Free, Melania

by Kate Bennett

  Social media also reveals a bit more of Ines Knauss, Melania’s older sister, who, like Melania, dropped Knavs to go by Knauss. The two are exceptionally close, but little is known about Ines. A pencil sketch on paper of two women talking from August 2014, captioned “art of gossip #courtesy of #artist ines knauss,” on Melania’s Instagram page, shows an example of Ines’s work. Ines has her own Instagram account, which she keeps fairly current even today. It feels more like a Melania fan page, however, than a social media account of her own. She posts flashback pics of the two of them as little girls in Slovenia or old photos of herself or her parents. People who know Melania best say Ines is her most important confidante and advice giver.

  One of the most famous photos from Melania’s social media feed is her asking an existential question about a white beluga whale, head peeking through the surface of the ocean. In 2012 it goes viral: “What is she thinking?” reads the caption. Of course, the image will again make the rounds as a meme once Melania becomes first lady, mostly because it’s such a bizarre question, but also because it’s what most people in the country want to know about Melania.

  Another of her posts that went viral is a video clip of a family drive with Donald and Barron. It remains on her Facebook page and shows her vantage point from the back seat, Rolls-Royce wings on the hood visible up front, with Trump driving and Barron riding shotgun. Taylor Swift’s “Blank Space” blares from the radio as the trio drives along in silence for a solid seventeen seconds: “Fun night with my two boys DJT & BWT [heart emoji].”

  The photos also show a real love that Melania has for her husband. “Date night with my [heart emoji] DJT.” Despite the gauzy filters, the shots paint the clearest picture of what Melania felt like sharing about her marriage. “Isn’t he gorgeous?” is the caption of a picture of Trump.

  In 2011 Melania (ironically) does an interview with Billy Bush for Access Hollywood, where she talks about, of all things, Trump’s legs. “He has beautiful legs. He has a gorgeous legs. Beautiful legs, long, beautiful legs.” She puts her thumb and fingers apart and drags her arm up and down, indicating how lithe and trim she thinks her husband’s legs are.

  The rewards for her adoration, or maybe they’re just gifts out of the blue, come with regularity for Melania. She shows off her expensive bags and jewelry and furs and clothes. Of course, it’s just a sampling. In real life, as the kids say, she has amassed hundreds of thousands of dollars in Hermès Birkin bags alone, with at least ten of them at her disposal, the most expensive a crocodile-skin Birkin that retails (after a significant waiting list for potential buyers) for about $60,000. It’s difficult for many to believe, but Melania is actually not personally a heavy spender. She’s careful with money, and though she does get a healthy amount for her upkeep and clothes and such, she’s not the type to spend wildly on five-figure Birkin bags on her own. Trump likes to ask what she wants and then he typically gifts them to her. She treats them with care and actually uses them, unlike many women who can afford them but keep them, museum-like, on the shelves of their walk-in closets.

  One of her Instagram pictures is simply a photo of a large Chanel shopping bag, captioned, “Nice surprise.” There are also yearly throwback shots to her wedding day on January 21, the couple’s anniversary, something Melania will no longer reference or acknowledge on social media once she enters the White House and becomes first lady. Whether driven by privacy—she doesn’t want to share her personal dates with an invasive public, now that she has her whole life on display—or by lack of emotional connection, as of this writing Melania has not wished a happy anniversary to her husband, nor he to her, in a public way, during their time in the White House.

  Memories, private events, personal mementos are all incredibly special to Melania, and she fiercely guards them. In part, she does this because she had such important and memorable times as a child herself, traveling with her parents in Europe, going on ski trips with them, taking coastal vacations. As tightly knit as the Knavses were, so is this Trump threesome: she, Barron, and Trump.

  In her study and her private office in Trump Tower, Melania has volumes of photo albums and scrapbooks. She has always been purposeful about documenting her life. Friends say she doesn’t keep a personal diary, but she has for decades made meticulous, chronological albums of each year of Barron’s life, and her own, with Trump. Each leather-bound album is embossed with the dates in gold on the front. Some showcase travel; others, holidays.

