Free, Melania

by Kate Bennett

  But getting pregnant, with Trump’s or anyone’s baby, didn’t mean Melania packed up her tendency for glamour; that she started knitting booties for the cover of Pregnancy magazine. On the contrary. In the April issue of Vogue, where just over a year before she appeared on the cover in her wedding gown, there is Melania, seven months pregnant, in a gold OMO Norma Kamali string bikini and Christian Louboutin stilettos, with a gold silk Carolina Herrera coat opened wide to expose her body and long legs. Shot by Annie Leibovitz, who in 1991 photographed the iconic Vanity Fair magazine cover of a naked Demi Moore clutching her very pregnant belly, the two-page Melania spread similarly showcased Melania’s stomach and was featured, ironically, in Vogue’s annual “shape” issue. The headline read “Golden Girl.”

  “I think it’s very sexy for a woman to be pregnant,” says Melania in the story. “I think it’s beautiful, carrying a baby inside”—something her husband might disagree with. But in this image, he’s not the focus; he’s on the left-hand page of the spread, sitting in the driver’s seat of the Mercedes he bought for his wife months before, the gull-wing doors of the half-million-dollar sports car open, like he’s waiting for Melania to walk on over and hop inside. She would, maybe, but she’s too busy posing on the back steps of the Trump jet, parked at the airport in West Palm Beach. Melania also tells Vogue that she will be a “strict, but not too strict” parent and that she intends to be “very grounded” bringing up her child. Read into the irony of the accompanying photo of her getting onto her private jet what you will.

  For her baby shower, thrown by her friends Audrey Gruss, a Manhattan philanthropist and socialite, and Pamela Gross, at the time editor of New York society magazine Avenue, Melania and guests take over the FAO Schwarz store on Fifth Avenue. However, though there were toys and baby gifts to be bought all around, none were purchased for baby Trump. Instead, Melania insisted that the things guests bought at the shower go to charity. The surplus of toys was later delivered to New York Presbyterian Hospital. It’s a gesture of kindness that friends say is a hallmark of Melania’s personality, and an early indicator of her soft spot for sick children. Since becoming first lady, her most genuine—and lengthy—hospital visits have been quiet, under-the-radar stops to see ill children, often in the ICU. Donating the gifts and money from her baby shower, and doing so without calling Page Six, while not Trumpian, are very much in alignment with Melania’s independent streak.

  On March 20, nine days early, Melania went into labor. After eight hours, Barron William Trump was born, weighing 8.5 pounds and measuring 21 inches long. The name is unique, but not entirely out of left field. In the 1980s, reporters got used to speaking with a John Barron (or, sometimes, Baron) when they wanted to get a quote or a statement from Donald Trump. Barron, they were told, was a spokesman for the Trump Organization. He was also Donald Trump. Trump used to pretend to be his own PR guy, John Barron/Baron, to pump his own stories and triumphs, plant his name in the paper, and bloat his identity—and sometimes his wealth. In 1984, Jonathan Greenberg was reporting the fabled Forbes 400, the annual ranking of the richest people in America. Greenberg was put on the phone with John Barron, a Trump Organization “official,” who went into deep and rambling detail about Trump’s assets and why they were worth more than the magazine had ranked Trump the previous year. When he ultimately went back and listened to the recorded “Barron” interviews, Greenberg said he was “amazed” at the time he “didn’t see through the ruse.” Trump had changed the cadence of his voice, said Greenberg, and deepened his New York accent, but it was him.

  Whether Melania knew about the John Barron ruse when she and Trump named their only child is unclear. Even more unclear is what she might think now that she knows the origin of the name and its history with Trump’s misrepresentations.

  Unlike when Marla delivered Tiffany, Trump was thrilled when Melania told him it would be fine to wait outside and not be in the delivery room while she was pushing. Marla was in labor for twelve hours and had opted for natural childbirth. As with most things with Marla, it was dramatic. Trump was by her side for most of it, agonizing as she screamed out in pain and praying as she was surrounded by a breathing coach (who performed reflexology), her mother, and a doctor. Trump, a famous germophobe, found the whole thing very, very uncomfortable, to put it mildly.

