in December 1993, he had insisted on a prenup that gave him the option of an inexpensive emergency exit from the marriage if it lasted less than five years.
In a June 2019 Vanity Fair article, journalist Gabriel Sherman reported that he had been passed a copy of the Marla prenup. He said that she had originally sought a guarantee of $25 million, but that under the terms she finally signed, Trump agreed to pay her only $1 million if they separated within five years, plus another $1 million to buy a house. The document also said that Trump would stop making $100,000 annual child support payments for Tiffany when she turned twenty-one. And Trump’s payments would cease earlier if Tiffany joined the military or the Peace Corps.
In addition, Sherman reported, Marla had agreed to an extensive confidentiality agreement saying that she wouldn’t publish “any diary, memoir, letter, story, photograph, interview, article, essay, account or description or depiction of any kind whatsoever, whether fictionalized or not, concerning (or seeming to concern) the details of the parties’ marriage.” Jay Goldberg, Trump’s longtime lawyer, told me that Trump kept one eye on the calendar. “He kept questioning me—how close are we to the five years? Like he wanted to divorce her, and he didn’t want the five years to pass. I’d say, ‘Donald, it’s only a little more than four years.’ ”
Trump served Marla with divorce papers just under the deadline, allowing him to make an inexpensive exit from the marriage. They separated in May 1997 and their divorce was final in June 1999. “After giving Donald two years to honor the verbal commitments he made to me during our 12-year relationship, I decided to walk away completely under the terms of our prenuptial agreement that had been placed before me just five days before our 1993 wedding,” Marla said in a statement at the time. Melania, who had lived through the last gasps of the Marla relationship, saw precisely how the prenup worked so ruthlessly well against Marla.
A few months before his wedding to Melania, Trump jokingly recalled his history with prenups with gossip columnist Liz Smith, saying that both exes had sued him but that he had prevailed: “And had I not had those prenuptial agreements, I wouldn’t be talking to you today. Other than talking to you from the standpoint of a loser, perhaps. And even then we’d be having lunch at McDonald’s instead of Le Cirque.”
Smith asked if he and Melania had a prenup. “Yes, we do. And the beautiful thing about Melania is she agrees with it. She knows I have to have that. Nobody gets married thinking they’re going to get divorced. But 55 percent of the people who get married do get divorced. You have to protect your life. Because the court system is unpredictable, and you can’t have unpredictability and be a successful person. You have to have a prenup. But I would be shocked if I had to use it. I’d be very surprised if something went astray with this.”
MELANIA KNEW from the start that Trump would be a hands-off father. He had often said that he was not the type of guy to push a stroller around Central Park, and his views hadn’t changed in 2016, when I interviewed him in Trump Tower. He said that he raised great kids in no small part thanks to their mothers. While we were talking, Jared Kushner, wearing shorts, entered Trump’s office, ready to review a campaign speech. Jared paused to praise Trump as a parent and said he wisely was not the type to give a kid a trophy for just showing up. If they did mediocre work, he told them.
Trump was not a big presence in the daily lives of his oldest three children from his first marriage until they started working at the Trump Organization, and he spent less time with his fourth child, Tiffany, as she was growing up. His fifth child, Barron, was born on March 20, 2006. As a toddler and young child, Barron was often formally dressed in suits, jackets, and elegant sweaters—just like his father. Melania made him her top priority and was a hands-on mother. Redbook quoted her as saying that she had let him write “Barron’s Bakery” on the wall in crayons in his playroom—knowing it could be painted over.
But having a child also changed how present Melania was in Trump’s public life. While they were dating, she had often sat on his lap at parties and was seen snuggling up against him, but after they married, spontaneous public affection became far more restrained. While Trump still calls her “baby,” Melania is more formal in many ways and calls him “Donald.” After Barron was born, some of Trump’s friends thought that he was less interested in Melania. “He wasn’t showing her off and they were not going out like before,” said a friend of the couple. Tellingly, Trump had said to ABC’s Nancy Collins in 1994, “I create stars. I love creating stars. And, to a certain extent, I’ve done that with Ivana. To a certain extent, I’ve done that with Marla… Unfortunately, after they’re a star, the fun is over for me.”