  She may be the third Mrs. Donald Trump, and her son the fifth Trump child, but Melania wants nothing about her experiences to resemble anyone else’s, which is why she so thoroughly keeps track of memories and experiences. Hers might feel like a chapter in her husband’s book of life stories, but Melania is hell-bent on not becoming a footnote.

  10

  Just Melania

  “I like beautiful stuff. I live the life.”

  —MELANIA TRUMP

  The years Melania spent between having Barron in 2006 and emerging on the public stage as the wife of a prominent presidential candidate in 2015 are not well documented. Unlike Ivana, who tried her hand at running Trump properties once her kids were in school, and Marla, who was still trying to break into acting, Melania had very little motivation to do much of anything in the professional sense. She told friends she was quite happy at home doing mundane things, taking care of her son, spending time with her small circle of friends, and dabbling a bit in the charity circuit. She wasn’t interested in modeling or acting after she got married, although she did one gig playing a Bride of Frankensteinesque character in an Aflac commercial. A mad scientist swaps her brain with the Aflac duck, and then the duck speaks with a sultry Melania voice about insurance—and she barks the duck’s “Aflac!” at the end, screaming when she realizes she has duck feet.

  In 2010, having decided the family business of real estate wasn’t for her, and neither was playing a duck-footed bride, Melania started having discussions with Trump about what she should “do” now that their son was old enough not to need her constant attention. Trump was smack in the middle of a career high: The Apprentice had spun off into The Celebrity Apprentice, and it was still ratings gold. He wasn’t necessarily interested in his wife having a career, since he’d been burned by it with the first two wives. But he also knows that Melania has been bored, a common malaise that many mothers, even wealthy Park Avenue (or Fifth Avenue, in this case) trophy wives, face once their child is out of diapers and they suddenly remember the career path they were on before being sidetracked by husband and baby.

  Unfortunately, Melania’s career had been modeling, a job that has a definite shelf date, and at forty, hers had long expired. Barron was four, old enough for her to start working on something, anything. She’s always liked designing and she’s always liked jewels—she combines the two and, boom, she’s a jewelry designer.

  As a Trump, that she didn’t already have a brand with her name on it was sort of strange anyway. Interestingly, however, Melania decided to call her line Melania Timepieces and Jewelry. Notably absent was the Trump part, the part that her husband thinks is worth its weight in gold. Melania, apparently, did not. Even the watches she designs have a simple M on the face, not MT. A few times, when reporters interviewed her about her line and accidentally referred to it as Melania Trump Timepieces and Jewelry, she was quick to correct: “Just Melania.”

  As such, she fashioned the line after her own lifestyle and based it on the three cities she said she loved most: New York and Palm Beach, where she had homes, and Paris, where she lived as a model—albeit in a tiny apartment with a Swedish roommate, surviving on tuna sandwiches and exercising by running up and down the staircase. The Paris part of her jewelry line was far more aspirational than the reality of her life in Paris in those days. The New York jewelry was contemporary; the Palm Beach, sporty. The hook? Every piece was less than two hundred dollars, a steal in the land of Trump.

  She took it very seriously, making promotional videos set t
o classical music, which show her sketching the designs from the golden desk in her home office. “I have many roles in my life: mother, wife, daughter, sister—and I design for those kind of women,” Melania says in one video, just after white letters spell out her name across the screen in curlicues. “I want women across the country to feel glamorous, elegant, chic, and happy when they wear my jewelry.” There is a lot of “me,” “my,” and “I” in this business undertaking. Melania insists that the line does not use the word Trump anywhere. She is clear that the aspirational element of her business is all about her own life, not her husband’s. When she is inevitably asked about Trump’s role in the undertaking, Melania is annoyed, telling one interviewer, “He’s very busy with his own stuff. I don’t want to bother [him] with this.” During another TV spot to promote the line, the reporter wants to know which piece is Trump’s favorite. “I didn’t ask him,” Melania replies.

