Donald Trump​ began seriously thinking about running for office in 1998, so it’s said, when the wrestler Jesse ‘The Body’ Ventura won the Minnesota governorship on the Reform Party ticket. Ventura’s campaign had been dismissed as a sideshow by Democrats and Republicans alike. He was no one’s idea of a professional politician and he made that the point. Only a true outsider, he insisted, could blow up the rigged system. Minnesotans marked the result with T-shirts: ‘My governor can beat up your governor!’ Two years later, Trump invited one hundred Reform Party activists to Mar-a-Lago and began quizzing his friends on which of his girlfriends would make the best First Lady. By now, Trump was telling the New York Times that if he ran for president, he’d win: ‘The working man loves me.’ His playboy reputation, he said, shouldn’t be an obstacle: ‘Actually, I think people like it. It’s a fantasy.’ He was single after two divorces, and Americans prefer their presidents married, but he was sure that, if necessary, he ‘could be married in 24 hours’. What he wouldn’t do was wed someone who might damage his brand: ‘Certain guys tell me they want women of substance, not beautiful models. It just means they can’t get beautiful models.’

In her memoir (Skyhorse, £30), Melania Trump says that she met Donald in 1998, at a party during New York Fashion Week. She was 28, a Slovenian model who’d recently changed her name from Melanija Knavs to the less Slavic Melania Knauss. She writes that the 24-year age difference between them didn’t register: ‘The connection between us was palpable’ and she was ‘giddy with joy’. She sensed they ‘were on the same wavelength’. His wealth and fame, she adds, were irrelevant, since she ‘could have easily captured the attention of numerous celebrities if I had so desired’. She doesn’t say whether it bothered her that he called in to the Howard Stern radio show to brag about her body parts; he told its listeners that he often felt her up in public, that she was ‘actually naked’ while they were on the air. Donald put her on the line:

Stern: You are so hot. I see pictures of you, I can’t believe it, you’re a dream.

Melania: Oh, thank you …

Stern: I want you to put on your hottest outfit … What are you wearing right now?

Melania: Not much.

Stern: Are you nude?

Melania: Almost.

Stern: Ahh. I have my pants off already.

When Stern asked Trump if he’d stay with her if she were disfigured in a car accident, Trump asked: ‘How do the breasts look?’

Melania’s memoir also makes no mention of Jeffrey Epstein, who was close to Trump during the years when she first knew him. In 2019, a month before Epstein was found dead in his Manhattan jail cell, the New York Times reported that he had been ‘claiming to people’ – their identities unspecified – that he had been responsible for introducing Trump to Melania, a claim both Trumps have ferociously denied. Photographs exist of Melania with Epstein, and in the Epstein files there’s a warm email exchange between someone with the name Melania and Epstein’s partner, Ghislaine Maxwell. In October, the writer Michael Wolff filed suit against Melania Trump in New York, alleging that she had threatened him with a billion-dollar lawsuit over his reporting on her association with Epstein: ‘Mrs Trump’s claims are made for the purpose of harassing, intimidating, punishing or otherwise maliciously inhibiting Mr Wolff’s free exercise of speech.’ If true, this wouldn’t be the first time that reporting about Melania Trump has been discouraged by unusually high stakes. British newspapers alone have paid her many millions of pounds to settle defamation claims. Mary Jordan, an editor at the Washington Post, has said that nothing in her three decades as a correspondent, not even her work on Mexican drug cartels, prepared her for the ‘unprecedented challenge’ of writing about Melania. The people who know her best seem scared to talk about her or are bound by non-disclosure agreements.

Melania herself rarely speaks about her upbringing – even her memoir is evasive – and what little she has said has not always survived inspection. Her account of her hard-working, honest, honourable parents in her speech at the Republican National Convention in 2016 was found to have been plagiarised from Michelle Obama (Trump’s team said there was ‘no cribbing’, that they were just ‘common words’). Her website once asserted that she had obtained a ‘degree in design and architecture at University in Slovenia’, but there was no evidence for this, and she now says that she dropped out of the University of Ljubljana to pursue modelling. She claims to speak French, German and Italian, but her encounters with French, German and Italian speakers suggest otherwise. When the reporter Julia Ioffe asked her whether she had an older half-brother in Slovenia, Melania denied it, acknowledging the truth only after Ioffe produced documents from a Slovenian court (Melania said that she’d misunderstood the question). One of Donald Trump’s friends told Jordan that when Trump started dating her ‘she looked the part – another young model,’ but she ‘didn’t talk about what she had been doing. She just appeared, this woman with no history.’