  With Melania, twenty minutes after Barron was born, Trump wasn’t in scrubs, he was on the phone announcing the news of his fifth child by calling in to Imus in the Morning, Don Imus’s radio program. “I continue to stay young, right?” fifty-nine-year-old Trump says, managing to make the birth of his new son about himself. “I produce children; I stay young.” He also took a call from Regis Philbin, who habitually referred to Trump as the Trumpster on his live morning television program. “She gave me a nice son,” Trump told Regis of Melania’s efforts.

  On her personal Web site, now defunct, Melania said, “Donald and I are very happy and excited. We can’t wait to take our new little Trump to his new home.”

  Melania was soon on the interview circuit herself. Just two weeks after the birth of Barron, she was on The View, chatting with the ladies about her “very, very easy” childbirth and answering with a laugh as to whether she had an epidural (“Of course!”). At the time, remember, The View was very friendly turf—this was prepolitics. Nowadays, Melania is one of the show’s favorite targets. The hosts frequently lambaste her with accusations of everything from being complicit in her husband’s policies to having a body double.

  But back then she was the model mother. Melania told The View audience that Trump was up in the morning with Barron, reading the newspaper “with him” in the bedroom. When Barron soiled his diaper, she said, Trump always said, “Time to see Mommy!”

  “He’s not like a crybaby. He’s calm and it’s fantastic,” Melania told People magazine in a story titled “Billion Dollar Baby,” done shortly after her View appearance. Posing with the baby and Trump, wearing a suit and holding little Barron, Melania is definitely not wearing what most new mothers wear three weeks after they give birth. She’s dressed in a black satin dress with a neckline so deep that to call it plunging would be an understatement. Diamond earrings dangle from her earlobes, and her hair is piled up in an elaborate chignon. This is how Melania does motherhood.

  Both Trump and Melania are staring straight into the camera, neither one smiling, neither one looking down at Barron, who is asleep on Trump’s lap. In one of the photos in the story, Melania holds Barron in one arm and, with the other hand, pushes a gold baby carriage, complete with gold spoke wheels and a mini crystal chandelier hanging from the top. It was a baby gift, and a play on Trump’s love of gold, from Ellen DeGeneres. “It’s fun. It makes you laugh,” says Melania.

  After she becomes first lady of the United States, political opponents will use this image of Melania in her golden apartment, pushing her golden pram, as an example of how out of touch the Trumps are and how ridiculous their lifestyle is that they actually had a carriage like this for their newborn. All very valid criticism, though no one mentions the gifter was DeGeneres.

  Melania spends every minute she can with her new baby, even though there is a nurse to mind Barron when Melania needs sleep. “I feed him, I change him, I play with him,” she says. Trump revels in his hands-offness. “Some women want the husband to do half the chores. That’s not Melania—fortunately for me.”

  She does an interview on television’s Access Hollywood—ironically, the same program on which, less than a year before, her husband was recorded bragging about his ability to get any woman he wants. “Hello, Access,” Melania coos to the camera, holding little Barron. The host (not Bush) gets a tour of the baby’s nursery, where Trump proudly shows off a humongous stuffed puppy dog, flopped on the ground in the corner of the room. It was a gift from Barbara Walters, Trump confirms. Gayle King’s baby gift is another huge stuffed animal, this time a green frog. The walk-through of the penthouse baby zone continues to the bathroom, which is bas
ically just a bathroom, the only sign that it’s maybe for a tiny baby is a rubber ducky perched on the white marble bathtub.

  As they pass the changing table, a converted Louis XIV desk, the interviewer asks Melania if her husband changes diapers. It’s an ongoing issue, the diapers, and whether he changes them, as though the visual of an almost-sixty-year-old billionaire wiping poop from his baby’s bottom will change the course of history.

  Melania, never one to be fake, says clearly, “No, he doesn’t,” but quickly follows with, “and I’m okay with it.” She talks a bit more about how special the penthouse view is for Barron (he’s not even eight weeks old and has probably just spotted his feet) and how she has enjoyed decorating the Trump Tower penthouse for her new son. It’s Melania’s moment, but Trump, as he often does, changes the topic of conversation to his real princess: Ivanka. “When Ivanka was growing up, Ivanka grew up in this room,” he says, awkwardly, Melania staring at him. There’s a slight pause and Trump goes on about the decor of the nursery. “We just change it from woman to man.” Huh.

