MELANIA POWER
According to new book, first lady stalled move to Washington to renegotiate pre-nup
The Art of Her Deal: The Untold Story of Melania Trump
Mary Jordan
Simon & Schuster
When Melania Trump stayed behind in New York after the inauguration, she said she didn’t want to interrupt son Barron’s school year. Washington Post reporter Mary Jordan reveals in a new book the first lady was also delaying arrival as leverage for renegotiating her pre-nup.
After news about Trump’s alleged sexual indiscretions and infidelities emerged, from the “grab them by the p---y” Access Hollywood tape to an affair with Playboy Playmate Karen Mcdougal; Melania learned new details, Jordan writes.
She needed to cool off and “to amend her financial arrangement with Trump — what Melania referred to as ‘taking care of Barron,’” Jordan writes in The Art of Her Deal: The Untold Story of Melania Trump.
Melania’s original pre-nup had not been incredibly generous, Jordan reports. But she’s been married to Trump longer than both his ex-wives and had bargaining power: Her perceived calming effect on him was so great Trump’s pals and at least one of his adult children exhorted her to join him in Washington as soon as possible.
Jordan conducted more than 100 interviews, with everyone from Melania’s Slovenian schoolmates to former New Jersey
Gov. Chris Christie, and lays out an argument that Melania Trump is as devoted to her own mythmaking as her husband.
“Both are avid creators of their own history,” Jordan writes, arguing that the #Freemelania hashtag ought to be retired because of her consistent support of her husband and her moves to stay in the White House.
“She is ... much more like him than it appears,” Jordan adds.
Jordan, a longtime Post reporter who won a Pulitzer Prize in 2003, secured a rare one-on-one interview with Melania while covering the 2016 campaign. The reporting goes back to Melania’s childhood in a small town in Slovenia. The mythmaking, Jordan writes, began early, when she would fail to correct reporters who cited her age incorrectly, always younger than she was. Despite saying she wouldn’t get plastic surgery, three photographers who worked with her said they’ve seen the scars.
She attended a highly competitive architecture program at the University of Ljubljana, but did not graduate, though she claimed in sworn testimony to have a bachelor’s degree. There’s also little evidence to suggest her claims of being able to speak four or five languages fluently are true.
Reporting in the book suggests she only speaks English and Slovene fluently.
The ease of Melania’s mythmaking has been aided, Jordan posits, by a pattern in her life of making clean breaks with her past. Old friends from Slovenia said they’d never heard from her again. Once-close friends from her New York City years say the same thing happened to them.
She “would seize an opportunity and put great effort into it. Then she would move on and never look back,” Jordan writes.
As much as she and Trump seem like complete opposites, Jordan writes, “They are both fighters and survivors and prize loyalty over almost all else . ... Neither the very public Trump nor the very private Melania has many close friends. Their loner instincts filter into their own marriage.”
That includes the separate bedrooms both at the White House and whenever they travel, or how they’ll often be in the same building but not the same room.
They also seem to love each other, according to people who witnessed their early courtship, and others who have seen their relationship in the White House go from frosty to warm again.
What emerges is a picture of personal ambition similar to Trump’s. In 1999, when he ran for president on the Reform Party ticket, she gave interviews musing about becoming the next Jackie O. Years later, she echoed Trump’s calls for then-president Barack Obama to produce his birth certificate, an alignment with the “birther” attacks primarily driven by Trump.
Christie said Melania was always Trump’s first phone call when he got on a plane after a rally. He’d ask what she thought. “She always had commentary to give him, and I think that tells a lot about what he thinks of her.”
She was a key reason Trump chose Mike Pence as his running mate, rather than Christie or Newt Gingrich. “She believed that he would be content in a
No. 2 spot and not gun for the top job,” Jordan writes, “which was something she could not say about the other two.”
Observers noticed an uptick in her mood by mid-2018. According to three people close to Trump, Jordan writes, Melania had finally renegotiated the prenup to her liking. She’d already been looking out for Barron’s future by making sure he had dual citizenship in Slovenia, which will position him to work in Europe for the Trump Organization.
Jordan writes: “She wanted proof in writing that when it came to financial opportunities and inheritance, Barron would be treated as more of an equal to Trump’s oldest three children.”