TRUMP OFTEN included Melania in his business meetings when they were dating. Several New York businessmen as well as a former Trump business associate all recounted similar stories of how Trump would usher Melania into a room full of men while they were working on a deal. Sometimes there would be just a few men, sometimes a couple dozen, and occasionally one other woman who was often older and certainly not dressed like Melania. They all told the same story: Melania would arrive looking gorgeous and say next to nothing. It seemed to everyone in the room that there was no need for her to be there except Trump liked that men had a hard time keeping their eyes off her.
She was often theatrically introduced at his meetings, too. Michael Streck, then the U.S.-based correspondent for the German publication Stern, recalls an interview in his office in Trump Tower in November 2001. Trump unexpectedly invited him to the penthouse. Streck told me, “He called Melania. She was upstairs preparing herself for a dinner later on. And she came down the stairs and he said, ‘Isn’t she stunning? Isn’t she beautiful? Could you turn your back?’ ”
Trump called Melania “honey” and kept boasting about how attractive she was. Streck found the whole scene awkward and weird. He said the way Trump introduced and showed off Melania reminded him of how a farmer might show off an award-winning cow at a cattle show. But it did not seem to bother Melania. Streck said Trump did nearly all the talking. He could not remember anything Melania said, but he vividly recalled that she wore a “very tight minidress.” After he left Trump Tower, he said he called his wife and said, “ ‘You really won’t believe what happened.’ [Melania] was obviously comfortable and was used to it. It was weird.”
Streck said that Melania wore “a very tight minidress, that’s what I do vividly remember. And he was obviously very proud of her. It was an awkward moment.” But Streck said that Melania seemed perfectly at ease: “Obviously she was used to this stuff.”
All the same, Trump had made it clear that he did not want his third wife too involved in business dealings. His first wife, Ivana, held high-ranking positions in the Trump Organization and Trump told ABC’s Nancy Collins that after that experience, “I will never again give a wife responsibility within my business.” Trump said when he got home at night, Ivana just wanted to talk business and not the “softer subjects in life.” For years Melania focused on being a full-time mother, but in 2009 she applied for a trademark for her planned jewelry collection and notably called it Melania, without using her famous last name. (Two years earlier, Ivanka had launched Ivanka Trump jewelry, capitalizing on the family name.) Melania said that now that Barron was a little older, she wanted to design luxurious-looking rings, bracelets, and watches that everyone could afford. Many of the pieces retailed for under fifty dollars, and she sold them on the QVC shopping network.
But as she went on TV to promote her jewelry, she was also being asked about her husband’s politics. On the Fox Business Network in 2011, Gerri Willis asked Melania about watches and brooches in her fast-selling collections, and then about the possibility of a Donald Trump presidential candidacy. Comedian and talk show personality Joy Behar introduced Melania and her jewelry on The Joy Behar Show under a sign proclaiming her “The Melania,” a play on her husband’s nickname “The Donald.” Then Behar asked, “Is he really running for the presidency, or is this a big publicity stunt? The wife knows the truth, what is it?”
“Look, he doesn’t need the publicity stunt,” Melania replied.
Behar, who had attended Trump’s wedding to Marla Maples, listened as Melania talked about how Trump was “very passionate about the country,” a “brilliant negotiator” with a “genius’s mind.”
“I don’t know what skeletons he has in the closet. But everybody gets vetted when they’re going to be president,” Behar said. “You know what that means, vetted?”
Melania said she did.
“They’re going to look into everything. He’s had a few wives, he’s had financial difficulties. All of that’s going to come out. How do you feel about that?”
“Well, that’s part of it. If he decided to run, he knows that’s part of it.”
Behar paused for a second, then asked a political question. “But what is this with the birth certificate obsession? Did he ask to see yours when you met him?”
Behar was referring to Trump’s history as a primary driver behind the “birther” attacks on President Barack Obama. As early as 2011, Trump had been peddling the conspiracy theory that Obama had not been born in the United States. Despite producing his official birth records, proving that he had been born in Hawaii to an American mother and a Kenyan father, Obama was unable to persuade the “birthers.” What followed on the air was a back-and-forth in which Melania sounded just like her husband, charging ahead with a bogus claim without any evidence.
“Well,” said Melania, “I needed to put mine anyway because if you want to become an American citizen you need to put the birth certificate. I have a birth certificate from Slovenia, and do you want to see President Obama birth certificate or not?”
“I’ve seen it, I’ve seen it,” Behar said.