Two women have very publicly stated that they had affairs with Trump after Barron was born and while Trump was filming The Apprentice in Los Angeles. Another woman told me that around this time Trump was also trying to pursue her romantically, including offering rides in his jet to wherever she wanted and dinners with famous people. Until the 2016 campaign was underway, Melania did not realize the extent of his philandering, according to three people close to the couple. But she did attend parties where she watched her husband rekindle his modelizer ways, gravitating to and putting his arm around young models. At one party at the Playboy Mansion, the guests included a former Playmate of the Year, Karen McDougal. She would later go public with claims that she had a lengthy affair with Trump that started shortly after Barron was born. A person at this party said that Melania was talking about her new son, Barron, and looking “extremely uncomfortable as she saw her husband grab women and hold them for photos.”
Melania stayed at home more, spending her days inside Trump Tower or at Mar-a-Lago or Bedminster. Said one longtime friend, “I think her favorite place is Mar-a-Lago. She loves the weather. It’s relaxed. I think she feels like she can be very private there. People don’t bother her. She’s not very approachable. She’s not like him. He’s going around saying, ‘How’s your drink? Did you like the lunch? Was it good? Was the club sandwich good?’ Melania is sitting by the pool, reading a book. They don’t bother her. I’ve watched it; they don’t approach her.”
To carve out some space inside their gold-plated home in New York, she had a personal spa constructed in a section of the top floor of the Trump Tower penthouse, where Marla and Tiffany had lived when she first started dating Trump. In 2008, she told Allure that she began the Trump Tower spa project because, “I wanted some privacy and comfort when I needed to get a massage, manicure or pedicure, or have my hair or makeup done.”
Melania told the magazine that she was proud that the room-size spa reflected her own tastes. “It’s 300 square feet, all white marble and silver fixtures with white towels and robes,” she said. “Everything is from Italy, and it’s all very modern—a very different look from the rest of the apartment, which is more… baroque.”
Allure asked if she invited friends.
“No, it is private, more for myself.”
“What about your husband?”
“NO [laughs and laughs], my husband never comes in! Of course he has seen it, but… well, he doesn’t have time. Everybody has different hobbies and what they do for relaxation. He likes to play golf and be out—and that’s fine with me.”
Melania was once asked what advice she had received from older models when she started her career. Her response was that she never got advice from other models but did from her mother. “She was always taking care of herself. That was very important, and I guess she instilled that in me as well.” She said that her mother told her that relaxation time was vital for the mind as well as the body, and that “when you take care of yourself, you can take care of others.” And increasingly, Melania relied on her mother and father as she devoted herself to her son. The story of their presence in the United States is intensely tied to her own immigration story, which received new scrutiny after her husband began his run for president.
On July 28, 2006, the summer of the year Barron was born, Melania Trump officially became a U.S. citizen, five years after being granted a green card and slightly less than ten years after she first arrived in New York. Later, questions about her visa status were fueled largely by the couple’s refusal to make her documentation public—just as Donald Trump had refused to make his tax returns public. Trump made opposition to immigration a cornerstone of his campaign. He insisted that his wife had come to America legally, but the lack of transparency led to suspicion that there was something improper about Melania’s immigration story.
In August 2016, the New York Post published the nude photos that Melania had done for Max magazine, and incorrectly reported that they had been shot in 1995. That seemed to contradict Melania’s assertions that she had first arrived in the United States in 1996. While the Post’s reporting turned out to be wrong (the newspaper later corrected it), it was picked up by other outlets and her immigration history caused a continuing distraction for the campaign.
On August 9, Trump promised that Melania would hold a news conference to set the record straight. “They said my wife, Melania, might have come in illegally. Can you believe that one?” Trump said during a campaign rally in North Carolina. “Let me tell you one thing. She has got it so documented, so she’s going to have a little news conference over the next couple of weeks. That’s good. I love it. I love it.”
But that news conference never happened, and the Trumps have never publicly released Melania’s immigration records—or even identified the attorney who originally represented her. Instead, on September 14, less than two months before the election, Melania tweeted: “I am pleased to enclose a letter from my immigration attorney which states that, with 100% certainty, I correctly went through the legal process when arriving in the USA.” The letter—displayed beside her tweet—was from Michael J. Wildes, an immigration lawyer who had done work for Trump, including helping with visas for foreign contestants in Trump’s beauty pageants. Wildes is a Democrat and mayor of Englewood, New Jersey.