  Barron soon became Melania’s reason for staying off the social radar in New York, then her reason for avoiding her husband’s presidential campaign, and, ultimately, her reason for not moving into the White House after she became first lady of the United States. And even when she does eventually move to D.C., he is her reason for adopting a light work schedule and generally refraining from trips that take longer than one day, so she can be home when Barron gets back from after-school soccer practice.

  She had convinced Trump that he should have another child, a fifth, and he went along with it, but he was not shy about the fact that he wouldn’t be involved in hands-on parenting the kid. He talked about it every chance he got, as if to pound into Melania’s mind that she was going to be on her own with this parenting thing.

  “If you have the money, having children is great,” Trump said to Larry King in 2005, his new bride seated right beside him, not yet pregnant. “I’m not going to be doing the diapers. I’m not going to be making the food. I may never see the kid.”

  He said it again in an interview with Howard Stern. “It’s not like I’m going to be walking the kids down Central Park.” For reference, minutes before he expounded on fatherhood, Stern tested Trump’s marital commitment, too, posing a scenario in which Melania is horribly disfigured in an accident. He asks Trump if he would stay with her if she was unreasonably jacked up. “Well, how do the breasts look?” Trump asks. “The breasts are okay,” says Stern of this imaginary world where Melania is mangled beyond recognition but her boobs survive. “Yeah, of course I stay,” says Trump. “Because that’s important.”

  “What about when Melania gets stretched out? Big belly, fat ass from carrying a baby?” Stern, as he does, goes on. “No, no, I will totally love it,” says Trump, with surprising reassurance. Stern ribs him that he won’t; that’s not him. Trump says he will love her, no matter what, but then he says, “Besides that, she’s listening right now.”

  Being so hands-on may make her a great mother, but Melania is not the complete picture of domesticity. She has people to clean the triplex, she has some part-time child help, and she definitely doesn’t cook. In a particularly weird segment on Martha Stewart’s television talk show, she and Trump and Martha make meatloaf sandwiches, which Martha at least claims are Trump’s favorite. Trump is wearing his usual bulky suit and tie, but with a white apron over it, tied at his waistline. Melania has smartly eschewed the apron, instead making her sandwich in a cashmere belted V-neck sweater, again so open at the décolletage that for a second one wonders if her breasts might actually be on the menu.

  “No, I don’t eat onion,” she snaps at Martha when she tries to layer the sandwich with toppings. She okays pickles, gingerly placing them on top of the meatloaf with her manicured fingers, her massive diamond rings getting into the shot. When Martha puts the slab of meatloaf on Trump’s sandwich, she uses her hands, a no-no for the notorious germophobe. He shrugs it off, giving her the all clear. “It’s fine, what am I going to catch from you?” She’s clean. proceed.

  Melania then makes a joke at Trump’s expense, saying now that he knows how to make a sandwich, he can make one for her when she asks. Martha smiles. Trump doesn’t.

  They still went out after the baby was born, but not as much, and when they did, it was sometimes with Barron in tow. Melania liked to dress him up sort of in the style of a posh European schoolboy, shorts and knee-high socks, with button-down shirts, Peter Pan collars, and tiny camel hair or cashmere suit jackets. He’s a beautiful little boy, with big blue eyes and curly blond hair. Trump could be seen bouncing Barron on his knee at the US Open, Melania took him to a red carpet hospital fund-raiser, they all went to Mar-a-Lago with regularity, but, as can happen when a baby comes into a family, the focus shifted away from the spouse to the child.

  For the most part, Melania disappeared from the spotlight and into motherhood, spending days with the baby and her parents, speaking Slovenian, staying in. Trump, when it served, occasionally used Barron as a publicity prop, which isn’t so unusual considering how often he has put his older children on The Apprentice, cobranding his business endeavors with his family. Around Barron’s first birthday, Trump gets a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame—one that, later when he is president, will be vandalized so often there is an ordinance passed to have it removed—and the family travels to Los Angeles for the ceremony. In remarks in front of the gathered crowd, Trump thanks his supporters and all his kids and then asks to hold the baby. Melania passes him over. Holding his youngest son, Trump says, “See? That’s Barron. He’s strong, he’s smart, he’s tough, he’s vicious, he’s violent.” It’s funny if only because Barron is so cute, grasping at the microphone on the podium like any baby would. Then Trump gets serious about his son for a second. “And most importantly, hopefully, he’s smart, cuz smart is really the ingredient. So, Barron, good luck.”