“It’s not a birth certificate,” Melania replied.
“Well, it’s a certificate of live birth, which they give [in Hawaii]. But, Melania, if he insists on what he’s saying, then no one in Hawaii can ever run for president. Because they all get the same live-birth certificate.”
“Well, but they need to have—”
“Bette Midler is finished, for example!” (The singer and actress was born in Honolulu.)
The audience laughed. Melania didn’t appear amused.
“They need to have, and, in one way, it would be very easy if President Obama just show it. It’s not only Donald who wants to see it. It’s American people, who voted for him, and who didn’t voted for him, they want to see that!”
“But it’s on display in Chicago. We’ve seen it on the internet. We’ve seen it. It’s not the same as yours, but it’s a certificate of live birth.”
“We feel it’s different than birth certificate,” Melania said, seeming to speak for both herself and her husband.
“Well, I think you should give it up at this point,” Behar said. Neither of the Trumps took her advice. Michelle Obama would later write in her memoir, Becoming, “The whole thing was crazy and mean-spirited, of course, its underlying bigotry and xenophobia hardly concealed. But it was also dangerous, deliberately meant to stir up the wingnuts and kooks… What if someone with an unstable mind loaded a gun and drove to Washington? What if that person went looking for our girls? Donald Trump, with his loud and reckless innuendos, was putting my family’s safety at risk. And for this I’d never forgive him.” It was an unusually strong statement from the former first lady, whose only mention of Melania in her book was to say that they had ridden together to Trump’s inauguration.
Melania and Joy Behar’s exchange in many ways foreshadowed what was to come. After her husband entered politics, the easy questions posed by the lifestyle magazines seemed to be from a long-ago era. In a 2006 article in Glamour, Melania was asked to tell readers five things they did not know about her. She replied by saying that she had studied architecture and design and, “If I ever had another job, I’d go in that direction.” She also said that she loved opera, found swimming relaxing, and that “I’d wear nothing but white every day if I could.” But given the “Lock her up” chants that Trump and his rallygoers would yell about Hillary during the 2016 campaign, the most surprising thing Melania listed in that 2006 article was: “Bill and Hillary Clinton came to my wedding. My husband and I are close to both of them.”
BUOYED BY the success of her Melania jewelry, two years later she announced a new skin care line. Melania spoke of these business efforts as hers and took pride in doing them independently from the family business. But Trump did devote an entire episode of The Celebrity Apprentice to the launch of the caviar-infused products. Because of the way the show was produced, however, Melania seemed to unwittingly become the punch line of a joke.
Standing in the lobby of Trump Tower, in front of contestants including NBA wild man Dennis Rodman, actor Gary Busey, and former Playmate of the Year Brande Roderick, Melania announced, “After ten years of researching, I’m thrilled to launch my debut skin care collection: Melania Caviar Complexe C6.” Two teams of celebrities would compete to produce a marketing plan to introduce the new skin care line. Earlier in the day, Melania, operating under the company name Melania Marks Skincare, had signed a five-year, $1 million license agreement with an Indianapolis-based company to manufacture, promote, and sell her products. That company, New Sunshine, which owned several tanning businesses, belonged in part to Steve Hilbert, a friend and business partner of Donald Trump.
Caviar Complexe was the centerpiece and chief selling point of Melania’s line. Her website boasted that her products were developed in “intense collaboration with Melania’s research laboratory” and described them in a dazzling string of trademarked buzzwords: “Melania Trump’s Caviar Complexe C6™ with Lipid Matrix Receptor™ Technology is Melania’s revolutionary approach to skin care that addresses the most advanced signs of aging,” with caviar harvested from a cultured sturgeon farm in the South of France. It would cost $150 an ounce, and she told reporters at the time that she slathered it on Barron, then seven, “from head to toe.”
On the Celebrity Apprentice episode, she met first with the team headed by Rodman, the eccentric NBA Hall of Famer. He asked her, “Did you start this?” Melania answered that she had “worked and researched for ten years” and had created “everything.” Rodman then asked if he might be allowed upstairs to see her private bathroom in Trump Tower, to get a sense of what kind of cosmetics she uses. His teammate on the show, country singer Trace Adkins, told Rodman that this was a bad idea and an inappropriate question for Melania. “Luckily she doesn’t speak English,” Adkins quipped in his sandpaper baritone. The cameras cut to actor Gary Busey, who offered this assessment of Melania’s looks: “Have you ever had your genitalia so excited that it spins like a Ferris wheel in a carnival ride? That’s how beautiful she is.”