In the lobby of his sleek Manhattan offices, Wildes displays huge photographs of two celebrity clients: Melania and Jean-Georges Vongerichten, the French-born celebrity chef and namesake of Jean-Georges, the restaurant in the Trump International Hotel. Vongerichten helped cater Melania and Trump’s wedding. Along with soccer legend Pelé, singer Boy George, and celebrity lawyer Alan Dershowitz, Melania provided a laudatory blurb for Safe Haven in America: Battles to Open the Golden Door (2018), a book by Wildes. She wrote, “I thank Michael Wildes for his counsel in reviewing my own path to the American Dream, for his knowledge and professional dedication, not to mention his warmth and concern. He has shown himself to be a scholar in this field.”
Wildes is the son of immigration lawyer Leon Wildes, who became famous in the early 1970s for successfully defending John Lennon against the Nixon administration’s efforts to deport him for overstaying a tourist visa. Now Wildes, the son, was speaking on behalf of the wife of a Republican presidential candidate. He had not handled Melania’s original immigration matters but reviewed them and wrote, in the letter Melania posted: “Following a review of her relevant immigration paperwork, I can unequivocally state that these allegations are not supported by the record, and are therefore completely without merit.”
Wildes laid out the timeline. He said that Melania first arrived in the United States on August 27, 1996, on a B-1/B-2 visitor visa. About six weeks later, on October 18, the American embassy in Slovenia issued her an H-1B visa that allowed her to work legally as a model in the United States. Wildes confirmed that Melania would have had to return to Slovenia to pick up that visa. Wildes said that the H-1B was good for one year, and that Melania was issued five in total over the next five years. He also noted that she “self-sponsored” in 2000 for her green card, which then allowed her to apply for citizenship in five years. In March 2001, she was issued that green card through the elite EB-1 program, which was designed for people “of extraordinary ability.” Among the recipients were renowned academic researchers, multinational business executives, and others—including Olympic athletes and Oscar-winning actors—who demonstrated “sustained national and international acclaim.”
When I wrote about Melania’s visa for the Washington Post, Bruce Morrison, a former Democratic congressman, told me, “We called it the Einstein visa.” Morrison was the chairman of the House subcommittee that wrote the Immigration Act of 1990, which defined this visa category. I found out that in 2001, more than one million green cards were issued to non–U.S. citizens, but only a fraction of 1 percent—just 3,376—were for EB-1 visas. To qualify for these, immigrants had to demonstrate “extraordinary ability” by meeting certain criteria, such as having won “recognized prizes and awards” and enjoyed “commercial successes.”
The process of deciding who meets the “extraordinary ability” standard is subjective, and at the time many models were applying for visas under this category. It is not known what Melania put on her application. By 2000, she had a number of high-profile modeling credits—the Camel ad campaign, the cover of British GQ, a photo in the Sports Illustrated swimsuit edition. But did that add up to “extraordinary ability”? When I pressed Wildes about why Melania qualified, he insisted that she was more than eligible but would not discuss any details of her case. “There is no reason to adjudicate her petition publicly when her privacy is so important to her,” he said. But others disagreed and said the wife of a candidate railing against people abusing the immigration system should be more forthcoming. “What did she submit?” asked David Leopold, an immigration lawyer and a past president of the American Immigration Lawyers Association. “There are a lot of questions about how she procured entry into the United States,” he told me.
More questions about Melania’s immigration path were raised on November 4, 2016, days before the U.S. presidential election, when the Associated Press reported that Melania was paid more than $20,000 for ten modeling jobs before she was granted a visa permitting her to work. The AP reported that detailed ledgers and other records showed she worked in the month before she received her visa in October 1996 for, among others, Fitness magazine and the Bergdorf Goodman department store.
Because of Trump’s proposals to crack down on foreign nationals illegally living and working in the United States, the story of Melania’s visa process was of great interest to immigration advocates who said that Trump would not hesitate to deport a Mexican for the slightest immigration violation. “He has a double standard when it comes to immigration—one for his family and one for immigrants he doesn’t like,” said Morrison.
