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It’s a profoundly curious experience to get to the end of a 256-page memoir and feel like you know even less about the subject than before you started reading. But in this respect, Melania – written, apparently, by Melania Trump – delivers in a way that defies the very laws of literature.
Did the Slovenian former model disagree with her spouse’s inflammatory rhetoric? Did she secretly roll her eyes at his unhinged Twitter rants in ALL CAPS? Did she, as speculated in the calls to #FreeMelania, feel trapped in a loveless marriage of convenience – swatting away Donald’s hand during public engagements because she couldn’t bear to physically touch him? On these last three counts, the answer is a resounding “no” if her new autobiography is to be believed. On almost all other points, however, the answer is a resounding question mark. Trying to glean much more about the mystery figure who has stood by one of the most divisive men on the planet for nearly 20 years is like trying to nail mist to the wall.
It is, in its own way, an impressive feat: to get through an entire book about yourself and leave no impression other than of a character vacuum. When talking about her time in the White House, for example, Melania dedicates a bewildering number of pages – and tedious level of detail – to the renovations she completed on various state rooms during her tenancy.
And yet there are glimmers of… perhaps… something hidden beneath the carefully curated anecdotes; mere hints of whispers of clues that a particularly diligent PI might just about be able to piece together to form some conclusions.
We start with Melania’s entry into the US back in 1996, when she flew to New York “to test my skills in the American modelling market… after weighing all the professional and personal implications”. (Many of the sentences read like this – as if the entire book were a particularly humourless extended LinkedIn post, or an attempt to answer a series of competency-based interview questions.)
A pattern soon starts to emerge through each of the chapters that chart a peculiarly non-linear tour through Melania’s life. It seems very, very important that the reader be left in no doubt as to her ongoing success from birth to the present day – and that anything approaching a failure was always, always somebody else’s fault.
The chapter that might have actually revealed some interesting insight into the human being behind the Trump PR machine – one that depicts her childhood and family life in then-Communist Yugoslavia, pre-Donald, pre-modelling, pre-US – amounts to little more than a charmless list of accomplishments on the part of everyone involved. No one could have had a more idyllic, blessed childhood in the history of humankind; no family could have been more practically perfect in every way.
“I took pleasure in cooking for him, supporting him in his daily routines, and maintaining a beautiful home. It was my priority to safeguard his welfare, meticulously attending to every aspect of his life,” she says of Donald; when it came to their wedding day, he “expressed his confidence in my abilities and jokingly mentioned that he would simply show up when I instructed him to”. It’s unclear how much of a “joke” this really was.
And then there are the hints at behaviour that genuinely sounds controlling, though Melania never frames it as such: “Donald to this day calls my personal doctor to check on my health, to ensure that I am OK and that they are taking perfect care of me.” (What Hippocratic oath?)
Much of the book is used to address past media foul-ups and snafus, notable for the staggering lack of anything approaching accountability – a hubris unmatched by anyone other than Donald Trump himself. That time she plagiarised Michelle Obama’s speech? Her team’s fault. That time she famously wore a jacket with the words “I really don’t care, do you?” emblazoned on it during a visit to migrant children kept in detention centres? Her press officer’s fault. That time rioters were breaking into the Capitol in an attempt to overthrow democracy and she failed to say anything at all? Her chief of staff’s fault. Melania remained completely unaware of what was going on outside, you see: “Had I been fully informed of all the details, naturally, I would have immediately denounced the violence that occurred at the Capitol Building.”
It’s when sniffing out more of what could actually be described as humanoid emotions that we start to get a sense of the things that might matter to Melania, deep down
At times it feels like the entire book is merely an exercise in score-settling, a vehicle through which to name and shame anyone who’s ever dared to wrong her. A needlessly long anecdote, for example, about a Melania skincare line that never came to fruition is written about with a cold fury that suggests there are perhaps some feelings beneath the robotic exterior. And it’s when sniffing out more of what could actually be described as humanoid emotions that we start to get a sense of the things that might matter to Melania, deep down. Her now 18-year-old son, Barron, for one; her mother for another. Passages about both are the closest the book ever comes to feeling like it was written by a real-life person rather than an AI fed with a Wikipedia page and an over-inflated sense of self-importance. This is particularly true when writing of her mother’s death: “There is an unparalleled sorrow in losing a mother, a profound heartache that shatters the spirit into fragments.”
And something close to empathy stirs when Melania shares that becoming a mother profoundly changed her, and expresses the anger and protectiveness she felt when her son, just a child during Donald’s previous election campaign, was bullied online. Media personalities used their platforms to analyse footage and publicly speculate as to whether Barron had autism – despicable behaviour and treatment that absolutely no one, least of all a blameless 10-year-old, deserves.
Amid the banal and these briefest glimpses of possible authenticity are Melania’s ideological stances, often unceremoniously shoehorned in, apropos of nothing. Some are unsurprising, if disappointing – an unnecessary and dispiriting few paragraphs denounce trans women in sport, for example – and some less so. “It is imperative to guarantee that women have autonomy in deciding their preference of having children, based on their own convictions, free from any intervention or pressure from the government,” she writes in a show of unflinching support for abortion rights. “Why should anyone other than the woman herself have the power to determine what she does with her own body?”
It’s an undeniably strong and courageous stance for the wife of a Republican presidential candidate to take, particularly during an election campaign. But where were these words when they were most needed – when states began to overturn Roe v Wade in 2022, enabled by her husband’s nomination of three Supreme Court justices who voted in favour of revoking nationwide abortion rights? Melania’s support of women’s bodily autonomy conveniently coincides with Donald Trump shifting his own message on the issue, having criticised some anti-abortion laws as being “too harsh” in a bid to win over more women voters.
Who is Melania Trump? After reading her book, I’m none the wiser. But, having read her book, I’m also happy to leave this particular mystery unsolved.