The two Celebrity Apprentice teams competing against each other then began their task of developing promotional posters for Melania’s new skin care line. They chose gold trays, plates, and crystal cups from the NBC prop shop and bought $2,000 worth of caviar. During their presentation, Rodman’s team revealed a poster that read “Simply… Milania.” Ivanka and Eric Trump, acting as judges, noticed the misspelling immediately. “It’s shocking,” Ivanka said to Melania after the team left the room. “I’m surprised you were even able to hold your tongue.” The other team, led by magician and entertainer Penn Jillette, produced materials that referred to Melania as the “spokesperson” for the product, not the entrepreneur who had launched it. “She has given ten years of her life,” Ivanka Trump said, putting the contestants in their place. “She has contributed years of her life to developing this formula.”
When the two teams appeared in the show’s famous dark-paneled boardroom and Donald Trump entered, Apprentice fans knew: somebody would win, and somebody would be “fired.” Trump pronounced the teams’ errors “not good.” But before rendering his verdict, he had a question for actress Marilu Henner, a member of Jillette’s team: “Marilu, how was Melania different from what you thought?” Henner replied, “She is so stunningly beautiful you almost don’t hear what she’s saying at first, because you’re looking at flawless skin and a flawless face. But then you realize how warm she is. Her warmth just comes radiating off her. She’s lovely.”
That was clearly the answer Trump was looking for. “Very nice,” he said. Then he fired Rodman.
The skin care line never got off the ground, through no fault of Melania’s. At the time she signed her deal, New Sunshine was being ripped apart in a brutal dispute between Steve Hilbert and his business partner, John Menard Jr., a billionaire hardware store mogul. Melania hosted fashion and beauty journalists at an event at Jean-Georges in Manhattan, appeared on The View, and had signed up with Lord & Taylor as a “launch partner.” Macy’s, Bloomingdale’s, and other big stores were set to join afterward. But New Sunshine was unraveling. The Celebrity Apprentice segment that had taped the previous November aired on April 7, 2013, when the product was supposed to be in stores, but wasn’t.
In March 2013, Melania received notice from Menard’s lawyers that they believed the contract was void. They would later argue that Trump’s friend Hilbert had cut Melania a “grossly favorable” sweetheart deal because of their personal relationship. Hilbert and his wife, Tomisue, were longtime friends and business associates of the Trumps. In 1998, Hilbert and Trump had purchased the famed fifty-story General Motors Building near Trump Tower in Manhattan for more than $800 million. The Hilberts had also attended the Trumps’ wedding, and in 2011 they appeared on The Celebrity Apprentice to promote their Australian Gold sunscreen. That same year, Hilbert approached Melania about joining forces on her skin care line. Now, Hilbert’s partner sought an injunction to void their licensing agreement with Melania. The legal action questioned Melania’s credentials and suggested she was “pretty much nothing other than Mrs. Donald Trump.”
The case was heard in U.S. District Court in Indianapolis in November, and according to a copy of the courtroom transcripts, Melania unleashed a cool fury from the witness stand. Journalist Peter Moskowitz, who wrote about the case in 2016, noted, “It’s hard to find emotion in court transcripts, but Melania’s anger jumps off the page.” She testified that she was involved “from A to Z” with developing her line, which she had been working on for over a decade—everything from researching the chemical makeup of the creams, lotions, and other products to selecting their logo and packaging. She discussed how she had promoted the line on her social media, including Facebook, her website, and Twitter, adding that she had received “a lot of bad responses” from fans who were trying to buy the products and couldn’t.
At one point, she said, “This is not how the business is done, and they were blaming me. They were blaming my brand, and I had nothing to do with it… the product was nowhere to be found.” She essentially said she was the victim of a feud between two partners, and the result was that by the time the product arrived in the stores, “it was too late. The damage was done. They didn’t honor the contract. I didn’t get paid. I did everything, and I would do much, much more,” but the other parties to the deal did not “honor the contract.”
Judge Jane Magnus-Stinson, the Obama appointee who heard the case, ruled in Melania’s favor, rejecting the allegation that she received unfair special treatment and finding that Menard’s company had improperly voided the contract. She ordered the company and Melania to work out a settlement in arbitration. Melania sought $50 million in damages, what her attorneys argued she would have made if the line had been properly launched. The parties later settled out of court, and terms were not made public. Trump continued to maintain a relationship with the Hilberts, who contributed to his presidential campaign; Tomisue Hilbert is listed as a $100,000 donor to Trump’s 2017 inauguration. In an interview with me in 2016, Steve Hilbert said that he was sorry that the Melania skin care line never happened. “This was a passion of Melania’s,” he said. “She has so much depth, creativity, an eye for detail, and dedication to the project.” But there were no second chances, and she dropped the whole business venture.
