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From Melania Trump: Modeling, Motherhood and a Brazen Whitewash of a Presidency
Slim and full of obfuscations, her memoir touches on business ventures and raising her son, but barely grapples with the mysteries of her marriage.
MELANIA, by Melania Trump
White House memoirs tend to go on a bit. Melania Trump’s 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 symbolize 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 strategized 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.
