Enigmatic First Lady Melania Trump is fiercely independent, intensely private, biographer Mary Jordan says

Eleanor Herman

August 05, 2020

Mary Jordan

Mary Jordan, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist at The Washington Post, interviewed the head of the Japanese crime syndicate, the yakuda, when she was reporting from Japan. Stationed in Mexico, she spoke for hours with the head of a Mexican drug cartel.

The one person she couldn't get an interview with: First Lady Melania Trump, the subject of her newest book, "The Art of Her Deal: The Untold Story of Melania Trump."

The first lady is deeply suspicious of journalists, Jordan said at an Aug. 4 National Press Club virtual book event. “She is so on guard she barely speaks at official dinners. She trusts people even less than Trump, who doesn’t trust them very much,” she said.

Perhaps because of her distrust, Melania has few friends, Jordan said. She is, however, extremely close to her parents, who live in the White House residence, to her sister Ines Knauss, and her fourteen-year-old-year-old son with Trump, Barron, she said.

In a process Jordan called “brutal,” she interviewed more than 100 people who knew Melania Trump, tracking the journey of her life from its start in Communist Yugoslavia, to modeling in Milan, Paris, and, finally New York. Some people, Jordan said, even those who spoke well of the first lady, literally shook during their interviews, fearful that the Trumps might sue them. Others scrambled into their attics to dig out videos of the young Melania and handed them over to Jordan.

The White House has called Jordan’s book “fiction” and did not respond to her repeated interview requests, written questions or fact checks.

The Art of Her Deal

Jordan said she wrote the book to fill the void of information about Melania Trump, the nation’s first first lady who grew up speaking a language other than English, and only the second first lady not born in the U.S. or the Thirteen Colonies (the first was London-born Louisa Adams, first lady from 1825-1829.) What particularly fascinated Jordan was Melania's status as an immigrant whose husband opposes immigration.

The enigmatic first lady is a fiercely independent, intensely private woman with an “extraordinary capacity to be alone,” Jordan said. She watched as Donald Trump build his brand by talking. And talking. And talking. Melania, on the other hand, crafted her image by withdrawing, by silence. “She could be an alluring old movie star in dark glasses,” Jordan said.

Jordan found that Melania and Donald Trump “are absolutely at peace spending huge amounts of time apart.” One person she interviewed said that over a two-month period when the Trumps were living at the Trump National Golf Club in Bedminster, N.J., they didn’t eat a single meal together. Melania, her parents, and son usually ate healthful food in their suite. Donald ate French fries in the club house.

Jordan pointed out that the first couple’s independence doesn’t mean they don’t rely on each other. Trump trusts fewer and fewer people as his associates write tell-all books or give interviews contradicting him. He trusts his wife and frequently consults her, especially with regards to hiring, Jordan said. She played a critical role in selecting Vice President Mike Pence as Trump’s running mate . And the first lady is not without power of her own.

“The most dangerous place to be is in the cross-hairs of Melania Trump,” Jordan said, noting that in 2018 she fired the second highest-ranking woman in the White House, Deputy National Security Advisor Mira Ricardel, after a squabble over seats on the first lady’s plane.

Melania Trump’s relationship with her three oldest stepchildren from the president’s marriage to his first wife, Ivana, is somewhat rocky, Jordan said. Jordan learned that Ivanka, Donald, Jr., and Eric consider themselves “the real Trumps,” as opposed to Donald’s daughter Tiffany, with his second wife Marla, and his son Barron, with Melania. The first lady calls Ivanka “the princess” because she is spoiled and thinks she is royal, Jordan said. Ivanka, for her part, calls Melania “the portrait” because she speaks about as much as a portrait, she said. Relations frayed further when, after Donald Trump’s inauguration, Ivanka suggested the first lady’s office become the first family’s office, a recommendation that did not go down well with her stepmother, Jordan said.

In his book The Art of the Deal, Donald Trump declared himself the best negotiator in the world and defined “leverage” as possessing what the other person wants and can’t do without. Jordan’s book revealed that Melania Trump took a page from his book when she leveraged the release, a month before the 2016 election, of the Access Hollywood tape in which Trump boasted about sexually assaulting women, to renegotiate her pre-nuptial agreement.

“That was the moment when Melania had all the power,” Jordan said. Though the author could not discover the details of the new agreement, she did determine that it gave Melania more money and her son Barron a share in the Trump Organization equal to those of his half-siblings.

Club President Michael Freedman, who interviewed Jordan, pointed out that Melania Trump is a very different first lady compared to her predecessors who were often in the public eye advocating for causes they cared about. Melania, Jordan said, feels that she doesn’t have to tell anyone where she is as she was never elected, and pointed out that the first lady disappeared for three weeks back in 2018.

Jordan said she hopes her book dispels myths about Melania Trump.

“She’s not trapped,” she said. “She doesn’t need to be freed. She always thinks of what’s good for her and her son, and right now that is to stay and keep the course.”