Moskowitz’s 2016 piece, “What Happened to Melania Trump’s Caviar Skincare Line?,” also contained, in parentheses, a footnote to the whole failed enterprise: “If the media reports about her never receiving a degree from a university in Slovenia are true, the court transcripts also reveal Melania lied under oath about her degree when she told the court she’d graduated with a bachelor’s in architecture.” A copy of the transcript I obtained shows this exchange:
Q: “Would you please explain to the Judge your formal education including what schools you attended and from which you graduated?”
A: “I attended and graduated from design school, from Fashion and Industrial Design School and also attended, graduated from architecture degree, bachelor degree.”
In fact, this was not true. Melania dropped out of college during her first year, at age nineteen. As late as July 2016, her biography on her website, melaniatrump.com, also said that she had a degree from the University of Ljubljana. That website was taken down, but Melania never acknowledged the inaccurate characterization of her formal education.
IF HIGH-PROFILE interviews and celebrity product launches were the public face of Melania, the private one was far harder to find. Often, the people who saw it were either family or staff who were all but invisible in the room. Jose Gabriel Juarez worked for Melania and Donald Trump for a decade, from 2008 to 2018, at the Trump National Golf Club in Westchester, New York, where he became the head waiter. In ten years, he saw Trump many times, but he said that he never witnessed a significant conversation between Trump and Melania. That may very well be because they made sure staff like Juarez didn’t, but the only one he ever heard took place when Melania was not even present—she was on television.
In April 2010, Melania was on QVC promoting her new line of jewelry. Watching on TV from the Westchester golf club restaurant, Trump picked up his cell phone and called in to the show. Juarez said that he watched Trump and Melania have a public conversation, he on his phone and she on the big screen. The restaurant was full of people, so they turned the volume up loud. Patrons in the restaurant were impressed that Trump could just dial directly into the show. “He was sweet with her,” Juarez said. “But that was on TV. In person, I never saw them talk like that.”
Juarez and two housekeepers at Trump National Golf Club in Bedminster whom I interviewed had unusually intimate access to the Trumps’ daily lives. Their accounts were remarkably consistent and painted a portrait of a marriage that seems to thrive on husband and wife maintaining parallel lives that barely intersect. From their meals—Trump’s well-done cheeseburgers and Melania’s healthier food prepared by her mother—to their daily activities, the Trumps do things their own way, on their own time. When necessary, they could present a cuddly, unified public front for club members. But in private, they preferred separate spaces and routines. During their interviews, housekeepers and others who worked at Trump properties all said that they noticed how little time the couple spent together.
The Bedminster club, about an hour west of New York City, is a family favorite, the place where they spend the most time after the White House and Mar-a-Lago. Bedminster has special importance to Melania and Trump. He bought the property in 2002, when he was with Melania. He was married to Ivana when he bought Mar-a-Lago, and he was married to Marla when he bought the Trump National Golf Club in Westchester. At Bedminster, he built two eighteen-hole golf courses and installed gardens modeled after those in Versailles, just as the décor in his Trump Tower penthouse is modeled after the famous chateau of French kings.
Trump has said that he likes Bedminster so much that he has even talked about being buried there. He spent nearly one hundred days there as president by early 2020. Some summers, Melania and Barron, and often her parents, have lived on the premises for nearly two months. Trump and Melania have a mansion on the property. Several employees at Bedminster said that Trump’s bedroom is on the first floor, while Melania and Barron have bedroom suites on the second.
Housekeepers on staff said that Trump’s room was mainly decorated with photos of himself with Michael Jackson and other celebrities, while Melania’s room was mainly decorated with photos of Barron, with a photo of her and Barron on her nightstand. During the day, Trump would usually be up at dawn, reading many newspapers and watching TV, and then out of the house by 7:00 to play golf, while Melania would wake later and spend much of the day inside and often on her computer. Many days at Bedminster, Melania got a massage in a room that former housekeeper Victorina Morales prepared. “I got it all ready,” Morales said, explaining that Melania liked candles and music with nature sounds—birds and running water. Trump typically did not eat with Melania and Barron; he usually had lunch and dinner at the clubhouse. He sometimes ate with Ivanka and Jared when they were staying at a separate mansion on the property—they were married at the club in 2009.
