What is Melania Trump thinking? She revels in the role of the good immigrant

Now Melania is returning to the White House, and she is already signalling that she’ll be charting an independent course. She has refused the traditional tea meeting with outgoing First Lady, Jill Biden, citing the Biden administration’s alleged role in the raid on Mar-a-Lago in 2022. And she is not the least bit approachable, unlike Michelle Obama who did folksy Q&As on Vine, or Jill Biden, who once tweeted “you can take the girl out of Philly” after physically blocking protesters with her own body, prompting Vox to applaud her “relatable toughness”. Melania is restrained and unknowable — a cipher in an era of garish American confessionalism.

Admittedly, her protectiveness is hard-earned. A former friend, confidante and advisor, Stephanie Winston Wolkoff, recorded their private conversations and wrote a tell-all book, Melania and Me: The Rise and Fall of my Friendship with the First Lady. Most salaciously, the book details the tensions between Melania and her daughter-in-law, Ivanka. Wolkoff describes her efforts to sideline Ivanka at the inauguration and keep her out of official portraits, while Melania privately refers to her daughter-in-law as “Princess”.

The announcement of her memoir, Melania, was treated as yet another violation of decorum, a departure from sanctified democratic tradition, and therefore suspect. Her patriotic immigrant story, a fairy tale about becoming American, was described as a last-ditch cash grab before the election: another tawdry consumer item for sale alongside the Trump coins, the trading cards, and the $100,000 Trump Victory Tourbillion watch. (There is also an 18K “First Lady” watch in rose gold, which retails for a more modest sum of $799). But while the Trumps’ tacky profiteering is undeniable, she was hardly the First Lady to monetise her position. Michelle Obama’s own memoir, Becoming, received a soft-focus rock star treatment: it was an Oprah’s Book Club selection, and was accompanied by a stadium tour and soundtrack by Questlove. In 2018, the Obamas signed a multi-year deal with Netflix, a corporate partnership that was never subjected to similar criticism by the liberal commentariat.

Melania was born in 1970 in Slovenia, the wealthiest republic of what was then socialist Yugoslavia. She describes an idyllic life full of foreign travel, sports cars, and fashion — hardly the drab, walled-off hell of many Cold War propagandists’ fantasies. Her upbringing in the republic of Slovenia during the Seventies and Eighties was happy, she insists; she wanted for nothing. Young Melania Knaus ran on the cobblestone streets of the UNESCO World Heritage city Dubrovnik in Croatia; she went shopping in Italy, and walked in her mother’s fashion shows in the Yugoslav capital of Belgrade. She is therefore very much a child of the socialism of leader Josip Broz Tito, himself a lover of luxury cars, yachts, and fine cigars. Tito also cultivated an image of elite glamour.

Around the time of Melania’s birth, Tito was photographed driving Sophia Loren around in a golf cart and hosting Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor on the Croatian coast. An entry from Burton’s diary in 1971 notes that Tito and his wife lived in “remarkable luxury unmatched by anything else I’ve seen”. The very next year, bronzed Penthouse publisher Bob Guccione opened the opulent Penthouse Adriatic Club on the Croatian island of Krk, which included a luxury hotel and casino, and was staffed by female “pets” in skimpy French maid uniforms. There were even rumours that one of the swimming pools was filled with champagne. When it flopped and closed the very next year, Guccione attempted a similarly inspired hotel and casino project in Atlantic City, New Jersey. But misfortune struck again and he ran out of money. The project was soon rescued by none other than Donald Trump, who purchased the half-finished Guccione property, opening the Trump Plaza Hotel and Casino in 1984. Melania’s image can therefore easily be situated within the Yugoslav tradition, and she herself can be seen as an extension of the golden age of Seventies Titoist luxury and glamour.

But nothing in the book answers the question always lurking: “What is she thinking?” Written in superficial, thank you-note politesse, Melania, in typical fashion, recedes from view. The delivers the stiff immigrant narrative, light on personal details but heavy on easy moralising. “Life’s circumstances shape you in many ways, often entirely beyond your control,” she writes. “Your birth, parental influences, and the world in which you grow up. As an adult, there comes a moment when you become solely responsible for the life you lead. You must take charge, embrace that responsibility, and become the architect of your own future.”

It is standard pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps fare, Americana imbued with the usual veneration of hard work and self-reliance. But Melania is aligning herself with a particular kind of immigrant, the kind that is part of her husband’s flock: the “good”, Trump-supporting foreigner who is patriotic, embraces American values, and does not feel victimised by their adopted country. In Melania’s world, we can surmise, immigrants of her kind stand in contrast to those who resent their country, reject its values, and call it racist. The latter see structural racism and xenophobia as the forces that have ultimately shaped their lives: responsibility is mostly external to oneself. In contrast, for the Trumpian immigrant, responsibility lies within. Despite years of Democratic Party courting, the recent presidential election has made clear that a great number of foreign-born Americans now identify more closely with Melania’s immigration narrative.