  Melania designs multiple collections over several years, doing the main selling herself on QVC, usually at odd hours, flying privately on the Trump jet to the television shopping network’s Pennsylvania headquarters, hawking the line late on Sunday nights, early Monday mornings.

  The pieces continually sell out, mostly because Melania’s breezy statements about how and why and when to wear them (“with a sarong, when you’re running around”), though ridiculous, feel, oddly, genuinely authentic. Part of Melania’s charm is her ability to put people at ease, to make them feel welcome. Here she was on QVC, the great middle-class shopping milieu, extending the world of the rich to the masses and giving them a how-to. And it felt, well, legitimate.

  A couple of years later, she attempts the launch of another Melania (no Trump, please) product, the Melania Caviar Complexe C6 Collection, a skincare line based on a lotion concocted with caviar. The bottle design is very Melania, white and gold, with elegant script displaying her first name—again, not a Trump in sight. She does, however, use the tried-and-true Trump style of promotion, going on talk shows like The View. During one of her appearances on the lady-chat show, she famously announced that she slathered the caviar cream all over Barron after his nightly bath.

  Perhaps the best marketing for the skin care line came from Trump’s Celebrity Apprentice, an episode of which was devoted to the team task of creating an advertising plan for the boss’s wife’s newest side hustle. On the show, Melania visits each team as it prepares for the big ad-campaign pitch; one of the team leaders is Dennis Rodman, who asks Melania if he can go to her personal bathroom to get a more intimate look at her beauty routine. The other team is even creepier. Gary Busey apparently takes a liking to Melania: “Have you ever had your genitalia so excited that it spins like a Ferris wheel on a carnival ride?” asks Busey, looking into the camera. (Um, no.) “That’s how beautiful she is.”

  Amazingly, Busey and his team do not lose the challenge—that distinction goes to Rodman’s crew, who make it through the entire presentation of their advertising campaign without realizing they have spelled Melania’s name Milania—with an i.

  The misspelling should have been a harbinger of things to come for the skincare line. It never got off the ground, despite all the hoopla, because of a complicated lawsuit with the backers and producers of the product. Melania’s partners’ company devolves into a series of nasty suits, one aimed at her, which she fights and wins. She testified that she spent time promoting the product, only to have no product for her customers to buy. Exonerated but not satisfied, Melania fights back ten times harder, in the same way as she will later describe how her husband goes after his enemies, countersuing the defunct company for $50 million in potential lost royalties and damage to her name brand. She scores there too, settling out of court.

  Though the jewelry line was a success, and presumably the skincare line would have been too, Melania ultimately decided to let both businesses die a quiet death. They kept her too busy to focus on Barron and her motherly duties.

  She folds the line, and little is heard about it again until Melania becomes first lady and her official biography on the White House Web site lists her accomplishments, one part stating: “Melania is also a successful entrepreneur. In April 2010, Melania Trump launched her own jewelry collection, ‘Melania TM, Timepieces & Jewelry,’ on QVC.”

  People freaked out. Accused of promoting her business—which didn’t even exist anymore—on her official White House page, an updated version was soon posted, excluding the name of the jewelry line and the part about QVC.

  “It is not uncommon for the White House to note the accomplishments of the first lady in her official biography,” said a Washington Post story about the incident, “but Trump’s decision to include a detailed list of her media appearances and branded retail goods is unusual.”

  To be honest, the charge isn’t fair, considering her job was to make media appearances and be in the pages of magazines as a model, and she actually did launch a line of branded retail goods. It was unusual, but it wasn’t untrue. Melania didn’t have a law degree, like her predecessor Michelle Obama, nor did she have Laura Bush’s experience as a political wife, taking part in policy programs and charitable initiatives, visiting with victims of natural disasters and the downtrodden. She had none of the accomplishments that Hillary Clinton had as a governor’s wife and a partner at a law firm.

