Melania Trump: Modelling, motherhood and a brazen whitewash of a presidency

MELANIA

Author: Melania Trump

Publisher: Skyhorse

Pages: 182 pp

Price: $40

White House memoirs tend to go on a bit. Melania Trump is slim, as befits an erstwhile fashion model who prepared for her husband’s 2017 inauguration with “strong espresso and a light breakfast of fruit,” but gravely out of shape.

Better brew a double before cracking Melania, which, though clad in a black cover — a choice that could symbolise mourning, sophistication or more likely abject nothingness — is a brazen whitewash of a presidency and a marriage of some tumult.

Its 182 pages are padded with a generous photo insert, including an old ad she did for Camel cigarettes. There are long quotes from the former first lady’s previously delivered speeches, and some of Mr Trump’s, too. And as if to assert herself against his omnipresent monogram, some paragraph breaks are marked with the stark initial M. Is this a book or a souvenir tea towel?

Certainly the timing of its release, less than a month before the 2024 election, invites speculation about what exactly Melania is intended to accomplish. Its biggest revelation, that Mrs Trump supports abortion rights, could be a cry of independence — or a strategised attempt to further blur Mr Trump’s unpopular policy position. The author briefly waves a manicured hand at the idea that trans women in sports might unfairly dash some dreams, and refuses to concede that President Biden won in 2020.

“I acknowledge that differing viewpoints are a natural aspect of human relationships” is a typical bland, obfuscating sentence. No co-writer is credited; after a plagiarism incident at the 2016 Republican National Convention, as Mrs Trump explains in a chapter called “Why Was the Speech Not Vetted?,” she’s loath to delegate.

Like much of the best life writing, Melania begins when its subject, then surnamed Knauss, arrives in New York, after modeling vaulted her from communist Slovenia to Milan, Paris and “everywhere in Europe.” She’s 26, ready to take her career to the next level and wearing a necklace from her family engraved with the German words Ich liebe dich (“I love you”). The twin towers loom as her limo comes into Manhattan, and will not be referred to again.

Her mother, Amalija, who died this year, was Austrian, an onion farmer’s daughter who became a patternmaker. Her father, Viktor, was a chauffeur turned auto salesman, and Melania fondly recalls the new-leather smell of a Citroën Maserati he brought home when she was seven.

There’s another chomp of the madeleine when Donald, after meeting her one night during Fashion Week in the VIP section of the now-defunct Kit Kat Klub, picks her up in a black Mercedes for their first date, a business-tinged visit to his property in Bedford. “Driving provides freedom,” she writes, “which I always treasure.”

She and an older sister, Ines, had grown up in a colourfully decorated three-bedroom apartment in the idyllic-sounding town of Sevnica, tended to by a nanny. The family summered on the Dalmatian coast of Croatia, where Melania remembers running barefoot over cobblestone streets and enjoying gelato. She was a diligent student and planned to pursue industrial design before professional photographers began clamouring to take her picture.

Her idealism was punctured after her prize money was stolen following a runway competition. “Such dishonesty has no place in my life,” she writes, “and it never will.”

Melania is less a confessional than a CV, most notable for what it leaves out than what it includes. Forget anything about porn stars or crotch-grabbing; astoundingly, George Floyd’s name is never mentioned during a discussion of Black Lives Matter. Instead she writes of business ventures like her jewellery sold on QVC, a planned skin care line with “the rejuvenating properties of caviar” that never quite made it to eager customers and recent dabblings in blockchain.

“Knowing that I can stand on my own if necessary,” she writes in one of those lines you’re dying to read into, but can’t quite, “gives me great confidence in everything I do.”

If there’s a plain truth in Melania, it’s that she loves her son, Barron, and will protect him at all costs; and sincerely cares for imperilled children. She has an aversion to raw fish that was accommodated during an official trip to Japan, and an ongoing correspond­ence with King Charles III. There’s plenty about her hard-hatted but high-heeled renovation of the White House, including a tennis pavilion, and her design of a flowery new rug for the Diplomatic Reception Room.

And yet the only entity called to the carpet by Melania is the media — a faceless monolith solely motivated by a desire to do damage to her family, wilfully misinterpreting and mocking messages — “Be Best,” her initiative to stop cyberbullying; “I Really Don’t Care, Do U?” scrawled on a jacket — that should be obvious to all.

“Lying is not acceptable,” she asserts.

The reviewer is a Times book critic and occasional features writer. She joined The Times in 2010