The woman beside

The biopic film “Melania: 20 Days to History” intends to present the life of Donald Trump’s current wife ahead of his Jan.20 inauguration. Following its showing at cinemas across the US, critics argued the release was inopportune as it coincided with mass protests against two deadly shootings by federal agents in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

The latest Pew Research Centre poll, released last week, showed that Donald Trump’s approval rating is 37 per cent, the lowest of his second term. According to YouGov, Melania Trump enjoys fame with 92 per cent while she is popular with only 32 per cent and disliked by 47 per cent.

At the end of his first term, Melania Trump was rated the most unpopular first lady ever polled. She received a positive rating of 42 per cent and a disapproval rating of 47 per cent. First ladies from the 1970s enjoyed popularity ratings of 71 per cent on average with Hillary Clinton being the lowest. She had a final approval rating of 52 per cent and disapproval rating of 39 per cent. This should have warned her not to run for president in the 2016 election.

Reasons for Melania Trump’s low ratings include her determination to maintain her privacy during both terms in the White House and the interregnum and her distain for an energetic public role in comparison with her predecessors. While she closely follows her press coverage, Melania Trump remains independent, restrained and controlled and is accused of being “unsmiling” except with children on whom she has focused in public.

Born in the former Yugoslavia in April 1970, Melania Knauss Trump is a Slovenian-US former model and Trump’s third wife who served as first lady from 2017-2021 and from January 2025. She did fashion modelling in Paris and Milan before immigrating to the US in 1996 where she worked in New York City where she met Trump in 1998. They married in 2005. The age difference is 24 years, a generation.

She is the second foreign born, first naturalised citizen and the first foreign language speaker to become first lady. She is the second Roman Catholic first lady, after Jacqueline Kennedy became the first in 1961. During the early months of Trump’s first term, Melania did not move into the White House in Washington but remained in the family apartment in Trump Tower in Manhattan so Barron could finish school and renegotiate her prenuptial agreement to improve financial terms for herself and Barron with the aim of ensuring he would be treated equally to her husband’s four older children.

In 2018, she launched the “Be Best” campaign focusing on improving the lives of children by addressing their well-being and online safety and combatting opioid abuse. She also pressed Trump to end his administration’s family separation policy for illegal migrants. At the same time, she had to contend with allegations of her husband’s infidelity and undergo treatment for kidney disease. She faced criticism for donning a pith helmet – the symbol of former British colonial rule – when going on a week-long tour of Ghana, Malawi, Kenya and Egypt to promote children’s welfare. This tour was seen as a means to defuse Donald Trump’s 2017 insensitive and crude remarks on some African countries. During his second term, Donald Trump slashed the budget of US Agency for International Development (USAID), thereby defunding programmes for children’s health and education in Africa and Asia his predecessors and Melania had tried to foster.

Despite his immigrant stock background and Melania’s foreign origin, Trump has clamped down on US immigration during his second term. Trump’s paternal grandfather Friedreich Trump, born 1869, travelled to the US from Bavaria in 1885 to escape army service. He settled in Alaska during the gold rush where he made a fortune and built restaurants, hotels and brothels before moving to New York were he invested in real estate. In 1905, he applied to return to Bavaria but was refused because he had not registered as an emigrant before leaving and dodged the draft. Trump’s mother Mary Anne MacLeod Trump was born in 1912 in the Scottish islands, emigrated to the US in 1930, to work as a housekeeper. She married Trump’s father in 1936 and was naturalised in 1942.

Two of Donald Trump’s three wives have been of immigrant stock. Ivana Marie Trump was born in Czechoslovakia in 1949 and immigrated to Canada in 1971 where she worked in modelling. She was visiting New York in 1976 where she met Trump. They were married in 1977, had three children – Donald Jr, Ivana (Ivanka) Marie, and Eric – and divorced in 1990. US-citizen and television presenter, model, and singer Marla Ann Maples married Trump in 1993, after the birth of their daughter, Tiffany, separated in 1997 and divorced in 1999. He and Melania married in 2005 and have one son Barron, now 19 years old.

The Melania film could humanise the inhumane Trump administration for millions of viewers but not the rest.

Photo: AFP