What is she thinking? (Credit: Chip Somodevilla/Getty)
Behind the feline eyes, the serrated cheekbones and campy glamour, there is a hint of pain to Melania Trump. She displays a vulnerability, a sense of betrayal and a frustration at being misunderstood. She has described herself as “the most bullied person in the world”. In interviews, especially those conducted in more recent years, you can detect something guarded and wounded in her.
Or maybe that’s just me. Despite her many years in the public eye as elite arm candy, including her four years as first lady, we still don’t really know who she is. In 2012, Melania tweeted a photo of a Beluga whale with the question, “what is she thinking?” Twelve years on, it is still difficult to ascertain. Years of relentless press scrutiny and a new memoir have supplied us only with hints. This impenetrability is part of what makes her such a perfect site for our projections. We see what we want to see.
Liberals love to hate her. She has been mocked for her accent, for being multilingual, and has been the victim of xenophobia and sexist barbs. “I can say ‘anal costs extra’ in six languages,” was one viral meme. News that she was going to make changes to the White House rose garden in 2020 was met with a xenophobic tweet storm by former New York Times reporter Kurt Eichenwald, expressing fury that a “foreigner” had “the audacity to … pull up history dating back a lifetime…These trashy, evil, stupid people need to get out of our house. What GALL she has.” American comedian Rosie O’Donnell has tweeted a video suggesting that Melania’s beloved only son, Barron, had autism. And feminists described her delightedly as “the only first lady to pose naked”. With Melania, the rigid dictates about how we use language to talk about identity no longer apply. We can say what we like.
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.
This, along with the whole “no fly zone” discussion is a sign that emotions are gaining the upper hand. Keeping emotions in check in a stressful situation is tough, but cool heads must prevail. Ursula von der Leyen has shown us once again just how unsuited she is to the position she holds.
Ukraine won’t be joining the EU any time soon – but sending out the signal that an unconscionable military attack would change the equation in any way when it comes to the accession process is utterly short-sighted and daft. The EU is a rules-based order. Suddenly throwing some of the most important rules out of the window because our emotions are ablaze and we’re high on the unity is just going to undermine the entire edifice.
The EU will not be in any condition to enlarge further until it has gone through fundamental reform and the Ukraine is nowhere near fulfilling the criteria for accession. Those are the facts. Let’s all just try and stay rational here.
I like your comment about the EU requiring fundamental reform. A monetary union of budgetary independent countries is what has started bringing the instability to the EU. This and complete freedom of movement. How are they going to address this?
It’s possible that the Eastern European EU members supporting this request see Ukraine as a potential ally in their confrontationa with the ‘progressives’ in Brussels.
Yes, Margaret, that crossed my mind too. Another possibility is that admitting Ukraine would shore up a kind of eastern bulwark against the Franco-German bulldozer.
Those are both very good reasons to admit Ukraine
That could be very well the reason indeed (ironically Russia would be too) .
Beyond the economic / corruption argument, the EU first needs to make sense of its military / security policy. Europe does need to fundamentally rethink its security, but whether the EU is the right forum for that is doubtful. Many of the EU’s members are neutral and unlikely to be keen for a military role. Remember also that it was the military provisions in the draft EU-Ukraine Treaty that were one of the reasons for the then legitimately elected government of the Ukraine in 2014 to reject the treaty – which then prompted the US coup.
Well done for mentioning that…there is a lot of inaccurate talk about Putin starting this war because of NATO expansionism when it was specifically EU expansionism in 2014 that proved the trigger for the revolution that year.
Putin feared EU membership as a precursor to Nato membership, but he also feared/dislike it in and for itself.
The idea that somehow NATO is expansionist and this is a bad thing, but that the EU’s expansionism is always and everywhere good, seems to have become an unchallenged version of the history around the current war. IN 2014 it was definitely the EU expanding that was the catalyst for the revolution.
Again..a sovereign European country can of its own free will, join the EU. I’m a Brit so I have no say so and wish them well and prosperity in years ahead.
The EU expanded in 2004, 2007 and 2013. There was no expansion in 2014.
Ukraine was one of the six ex Soviet countries targeted in 2004 as the next circle of some form of accession light, confirmed by Prodi in 2007. The EU told Ukraine they could not participate in two trade agreements, and Yanukovich dithered, then decided to stay in the EEU one, largely because it offered Russia’s cut price gas.
Yes, quite why so many people take Putin’s grotesque rationalisations for this unprovoked invasion on face value, any more than they would Hitler’s, is beyond me. The EU, whatever it’s many faults, a pacific organisation, opening a branch office in Kiev?! Naive isn’t a strong enough word.
Putin is of the view that the dissolution of the Soviet Union was the biggest geopolitical disaster of the 20th century. So, not the Holocaust, the Gulag, the Holodomor, Mao’s killing of millions, not the Khmer Rouge or even the First and Second World Wars. He admires Peter the Great, who was an appalling tyrant, who among many other things had his his own son ‘knouted’ to death, killed tens of thousands of labourers in the building of St Petersburg, had thousands of rebels tortured to death, and of course conquered huge territories especially from Poland-Lithuania and Sweden, which might well otherwise have developed in a more western and liberal direction. Instead they became yet another region of the brutal autocracy Russia – or rather Muscovy – has always been. That seems to be the rather greater historical tragedy.
You can factor in the recent efforts by the US to destabilise other former Soviet states
If the Ukranian people had not liked the results of the 2014 revolution then they were at complete liberty to reverse it at the last elections. They did not and voted overwhelmingly in favour of the changes made. There was no CIA coup!
Stepping back a bit from the war, the EU does not need another economic basket case like Greece.
