Can the real Melania Trump please stand up?

Helen Coffey, The Independent

It’s a profoundly curious experience to get to the end of a 256-page memoir and feel like you know even less about the subject than before you started reading. But in this respect, Melania — written, apparently, by Melania Trump — delivers in a way that defies the very laws of literature. The former first lady and wife of Donald Trump has held a unique fascination ever since her husband announced his bid for the presidency in 2015 before being elected the following year. Who was this poised, stiff, silent woman, 24 years his junior? What did she think or feel or want behind the perfect, blank-faced mask?

Did the Slovenian former model disagree with her spouse’s inflammatory rhetoric? Did she secretly roll her eyes at his unhinged Twitter rants in ALL CAPS? Did she, as speculated in the calls to #FreeMelania, feel trapped in a loveless marriage of convenience — swatting away Donald’s hand during public engagements because she couldn’t bear to physically touch him? On these last three counts, the answer is a resounding “no” if her new autobiography is to be believed. On almost all other points, however, the answer is a resounding question mark. Trying to glean much more about the mystery figure who has stood by one of the most divisive men on the planet for nearly 20 years is like trying to nail mist to the wall. “As a private person who has often been the subject of public scrutiny and misrepresentation, I feel a responsibility to set the record straight and to provide the actual account of my experiences,” reads the book’s introduction. But “accounts” are all we get, written in prose that, though grammatically faultless, is nothing short of extraordinary in its woodenness. Any sense of personality — should one exist — remains maddeningly opaque.

It is, in its own way, an impressive feat: to get through an entire book about yourself and leave no impression other than of a character vacuum. When talking about her time in the White House, for example, Melania dedicates a bewildering number of pages — and tedious level of detail — to the renovations she completed on various state rooms during her tenancy. And yet there are glimmers of… perhaps… something hidden beneath the carefully curated anecdotes; mere hints of whispers of clues that a particularly diligent PI might just about be able to piece together to form some conclusions. We start with Melania’s entry into the US back in 1996, when she flew to New York “to test my skills in the American modelling market… after weighing all the professional and personal implications”. (Many of the sentences read like this — as if the entire book were a particularly humourless extended LinkedIn post, or an attempt to answer a series of competency-based interview questions.)

A pattern soon starts to emerge through each of the chapters that chart a peculiarly non-linear tour through Melania’s life. It seems very, very important that the reader be left in no doubt as to her ongoing success from birth to the present day — and that anything approaching a failure was always, always somebody else’s fault.

The chapter that might have actually revealed some interesting insight into the human being behind the Trump PR machine — one that depicts her childhood and family life in then-Communist Yugoslavia, pre-Donald, pre-modelling, pre-US — amounts to little more than a charmless list of accomplishments on the part of everyone involved. No one could have had a more idyllic, blessed childhood in the history of humankind; no family could have been more practically perfect in every way. Melania Knauss, as was, was “a joyful and contented baby”, before growing into “a hard worker” who “was always striving for the best”. It’s hard not to find yourself questioning whether she is replicant or human, in fact, with lines such as: “As a child, I demonstrated a strong sense of organisation, orderliness, and methodical approach in all my projects. I possessed a keen curiosity and diligent work ethic.” The description of her sister, Ines (rarely seen with Melania publicly since the latter’s rise to fame and absent from much of the rest of the book), reads like an exemplary school report card: she “excelled academically with apparent ease showcasing a natural intellect and curiosity about the world around her”. Their late mother, Amalija, was a patternmaker and the “epitome of elegance”, gifted with “innate talent and boundless creativity”; her businessman father Viktor’s “expertise in all things mechanical was unmatched”.

There’s something hauntingly familiar in the world of superlatives in which the book resides. Familiar, because this is the constant hyperbole we became intimately acquainted with during Donald Trump’s tenure as president. It’s the language of the narcissist; everything is the “best”, the “worst”, the “strongest”, the “smartest”, and nothing in between. Various Donald speeches are pasted in at intervals, reminding us that, for example, under his leadership America’s “economy is perhaps the greatest economy we’ve ever had in the history of our country. We accomplished more than any other president has in the first two and half years of a presidency.” In truth, the entire book reads like it could have been written by a Trumpian-inspired ChatGPT — but perhaps this is simply indicative of the kind of person it takes to be married to the former Apprentice star for two decades.

But I digress; back to the “real” Melania. She was spotted by a photographer at the age of 16 at one of her mother’s fashion shows. An “unremarkable” photoshoot followed, yet she started to book gigs in Slovenia. Modelling competitions came next, with one resulting in a modelling agent in Milan; Melania took the decision to drop out of studying architecture to focus on this shiny new career. From there, she moved to Italy, then Paris, before touching down in New York. Any hopes that we might find out something juicy about life as a beautiful young woman living in Manhattan in the Nineties, however, are quickly dashed. “While others indulged in a lifestyle of excess, I stayed focused on my goals and ambitions,” reads the depressingly puritanical prose, which makes clear that abstinence and “remaining singularly intent on my career goals” were the order of the day.

The biggest clues lie in what isn’t there. Not a single date, let alone boyfriend is mentioned, including her alleged relationship with a man named Jure Zorcic before she moved to Milan (“This is yet another person trying to use Mrs Trump’s name for publicity. The facts are not accurate,” a Trump spokesperson said in 2016 when Zorc shared his story). More precisely, into the Kit Kat Klub, where she was seated in the VIP area. We’re given to understand that she didn’t recognise the real-estate mogul, and only had the vaguest idea of who he was when he said his name — and hey, maybe she didn’t. This was in 1998 — a point by which Donald had become so famous for his rich man-about-town persona that he’d had a cameo role in Home Alone 2: Lost in New York.