While she takes great care to depict her early years in sunny terms, there are indications that all was not easy. “As a child, I was somewhat shielded from the darker aspects of the system, but its presence loomed in the back of our minds,” she says. We know from other sources that her father, Viktor Knavs, was a member of the Communist Party of Yugoslavia and appears in the police files of UDBA, the Directorate for State Security. Identified as a travelling salesman. He is thought to have violated Yugoslavia’s criminal code, supposedly through tax evasion. Though some American have suggested that Knavs should have been denied US citizenship on the basis of the alleged criminal record, it is possible that UDBA’s interest in Knavs was purely political. As someone who frequently travelled abroad and owned a fleet of cars, Knavs would have likely drawn the attention of the Yugoslav authorities.

None of that is interrogated in her glossy and unexpectedly sympathetic portrait of Yugoslavia in in the last decades before the country began to fall apart. Her story is as sleek and immaculate as the woman herself. And yet, the tiny Alpine country of just over two million has a complex relationship with its native daughter. “The Melania effect” boosted tourism to Slovenia when the Trumps were last in the White House, and Balkan media is already anticipating renewed interest in the country, with enterprising restaurants and artisans already mass producing Melania-themed dishes and products. But not everyone is happy: in 2019, a wood carving of Melania was erected in Rozno, in south-eastern Slovenia, not far from her hometown of Sevnica. A year later, the wooden carving was burned in a “politically motivated” arson attack, and swiftly replaced with a more durable bronze statue in September 2020.

Back in her adopted country, the attitude is similarly mixed. The continued fascination with her is rooted in her stubborn adherence to traditional modes of gender expression, and her total disinterest in the current imperative of female emancipation. In Melania, she doubles down on her utter fidelity to her wifely duties –infidelities go unmentioned – and to her motherly obligations, her “protection” of Barron first and foremost. She presents, with echoes of Jackie O and Diana, as the betrayed but faithful wife, the princess trapped in a tower, the fiercely devoted mother. She is playing a role of exaggerated femininity, which, in an era of diminished sexual dimorphism in the West, seems almost drag-like.

When asked, in 1999, the year after they first met, if she could picture herself as first lady one day, she demurred: “I would be very traditional, like Jackie Kennedy.” And she was ready to abandon her modelling career in the event that Trump ever became president. “I would stand by him,” she insists, true to form. During a 2005 interview on Larry King Live as newlyweds, Trump claimed that they’d never had a single fight, calling Melania “the rock”. In that interview, she admitted that to be with a man like Donald, “you have to know who you are” and “be smart and strong”. Both insist that theirs is a relationship of equals. But as with other aspects of Melania’s life, much about their marriage — her feelings about her husband’s infidelities, for one — remains an enigma.

It’s easy for women to paint their own opinions on to this blank canvas. A certain cohort are determined that she is the powerless victim of her husband and his politics. The princess in the tower of so many fairy tales, beautiful and trapped. The “free Melania” mania of the first Trump administration, speaks to this inability to understand why she might have chosen to be with this “monster’. And yet, there is very little evidence that Melania is dreaming of freedom. In fact, her memoir offers a glimpse of a very different side of Melania. After the Trumps have left the White House, the FBI raids their home in Mar-a-Lago, and Melania describes a sense of violation. Here her narrative shifts from a studious avoidance of victimisation rhetoric to one of victimhood. After taking so much care to reiterate the need to take responsibility for one’s life, one’s choices, and one’s destiny, she embraces the role of the embittered, wronged victim. Blame is never hers or her husband’s; it is assigned untrustworthy assistants, chiefs of staff, speechwriters, political opponents, and the liberal media. We even get the sense that her much-maligned anti-cyberbullying initiative, Be Best, is actually about herself.

And yet, in other moments, Melania appears sincere. Certainly when she’s talking about “a woman’s natural right to make decisions about her own body and health”, which she did in her book. The revelation that Melania is pro-choice came a few weeks before the election, when the Democrats were attempting to use the Trump-Vance ticket’s anti-abortion stance as a means of cajoling the undecided or uninspired into voting for them. Whether she was being used to appeal to women voters, or if she was sincere, it’s hard to tell. Inevitably, feminist activists refused to take it at face value. “They’re not embracing it at all,” she said in an interview shortly after her book came out. “They’re saying it was a scam, that it was a lie.”This, then, is the price you pay for being unknowable. Everyone simply believes what they want.

Melania shrugs it all off. And her public statements since her husband’s victory have emphasised unity. “I anticipate the citizens of our nation rejoining in commitment to each other and rising above ideology for the sake of individual liberty, economic prosperity, and security,” she wrote on November 7. In her first post-election interview on Fox & Friends last week, Melania dismissed the importance of Vogue covers and flattering press coverage. “We have more important things to do,” she says. Perhaps she has fooled us all. Perhaps there is a more complex, mature first lady about to move into the White House. There have been indications of that complexity before. When the interviewer in 1999 suggested that she might be with Trump for his money, noting that there weren’t too many 20-something supermodels on the arms of car mechanics, she responded with a rare flicker of depth. “You can’t sleep and you can’t hug with beautiful things, with a beautiful apartment, with a beautiful plane, beautiful cars, beautiful houses. You can’t do that. You can feel very empty… and if somebody said, ‘you know, you’re with a man because he’s rich and famous’, they don’t know me.”

And after all these years, we still don’t.