  When he was a toddler, Barron and his mother made what was by then a rare appearance on The Celebrity Apprentice, in a segment filmed at the Trump Tower triplex. Trump greets the contestants, saying of his home, “some people say it’s the greatest apartment in the world.” He tells Barron, who is in his mother’s arms, to say hello to the group and adds, “Barron, hopefully, someday, will be a great entrepreneur.”

  “What do you want to do when you grow up?” Melania coos to the baby boy. “Bid-ness!” he says. It’s well rehearsed but still adorable, and everyone laughs.

  “He’s doing well, just eighteen months old, and he’s doing really well,” says Trump, always so desperate to make sure everyone can tell that his progeny is smart.

  Once she became the Republican candidate’s wife, and ultimately first lady, the things Melania used to love to do she could no longer do. It was challenging to spend time with her husband and her son. She didn’t feel comfortable visiting with her small group of friends. She felt strange and out of place watching Barron’s baseball games in Central Park with the other moms; she couldn’t just decide to jet off to one of her other homes at a moment’s notice; she had trouble shopping in her favorite stores, like Barney’s or Bergdorf Goodman, without feeling as if she had lost some of her treasured privacy.

  Nor could she document her activities in the way she had grown accustomed, posting with regularity on Twitter and Instagram. She revealed just enough to paint a picture of a posh and happy lifestyle, blurring out details of places using a filter or shooting photos off-center to hide exact locations and avoid providing too much detail in the background. She was sharing, yes, but she was doing so with signature mystery.

  Granted, nothing about her previous life was all that exciting or titillating in the large-scale world of Trump flash and cash. In fact, Melania’s social media feeds, some of the photos from which still exist on her Facebook page and her personal Twitter page, perhaps most authentically illustrate Melania Trump BWH (“before White House”). And it’s all sort of milquetoast, but wealthy milquetoas
t. Her Facebook profile pic is a classic Melania beauty shot, nonsmiling, of course. Her cover photo—the larger image of a profile page—is a supertight close-up of her cobalt blue eyes.

  Melania’s Facebook mobile uploads, images she has snapped on her phone and posted to social media, reveal she likes to travel, eat well, observe flowers (there is an abundance of tightly cropped pictures of blossoms), and skip around between her homes (one can seasonally keep track of which house she is at using the color of leaves outside or the presence of snow or sand as indicators).

  One of the most shared photos from her social media account is a selfie, with Melania holding her iPhone, facing the mirror in her personal bathroom in the Trump Tower penthouse (a deep porcelain bathtub with a pink shower cap resting on the faucet are in the background), wearing a navy blazer and white jeans, unsmiling in her huge sunglasses. The caption reads: “Bye! I’m off to my #summer residence #countryside #weekend.” Some might call it tone-deaf; Melania would probably just shrug.

  To read into these glamour shots is an exercise in futility. Like most women on social media, she’s mostly just chronicling her life for her friends, and that picture of her ponytail, captioned “Thursday,” is probably just that: a picture of her ponytail on a Thursday.

  She has a few of Barron and Trump together, where she refers to them as “my two boys.” “I always thought she should write a guide for parents on raising children,” one of Melania’s closest girlfriends tells me. Melania is the “other mom friend” she calls or texts when this friend needs help. “She gives the best, most spot-on advice.”

  The friend adds that Melania is great at keeping things down-to-earth for her son, but she is still the mother of a Trump, and Trump life is not down-to-earth. Like the time Melania revealed she had taken her young son to … wait for it … the grocery store. “He had a lot of fun and it’s a new experience for a child, you cannot shelter the child.” By keeping him from the grocery store. “We went because I want to show him [the] supermarket. He had a fun time, he was putting everything in the shopping cart, ‘we need this, we need cereal,’ we need so many stuff,” Melania says. She was also asked if she, Mrs. Donald Trump, ever has to go to the market, to which she answers, yes, once she did.