Would Ukraine be expected to adopt the euro? I assume so. They lose then all control of monetary policy and become another economic vassal of Germany.
Better to consider something like EFTA, if there is a need to make a statement that Ukraine is European.
Emotions are high with lots of dangerous requests from Zelensky, thankfully Boris is more circumspect than VDL; I am sure Turkey felt their nose put out of joint with her comments.
The world would be a better place without Putin but we in the west seemed to have lost something in our diplomacy over the last 2o years with embarrassing not exactly successful sorties into other countries and a shift in our strategic thinking and tactical execution;
Many lament the lack of real strategic thinking in the West since the end of the Cold War.There has been a failure to think carefully about the conjunction of global interests or to projectourselves realistically into the future. While the West called all the shots in the 1990s that did not seem to matter. But now it does, not only because the West no longer calls all the shots, butalso because the future is visibly upon us. One of the most momentous steps in the last 20 years,undertaken with much strategic talking and little genuine strategic thinking, was the enlargement of NATO after 1994. The United Kingdom opposed the idea in the early 1990s, until the Clinton administration pressed for it in the run-up to the 1994 NATO Summit and the US Congressional elections. The UK discovered merits in the idea that had not previously been evident–or perhaps British policy-makers merely felt they had to recognize the reality of a pax Americana and the US electoral cycle. Realpolitik thinking, perhaps, but not strategic in the proper sense of the term. Many argued against NATO enlargement at the time, precisely on the grounds that this would fundamentally change the political balance in Europe in ways that would be difficult to control. ref https://www.jstor.org/stable/25144993?Search=yes&resultItemClick=true&searchText=NATO%20expansion%20a%20policy%20error%20of%20historic%20importance&searchUri=%2Faction%2FdoBasicSearch%3FQuery%3DNATO%2Bexpansion%2Ba%2Bpolicy%2Berror%2Bof%2Bhistoric%2Bimportance%26so%3Drel&ab_segments=0%2Fbasic_search_gsv2%2Fcontrol&refreqid=fastly-default%3A5e8099b750727ce7f9985b037580b3b8
And so he should. Britain has military assets. It’s alright to speak loudly and wildly when you are unarmed (as VDL is) Quite another when you are are armed and armed indeed with nukes as Boris and Macron are.
So it joins Turkey then? So the EU can fantasise about a power bloc whose bounds grow wider still and wider…but without every having to actually let them in?
I see Nigel Farage has repeated his assertion from years ago that the possibility of Ukraine joining the EU is what is really antagonising Putin. He seems to fear that Putin thinks this would lead to moral degradation in terms of the traditions of the Slavic Christian tradition.
I think this is more about preserving his own power than defending ideals. He probably fears a prosperous and democratic Ukraine at Russia’s doorstep because it would plant ideas about a better life in the imaginations of ordinary Russians.
The idea that a former KGB officer is some sort of supreme guardian of the Christian tradition, is one of many ludicrous claims made on behalf of this tyrant.
Again, there is more than one ‘Christian tradition’. As far as I can see, Putin fits right in with one particular strain of armed Christianity that first developed in Rome in the 4th C. (the inspiration for all European military tyrannies ever since). ‘Chivalry’ is the sanitised name for it.
Highly recommend this for real detailed insight – https://youtu.be/Ys2zTL-b3eE (Russia, Ukraine and the West history talk) with Dr Jordan Peterson and Frederick Kagan.
As the article the article hints, without the rose tinted specs, Zelensky and those that put him there, and who presumably continue to exercise huge influence, are not the icons of democracy and freedom our press and politicians would have us believe.
Having said that, the elites in Europe an the US appear to be little different.
You cant compare Ukraine’s governance problems with anything Orban has done. Romania and Bulgaria both acceded under the wire, without complying with the necessary standards, and that has not worked well, despite Romania being the first CEE country to sign an association agreement in 2004. . I am sure the poorest country in Europe would love to get its hands on the billions a year it would need, but until the judiciary, the oligarchs controlling and stealing Ukraine’s resources, and other state actors can be reformed, nothing will improve in Ukraine.
Nearly all on here are Brits. We left the EU so now it’s really none of our business.
I voted Leave and would do so again on any day of the week and twice on a Sunday. But the EU is still our business as is Europe more widely. There are a lot of European fields which are “forever” British just to underline that Europe is our business.
But NATO shares the continent with EU, and there are numerous members of both, so things done by the EU, and maybe even statements made by VDL without British foreknowledge, may involve us in war.
Love football, Hate FIFA… both are possible.
If Putin carves off the eastern regions and Crimea as I’m expecting, why shouldn’t the rest of Ukraine be free to join whichever alliances it chooses seeing as it will no longer border Russia? Putin has his buffer and the Ukrainians can look westward for their needs
#brickingit
Best solution would have been a “Commonwealth of Ruthenia” (name immaterial) – a sort of EU for the three orthodox Eastern Slav countries, because it is that particular combination of culture, race and history which unites them. Putin has now made that impossible for a century.
Can someone explain what Ukraine gets by joining the EU? It’s not military, is it automatic funding/relief for disasters etc..?
They’ll join if they want to. Ok this is extraordinary but the principle counts. A sovereign country wants to join. Their choice.
Well, 27 countries have to agree, and the process is long and formidable, as UvdL would not know.
Ans so too should Zelensky. However, at least he has the excuse of desperation.
Ok, apply.
“The Hungarian government’s willingness to drop legitimate concerns over the mistreatment of its minority community in Ukraine is one of the most remarkable signs yet of the EU’s newfound unity over the Russian invasion.”
Hungary is applying perspective and proportionality, William. It’s not really that remarkable in these circumstances, except to you.