In recent years, Melania has tended to eat in the house, where she and her parents and Barron speak Slovenian. (Trump has complained to others that he has no idea what they are saying.) Amalija and Viktor have stayed in a cottage near the clubhouse pool, but her parents spend a lot of time in Melania’s residence. Her mother not only cooks but does the dishes afterward. “I never saw them have dinner together,” Morales said of Melania and Trump. Speaking in Spanish, she said, “She didn’t go to the club because she didn’t like the food. She always ate at home.” Morales said she has seen Trump sit on a couch in the residence in the evening, watching TV with his feet up on a coffee table. Barron would be sitting on the floor watching the TV or playing a video game and Melania would be on the computer. “It’s a strange marriage,” Morales said, through a translator. “I never saw them like a normal family, sitting together at a table, eating together, talking. Never, never, never. They spend time in the same place, but they don’t interact.” At the White House, the Trumps also sleep in separate bedrooms. Trump has gone golfing so many times since becoming president that a site called Trump Golf Count tracks his outings—two hundred forty-nine visits to his golf clubs while president, and evidence of playing golf at least one hundred seventeen times as of mid-March 2020. While he golfs, Melania is almost always somewhere else, out of sight.
Morales said Melania often seemed sad. “She would talk to us, but never a smile,” she said. “She seems burdened.” Sandra Diaz, another housekeeper, as well as others on the staff, said that Melania led an insulated life at Bedminster. A handful of times, some “elegant ladies” came for lunch. But mainly she was there with just her parents and Barron. Morales said that in the five years she worked there, she never met Melania’s sister, Ines.
Diaz said that Melania would sometimes get dressed up to accompany Trump to the main Bedminster clubhouse to attend a wedding or some other public event. But after greeting the crowd, she would quickly retreat to her private space. Diaz recalled one night when Trump came into the house and asked Melania to come greet Ivanka and other guests around the pool. Melania said, “I can’t go now.” But Trump insisted and Melania reluctantly went with him, staying for only about ten minutes before she returned. “Melania is always very apart,” Diaz said. “I always saw Melania living in a completely different world than his. I never saw them share as a couple. I never saw them holding hands.” Diaz and Morales said that Melania seemed happiest when she was with Barron.
Morales worked at Bedminster from 2013 until 2018. After Trump became president, the Secret Service gave her a flag lapel pin with a Secret Service insignia to wear when she was on the property. Morales would spend long days at the club, especially in the summer, when the Trumps visited most. She wore a uniform, in later years beige, as she made beds, washed clothes, and cleaned the family’s bathrooms. Diaz said Trump was very specific about what he wanted in his bedroom suite, from his bathroom to his closet, where she was to make sure he always had ready six white polo shirts, six pairs of beige pants, and six ironed pairs of boxer shorts.
One of the worst jobs was cleaning up the residue from Melania’s regular applications of tanning spray to make sure any traces were removed from all the white surfaces in the bathroom. The bronzer washed off in the shower, and Melania used it nearly every time she left the house, the housekeeper said. Diaz also said that she was told to make sure Trump always had two bottles of liquid face makeup. She would test the open bottles by pouring a little liquid on her hand to make sure there was still plenty inside. Morales said that Melania always treated her with respect and seemed to value and appreciate the work she did. Diaz said she and other housekeepers entering the Trumps’ residence had to put on latex gloves and blue cloth shoe covers like those worn by doctors and nurses. Melania wanted white and pink roses on her table and certain candles in her massage room. The maids were instructed to leave perfect vacuum tracks in her white carpet and not to touch the six cinnamon-scented candles she kept near her computer.
The housekeepers described an often tense dynamic outside the immediate family. Both said that Melania and Ivanka had strained relations and seemed to be competitive with each other. Diaz recalled Ivanka telling her to come clean her house at exactly the same time Melania wanted her house cleaned. She said it seemed like a deliberate power play. Both housekeepers said they preferred working for Melania, who, despite the language gap and her strict demands, always treated them with more respect. They also liked Amalija, who would often slip them a $10 or $20 tip, whispering not to let Melania know.