The Trumps have never directly addressed the issues the AP story raised about her first modeling jobs, but Wildes insists that that Melania “is meticulous about compliance.” Melania herself explained to Harper’s Bazaar that she was proud of following the immigration rules: “I came here for my career, and I did so well, I moved here. It never crossed my mind to stay here without papers. That is just the person you are. You follow the rules. You follow the law. Every few months you need to fly back to Europe and stamp your visa.”
During the 2016 campaign, Melania also talked about how much her U.S. citizenship meant to her, calling it “the greatest privilege in the world.” She said living and working in America was a blessing, “but I wanted something more. I wanted to be an American. After a ten-year process, which included many visas and a green card, in 2006, I studied for the test and became a U.S. citizen.… I’m an immigrant, and let me tell you, no one values the freedom and opportunity of America more than me, both as an independent woman, and as someone who immigrated to America.”
Melania often talks about how proud she is of her American citizenship, but less well known is the fact that she has also kept her Slovenian citizenship. Not only is she a dual citizen, but she has also made sure that Barron is, too. According to multiple sources, Melania applied for and received Slovenian citizenship for Barron; he is entitled to it because his mother was born in the country. Both Melania and Barron Trump have renewed their Slovenian passports since they moved into the White House. The United States does not object to dual citizenship, but all U.S. citizens are required to use their American passport when they enter and leave the country. There are no statistics on how many Americans hold dual citizenship, but while it is not uncommon, it is very unusual for members of the first family to be citizens of another country. (Louisa Adams, wife of John Quincy Adams, is the only other first lady to have been born outside of the United States; she was born in London in 1775.) Slovenian citizenship makes it easier for a person to inherit property and buy land in Slovenia. It also makes it easier to get both a job and health care in all twenty-seven countries of the European Union. Some EU countries have a cumbersome work permit process for foreigners, similar to the process in the United States. Melania essentially has given her son the same options she had. As she told the Slovenian journalists gathered in Paris in 1998, additional citizenship means “more doors in the world might be open to you.”
A key reason people keep dual citizenship is for its conveniences, but it can also be inconvenient. According to the State Department:
It is important to note the problems attendant to dual nationality. Claims of other countries upon U.S. dual-nationals often place them in situations where their obligations to one country are in conflict with the laws of the other. In addition, their dual nationality may hamper efforts of the U.S. Government to provide consular protection to them when they are abroad, especially when they are in the country of their second nationality.
After Melania received her U.S. citizenship, she focused her attention on her parents, and especially on her sister, who is Barron’s godmother. One day in 2006 she summoned immigration lawyer Eric Bland to Trump Tower to seek his help, leaving word with security at the side entrance to the building on Fifty-Sixth Street to let Bland take the elevator up to the penthouse. He was told to wait for her in her sitting room. Bland had walked by Trump Tower a million times but had never entered—not even the lobby.
He arrived before her and sat down in what seemed to him to be a living room, mesmerized by all the marble and gold. There was a little red wagon sitting there, with “Barron” written on the side. A homey family touch, he thought, in what otherwise felt like how Louis XIV might have decorated the Taj Mahal. And then there she was, the elegant Mrs. Trump. Melania sat down on a couch. No small talk. She got right to it: “What are the options for my sister?”
“Your parents will be relatively easy,” Bland said. “But your sister will be harder.” Bland explained the realities of what Donald Trump would later deride as “chain migration.” As a citizen, Melania could petition for her family members to join her in the United States. But it’s far easier for an immigrant who becomes a citizen to sponsor a child and parents than siblings. It could take twenty years or more of paperwork, persistence, and patience to get permanent residence for a sister.
Her parents and sister had been coming to visit her for years on visitor visas. That was fine for her parents, but her sister was in her late thirties. To work and to easily travel in and out of the country, she would need legal status—and not have to wait for two decades.