It matters to Melania Trump that people know that she was ‘already a thriving model, enjoying my success’ before she met Donald. In 2019, the Telegraph paid her ‘substantial damages’ to settle a defamation suit and published an apology that included the statements ‘Mrs Trump was not struggling in her modelling career before she met Mr Trump’ and ‘she did not advance in her career due to the assistance of Mr Trump.’ In her memoir, she says she focused on commercial modelling, which included catalogue work; and she posed nude with another woman for a French men’s magazine. Advertising rules sometimes worked in her favour: models for alcohol and tobacco products were supposed to look over 21, and she was featured on a billboard for Camel cigarettes. Once Melania started going out with Trump, he took over her representation through his own modelling agency, Trump Model Management. She began appearing regularly in fashion magazines and posed in a bikini for the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue. In 2005 she appeared on the cover of Vogue, billed as ‘Donald Trump’s new bride’.

And now, of course, there is her new film, Melania, a $28 million bribe from Amazon to do what she has always wanted: walk and be watched. It is – to a degree that seems unbelievable after you’ve paid to see it – a movie about her walking. She advances across plains of marble, glides down the gilt corridors of Mar-a-Lago towards a waiting motorcade, steps out of armoured black sedans onto airport tarmac and up the stairs to private jets, through the mirrored heights of Trump Tower, down the nave of St Patrick’s Cathedral, along the polished floors of the Capitol. Adriane Quinlan of New York magazine was struck by the film’s inexhaustible attention to hallways: we watch, over and over, Melania ‘clacking down them in her stilettos’, a runway supermodel at last. She was an executive producer, with editorial control, yet the film often seems as though it’s been edited by someone who despises her. It opens with the Rolling Stones’ ‘Gimme Shelter’, and as she arrives and departs we hear ‘Rape, murder, it’s just a shot away.’

A few days before the 2016 election, the Associated Press reported that Melania had earned $20,056 for ten American modelling jobs she completed in 1996 while on a temporary visa that didn’t legally permit her to work in the country. (Her immigration lawyer denies this: ‘These documents, which have not been verified, do not reflect our records.’) More recently, the British press reported on Becky Burke, a 28-year-old Welsh woman who visited the US last year on a tourist visa. She had arranged accommodation through Workaway, a ‘cultural exchange’ website where guests receive free room and board in return for helping out with household chores. Burke had used the site to arrange accommodation for a previous trip to California, doing light cleaning and walking her host family’s dog, but otherwise going on bike tours and day trips. On this visit, after questioning by US border officers, she was detained for nineteen days for breaching her visa conditions. There weren’t enough blankets for all the detainees; she went hungry and was forced to undergo an invasive body search. She repeatedly asked to be allowed to buy a ticket home – she had the money – but was refused. Burke counts herself lucky, though: she had nannied for the BBC presenter Jenny Kleeman, who wrote about her case; her friends and family campaigned for her release; her local MP got involved. After diplomatic intervention, Burke was finally put on a flight home, shackled at the ankles, wrists and waist.

When rumours first surfaced that Melania had worked for money while on a temporary visa, Donald said that he would hold a press conference to set the record straight. As Jordan notes in The Art of Her Deal: The Untold Story of Melania Trump (2020), it never happened, and Melania has never released her immigration records. After she became an American citizen in 2006, her parents were able to move to the US and become American citizens too – a process Donald Trump has elsewhere derided as ‘chain migration’. One of Melania’s former friends, Stephanie Winston Wolkoff, has speculated that Melania may have helped her sister too. In her memoir Melania and Me: The Rise and Fall of My Friendship with the First Lady (2020), Wolkoff recounts that in 2012, Melania ‘asked me to write a letter on behalf of her sister, Ines’ (about whom almost nothing is publicly known), who was applying for an O-1 visa, reserved for individuals with ‘extraordinary ability or achievement’. Wolkoff had no idea what extraordinary ability Ines claimed to possess, but Melania had a plan. She sent Wolkoff a draft letter, written by someone in the Trump organisation, praising her sister’s gifts in the ‘field of design’. Wolkoff was a director for New York Fashion Week and had produced the Met Gala. When it came to matters of design, her name carried weight. Because friends help friends, Wolkoff signed a letter in support of Ines’s application and sent it back to Melania. ‘Ines got her visa and now lives in New York.’

Wolkoff was working as director of special events at Vogue when she first met Melania. She seemed – as Donald Trump might have put it – ‘out of central casting’ for the magazine: the ‘Winston’ in her name refers to the jewellery firm. She’s a tall, wealthy Upper East Sider with long, glossy hair who had done some modelling and was married to a real estate developer. It seemed inevitable that they would become friends, or at least trade the occasional lunch at Cipriani. It was 2003, and Donald was about to launch his TV career on The Apprentice – Wolkoff thought of him as a ‘harmless egomaniac’. She writes that she came to see Melania as a ‘really confident, perfectly coiffed, ultimate older sister’, possessed of enviable calm and seemingly preternatural self-assurance. Being with her was oddly soothing: ‘In her world, nothing was a big deal, and everything was just as it should be.’ She attended Melania’s wedding in Palm Beach: 350 guests attended, including the Clintons and P. Diddy; reportedly, the only Slovenians were Melania, her parents and sister. When Donald ‘recited the vow to honour and obey, for richer or poorer, everyone laughed’.