The housekeepers said that Trump and Viktor Knavs weren’t close. They recalled Trump blowing up at Viktor over a cap. Trump had a reputation at the club for being very generous; he would hand out $100 bills when he was happy with the service. But he was also known to be incredibly frugal. Trump had a specific place in his bedroom suite where he put clothes or other things he no longer wanted. Maids were instructed not to toss out even the tiniest thing, if it wasn’t in that discard pile—not even the last little sliver of his bar of Irish Spring soap.
Viktor sometimes ended up with Trump’s cast-off clothing. “They’re the same size and everything,” Morales said. One day in 2013, Amalija found a red hat in a pile where Trump had placed some items that he no longer wanted to wear. She thought Viktor could use it, so she picked it up and gave it to her husband. Viktor put it on one morning and wore it to the golf course, where he ran into Trump.
Employees knew that Trump had an unwritten rule that only he could wear his distinctive red caps—making him unmistakable anywhere on the property. When he saw Melania’s father in the cap, he became furious and demanded that he take it off and leave. The caddies and housekeepers who saw this scene unfold said it was an unforgettable moment. “Nobody could wear the red hat but [Trump],” Diaz said. “The whole world saw what Trump had done to his father-in-law,” Morales added. Viktor “was very embarrassed.” Diaz said that Viktor came back to the house and screamed about “that fucking guy.” Diaz said Melania’s mother tried to calm her husband down, but recalled that Melania remained silent.
The Trumps would occasionally travel to the Trump club in Westchester, about eighty miles northeast of Bedminster, on summer Sundays, Jose Gabriel Juarez recalled. Juarez said that they would arrive in two cars—Trump in one and Melania, Barron, and Viktor in another. Trump would play golf while his family had lunch in the club. Juarez said that on weekends when there was a golf tournament, Trump would sometimes stay overnight at the club. Melania and Barron never did. “I never saw them together,” Juarez said of Melania and Trump.
When they came for lunch, he said Melania would have a salad, and Barron would usually have a grilled cheese sandwich and fries. He said that Viktor always seemed to be in a good mood and would often slip him a $20 tip. After lunch, Melania and Viktor would walk Barron over to the driving range so he could hit balls. Viktor would sometimes hit with him while Melania watched.
Juarez, Morales, and Diaz were at one point all undocumented workers employed at Trump properties, a fact that has brought more scrutiny to Trump’s immigration policies as president. Juarez came from Mexico. Morales came to the United States from Guatemala in 1999 and was an undocumented immigrant for her entire time at Bedminster. Diaz was an undocumented worker from Costa Rica who was employed at Bedminster from 2010 until 2013, using a fake Social Security card she had bought for fifty dollars.
Trump’s talk of Mexican criminals and “rapists,” his promise to wall off the U.S.-Mexico border, and his administration’s policy of separating immigrant children from their families created tension among the undocumented workers at his properties. Juarez recalled Trump’s wealthy club members taking a cue from Trump and making rough comments and jokes once he was elected president. “You’re still here? How come we can’t get rid of you? I’m going to call Trump, you [expletive] Mexican,” Juarez said a member told him. By the end of 2018, Morales and Diaz had had enough. They gave interviews to the Washington Post, the New York Times, and other publications, hoping to highlight what they considered Trump’s hypocrisy and unfairness to immigrants. Two months later, Democrats in Congress hosted Morales and Diaz as their guests at Trump’s State of the Union address. Neither Diaz nor Morales works for the Trump Organization today, and after they spoke out, the Trump Organization announced a crackdown on undocumented workers, firing many of them.
After leaving her job at Bedminster, Diaz became a permanent U.S. resident; as Melania Trump had done for her mother, Diaz’s daughter, a U.S. citizen, petitioned on her behalf. As of early 2020, Morales had filed for asylum and Juarez was still trying to get legal status. “I don’t understand why the first lady, who’s an immigrant, doesn’t help us,” Diaz said. “She does speak out sometimes. Why doesn’t she speak out to help us?” Melania has made it clear to those around her that she sees her path as being very different from the paths of those crossing the U.S.-Mexico border, and that she believes immigrants should enter the United States legally, as she did.
Many immigration activists have criticized both Trumps—Melania for not speaking up, and the president for makingtougher immigration laws a centerpiece of his agenda while he is surrounded by immigrants: his wife, his in-laws, and even the people working on his properties. On June 16, 2015, when Donald Trump announced his candidacy with promises to “build a great wall” and clamp down on immigration, he began his run by taking the escalator down to the lobby of Trump Tower. This time—a rare time—Trump ushered Melania ahead of him. A woman who had been an American citizen for less than nine years led the way.