Ines and her parents have a special place in Melania’s life. They were just about the only ones who really knew her. Arranging for them to be permanently and legally living in the United States would be the final step in Melania’s immigrant journey. Bland had never met or spoken to her before, even though he had helped with the paperwork for her citizenship application. He was struck by how single-minded she was about her family’s immigration options. He tried to lighten things up, but that went nowhere. “I like to joke a little; that’s my personality, to be chatty. But she was very serious,” he said. He left with the impression that she was quite innocent. He described her as “a nice, kind young woman” who seemed out of place in Trump Tower.
Her efforts to keep her family close have succeeded. After her husband became the president of the United States, her parents would join her as naturalized U.S. citizens. Without any public notice, her sister would also become a legal permanent resident.
“AND HOW about chain migration? How about that?”
Twenty-three minutes into an Ohio rally on August 4, 2018, President Trump was firing up the crowd. Call-and-response. A roar rose to jeer immigrants bringing family members into the country.
“BOOOOOOOOOO!!”
“Somebody comes in, he brings his mother, and his father, and his aunt and uncle, fifteen times removed.”
“BOOOOOOOOO!!”
Five days later in Manhattan, Viktor and Amalija Knavs raised their right hands and recited the oath of citizenship that more than seven million people have spoken in the past decade:
I hereby declare, on oath, that I absolutely and entirely renounce and abjure all allegiance and fidelity to any foreign prince, potentate, state, or sovereignty, of whom or which I have heretofore been a subject or citizen; that I will support and defend the Constitution and laws of the United States of America against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; that I will bear arms on behalf of the United States when required by the law; that I will perform noncombatant service in the Armed Forces of the United States when required by the law; that I will perform work of national importance under civilian direction when required by the law; and that I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion; so help me God.
What Donald Trump was fuming about on August 4, his in-laws were celebrating on August 9. Viktor and Amalija’s naturalization ceremony was held quietly in the Jacob K. Javits Federal Building in Manhattan. As Melania’s parents, both in their seventies, exited the side door of the federal building, escorted by Department of Homeland Security police, one of the reporters waiting asked how it felt to finally be U.S. citizens.
“Thank you,” Viktor said. Then his lawyer, Michael Wildes, interjected. “This is an example of it going right,” Wildes said. He added that other than security arrangements, Melania’s parents did not receive special treatment. “The application, the process, the interview was no different than anybody else’s.” The attorney said, “This golden experiment, these doors that are in America, remain hinged open to beautiful people as they have today.”
Melania, who was staying in Bedminster, New Jersey, did not accompany her parents. Stephanie Grisham, Melania’s spokeswoman, said the first lady’s parents “are not part of the administration and deserve privacy.”
But what was most interesting is that Wildes, identified as Melania’s immigration lawyer, began publicly criticizing Trump’s immigration rhetoric and policies. The day after Viktor and Amalija got their U.S. citizenship with the help of their daughter who sponsored them, Wildes appeared on CNN. He called Trump’s opposition to family reunification “unconscionable” and accused the president of fearmongering at his Ohio rally. In an interview, Wildes said that he spoke to Melania beforehand and told her he had been asked to go on CNN: “She said, ‘Make it clear that I need babysitting. If I am going to do the work for the nation, I want to make sure my son is in the hands of my parents and they have the right to be here permanently.” Melania rarely talks directly about immigration, but she was allowing those close to her to criticize her husband’s policy. Her spokeswoman has also praised U.S immigration policies that allow a naturalized citizen to sponsor family members. Wildes on CNN called family reunification “a beautiful bedrock of immigration law.”
IN THE first years of the Trump administration, the number of new immigrants allowed into the United States has decreased dramatically. Denials of new applications for H-1B visas have quadrupled, while average processing time for all types of visas has increased by nearly 50 percent. In 2018, the United States added just 200,000 immigrants to the population, a remarkable 70 percent drop from the prior year. Wildes said that Trump’s policy of family separations “reminds us of our past mistakes,” including internment camps for Japanese Americans during World War II. “You can tell just by the language just being used, ‘anchor babies, chain migration,’ they are effectively changing the narrative away from the beautiful notion of family reunification,” Wildes said.
When I asked Wildes about how long it would be until Melania’s sister is granted her U.S. citizenship, he told me that he couldn’t talk about client matters. But typically, people are eligible for U.S. citizenship five years after they get a green card.