Wolkoff was struck by how much Melania’s father, Viktor Knavs, resembled Donald – only two years older, similar in girth and height, perpetually in a suit and tie. Other reports have noted that he sometimes wears his son-in-law’s old clothes. In Slovenia he had sold used cars. When the Telegraph settled its defamation case, its apology also included a statement that ‘Mrs Trump’s father was not a fearsome presence and did not control the family.’ In 2016, Melania told GQ it was true that she’d married a man who was like her father, but also that both men were very much like herself.

Wolkoff says that Melania was ‘well aware’ of what Trump ‘wanted – and didn’t want – in his third wife’. She’d studied his previous marriages, noting how they bent and broke, and contorted herself accordingly. Unlike Ivana Trump and Marla Maples, she didn’t ‘pressure him emotionally’ or insist on her own career; Wolkoff noticed that in his presence her voice changed, becoming ‘coquettish, hyper-feminine’. (There are glimpses of this in the movie too.) In an interview before their marriage, when asked about Melania’s ambitions, Trump said: ‘At the moment, she’s really only interested in what’s good for me’ – what could have pleased him better? She has now outlasted his previous wives.

When Trump first descended the golden escalator to announce his candidacy, Wolkoff assumed it was just a publicity ploy while he renegotiated his NBC contract for The Apprentice. As the campaign unfolded, she noticed that Trump increasingly relied on his wife, confident that her interests aligned with his own. After Melania dined with Mike Pence and his wife, she persuaded Donald that unlike the other top contenders – Newt Gingrich and Chris Christie – Pence wasn’t ‘too ambitious’ and wouldn’t seek to supplant him. Sean Spicer, Trump’s first communications director, would later remark that Melania ‘knows exactly who he is as a person, what he believes and what his brand is about. She really understands positioning him. She says: “This is who you are. You don’t need to do that.”’ When the Access Hollywood tape surfaced a month before the election, she refused to be pitied. She went on television and told Anderson Cooper: ‘People think and talk about me – like, “Oh Melania, oh poor Melania.” Don’t feel sorry for me. Don’t feel sorry for me. I can handle everything.’ Trump’s fixer Michael Cohen later testified that she quickly grasped exactly how it should be handled. It was her suggestion to describe Trump’s boasts to Billy Bush as ‘locker room talk’, an extraordinary piece of political rebranding that soon became the campaign’s central talking point. Wolkoff had often heard Melania fall back on similar refrains: ‘boys will be boys’; ‘men will be men.’ She seemed to mean it: she didn’t expect much of them.

Wolkoff presents herself as politically naive. She had never voted before Trump appeared on the ballot, and seems to have been largely indifferent to his platform. Yet she was sophisticated in other ways. She began taping conversations and saving texts and emails, a precaution that almost certainly explains why her book was only lightly challenged. (Trump’s Justice Department later sued to recover her profits, alleging a breach of her non-disclosure agreement; the case was dropped under Biden.)

Michael Wolff claimed that on election night Melania was ‘in tears – and not of joy’. But the evidence, including Wolkoff’s, points in another direction. Melania seemed to regard the victory as her own as much as her husband’s, repeatedly insisting on being called the ‘first lady-elect’, even as staff reminded her that she hadn’t actually been elected. The enduring liberal fantasy that she’s unwilling, trapped, in need of rescue, #FreeMelania, has never squared with the most rigorous reporting about her. Gestures that commentators read during Trump’s first term as signs of misery or resistance often turned out to be projection. When she wore a pink dress by a gay designer the day after a Pride parade, it was widely interpreted as a signal of solidarity with the LGBTQ+ community. Wolkoff recalls Melania’s blunt response: ‘Really? Excuse me? Are you kidding me? It never even crossed my mind.’ When she boarded a plane to visit children separated from their parents at the Texas border – wearing the infamous ‘I really don’t care, do u?’ jacket – she seemed to take delight in the outrage. ‘I’m driving liberals crazy!’ she told Wolkoff. ‘You know what? They deserve it.’ When Wolkoff expressed concern for the children, Melania brushed it off: ‘The patrols told me the kids say, “Wow, I get a bed? I will have a cabinet for my clothes?” It’s more than they have in their own country where they sleep on the floor.’

Wolkoff put her Met Gala experience to use helping the Trumps plan their first inauguration and served as Melania’s senior adviser in the East Wing – then, as sometimes happens with the Trumps, it all went to pot. Too much money was spent, some of it went missing and Wolkoff feels she became the scapegoat. Melania published a blog post describing Wolkoff as a ‘former contractor’ who ‘clung to me after my husband won the presidency’, while the West Wing blamed her for the inauguration committee’s overspending. The attorney general of the District of Columbia filed suit, alleging that the committee funnelled money intended for inaugural events into Trump’s own businesses. By the standards of Trump 2.0, the Trump Hotel’s overcharging for the use of its ballroom almost seems quaint.