.. Their courtship story is as chaste as its backdrop is louche: Donald saw Melania, Donald asked Melania for her number, but Donald had arrived with another woman—the Norwegian cosmetics heiress Celina Midelfart—so Melania refused. Donald persisted.
.. Trump’s mother was an immigrant, too, from Scotland; his first wife was born Ivana Zelníčková, in Zlín, Czechoslovakia. If he’s as concerned as he says he is by all the “people that are from all over and they’re killers and rapists and they’re coming into this country,” he might consider building a wall around his pants.
.. Melania came to New York to work as a model. Through a quirk in immigration law, models, nearly half of them without high-school diplomas, are admitted on H-1B visas, as highly skilled workers, along with scientists and computer programmers, who are required to show proof of a college degree. “The H-1B program is neither high-skilled nor immigration: these are temporary foreign workers, imported from abroad, for the explicit purpose of substituting for American workers at lower pay,” Trump said, in March, railing against “rampant, widespread H-1B abuse.”
.. a thing for the phrase “from A to Z” (“I follow from A to Z,” “I’m from A to Z hands on,” “I’m involved from A to Z with every piece I design”).
.. Her husband seems to define her largely by her physical advantages, which confer upon him an aura of sexual potency. “Where’s my supermodel?” he yelled from the stage, at a town-hall meeting at the University of Pennsylvania, in 1999, shortly after ushering Melania onto the Howard Stern show to discuss the couple’s “incredible sex” and her lack of cellulite.
.. Trump, speaking to Howard Stern about Ivanka, his ideologically supple elder daughter, said, “She’s six feet tall, she’s got the best body.”
.. Trump plays into the ur-paternal dynamic by repeating his desire to “protect” and “take care of” people. “Make America Great Again” really means “Make America Rich Again.”
.. It has been reported that, out of four hundred and fifty guests at the Trumps’ wedding, three—Viktor and Amalija and Melania’s sister, Ines—were Slovenians.
.. Yet Melania appears to have internalized many aspects of Donald’s culture: his ahistoricism; his unblinking gall; his false dichotomies between murderous scofflaws and deserving citizens, women who ask for nothing and nagging wives. Like Donald, Melania doesn’t drink. She never breaks ranks, not even with a teasing criticism. “I like him the way he is,” she has said, of Donald’s hair.
.. In 2013, Donald tweeted, “I love watching the dishonest writers @NYMag suffer the magazine’s failure.” One of them, Dan Amira, retaliated, writing, “Your wife is waiting for you to die.”
.. If the President has got a smart, plugged-in partner who can get his attention and tell him what’s going on in the land, and when he’s being an idiot, as the best ones have been able to do, that is in our interest. Everybody else serves at his pleasure.” A passive First Spouse, Marton said, can hurt not only her husband but the nation. <strong>Melania Trump, she added, would be “the least experienced and the least prepared First Lady in history.”</strong>
.. they make a persuasive case that Melania has often retailed the basic details of her life as hyperbolically as Trump does his condominiums. Her mother, she told Mika Brzezinski, was “in the fashion industry for a long time.” Melania has also referred to her as “a fashion designer.”
.. Melania has claimed to have won first place in the Look of the Year contest; her Web site states that she obtained a degree in architecture and design from the University of Ljubljana when in fact she dropped out in her first year.
.. must be a bizarre feeling to be Donald Trump and to have a multilingual son who, at one point, spoke English with a Slovenian inflection. (“He has an accent?” Larry King asked, in puzzlement, when the family appeared on his show in 2010.)
.. Not only does she never joke about her husband; she is entirely self-serious. The most un-American thing about her is that she is discreet about her weaknesses. She doesn’t attempt to bond by deprecating herself. She makes no apologies for her twenty-five-carat diamond (a gift from Trump for their tenth anniversary), her formal life style (“He’s not a sweatpants child,” she has said, of Barron), her multiple houses (“Bye! I’m off to my #summer residence #countryside #weekend”).
.. In 2011, after Donald joined the birther movement, she went on “The Joy Behar Show”:
BEHAR: But what is this with the birth certificate obsession? Did he ask to see yours when you met him?”
MELANIA: Well, I needed to put mine anyway because if you want to become an American citizen you need to put the birth certificate. I have a birth certificate from Slovenia, and do you want to see President Obama birth certificate or not?
BEHAR: I’ve seen it.
MELANIA: It’s not a birth certificate.
BEHAR: Well, it’s a certificate of live birth, which they give. But, Melania, if he insists on what he’s saying, then no one in Hawaii can ever run for President. Because they all get the same live-birth certificate.
MELANIA: Well, but they need to have—
BEHAR: Bette Midler is finished, for example!
MELANIA: They need to have, and, in one way, it would be very easy if President Obama just show it. It’s not only Donald who wants to see it. It’s American people, who voted for him, and who didn’t voted for him, they want to see that!.. “I don’t have a nanny,” she told Bazaar. “I have a chef, and I have my assistant, and that’s it. I do it myself.” (“Yes, there is a young woman, someone who works with Barron,” Donald admitted to the Post.)
.. The Trumps’ ostentatiously inegalitarian marriage—it is as blinged-out with male dominance as their penthouse is with Louis XIV furniture—can also be thought of as a marketing tool. This is the prosperity gospel for male grievance. “I mean, I won’t do anything to take care of them,” Donald told Howard Stern, speaking of children. “I’ll supply funds and she’ll take care of the kids. It’s not like I’m gonna be walking the kids down Central Park.”