  Melania Trump’s professional accomplishments were unlike any first lady’s before her, but they were very much aligned with being a sexpot model who married a mogul and had time and money on her hands to try her hand at a business endeavor. Sports Illustrated, GQ, FHM spreads, and a jewelry line—QVC had discontinued selling the Melania jewelry line long before she went into the White House, so there was no need to clutch pearls over using the White House Web site to “promote” a business. It was just that her business wasn’t what the people expected, or preferred, from their first lady. Today, Melania’s official White House bio has been further scrubbed and now has zero mention of her jewelry line or her magazine appearances.

  But Melania still found a way to make her own income, even in the White House. A control freak when it comes to her image, with an extreme dislike of people making money off her, Melania owns the licensing agreements to most of her private photo sessions. She has a “rights-managed” license with Getty Images, something that many celebrities have, which allows her to be compensated for the use of photos she poses for with professional photographers. It’s clever, and also wily. The agreement also allows for her to decide which news outlet can use the images. Anyone who reaches out to Getty to license the photos must be approved by a Trump representative—who is typically the first lady herself—and if she doesn’t like the person/story/outlet, she can just say no. It’s pretty genius, actually. And lucrative. In spring 2018, the Office of Government Ethics released its annual financial disclosure for the president for the previous year. Melania received between $100,000 and $1,000,000 from Getty for licensed photos of herself, with many sources thinking it was closer to seven figures.

  She may have given herself over to the public to a great degree when her husband won the presidency, but Melania was still going to know which images of her, her home, and her son were being released, who was publishing them, and where.

  Her new role left her with few avenues to exert independence, but Melania would manage to find them. As for the vast and foreign White House itself, Melania would move in only when she felt good and ready. Like most things Melania, she would confront it, but on her own terms.

  11

  The White House

  “There are prison elements to it. But it’s a really nice prison.”

  —MICHELLE OBAMA

  At about the year and a half mark, all first ladies start to go a little crazy. That’s when they realize they’re trapped, says a former Secret Service agent who has watched it happen to the three he guarded during his tenure: “There’s no way to avoid that feeling.” The eighteen acres of grounds, the thirty thousand square feet and four floors of the White Ho
use’s private residence, begin to feel claustrophobic.

  The president, at least, is allowed to walk to the Oval Office, get a bit of fresh air when he wants to walk along the breezeway from the East to the West Wing, a journey that, depending on his clip, can take five to seven minutes from the residence to the Oval Office and is about the length of a football field. The first lady, not so much. Her offices are just downstairs from the residence, in the East Wing, about a minute away. (The exception is Hillary Clinton, who while first lady managed to keep the East Wing space as well as commandeer offices in the Executive Office Building and an office for herself in the West Wing. In 1993, Bill Clinton’s press secretary, Dee Dee Myers, told the media that Mrs. Clinton was given an office in the West Wing “because the president wanted her to be there to work.”)

  In all, there are 132 rooms in the White House, 35 bathrooms, 147 windows, 28 fireplaces, 8 staircases, and 3 elevators. Some of those rooms, about 35 of them, are private and just for the first family and their guests. Still, live there a while, and the walls, while plentiful, start to close in. Michelle Obama once said, “There are prison elements to it. But it’s a really nice prison.” Harry S. Truman called it “this great white jail.”

  There are eyes on you everywhere, and you have no control over things you once had control over in your own home, your own penthouse, your own country house, your own beach house—for Melania, the list is long. You don’t control the air—the Secret Service regulates the temperature and the oxygen levels (that thermostat is a dummy). You don’t control the electricity—the Secret Service dictates which lights must remain on or off. You don’t control the food—the Secret Service can have a say in that, too, for safety. You don’t even control if you can open the window to get fresh air—the Secret Service won’t allow it. Let’s say you do put a lock on your door, as Trump insisted be put on his own bedroom—the Secret Service will put up a stink, but ultimately say it’s all right—only because they can breach the door whenever they need to. But if you think you can live without your every step being monitored, you’re fooling yourself. “When you’re first lady, you lose the spontaneity of your life,” says the agent.