On the trail of the First Lady
Mary Jordan tells Will Pavia how she uncovered Trump’s secret weapon (his wife)
Imagine that you have been invited to a state dinner with the leader of the free world. Not only that, they’ve put you next to Melania Trump.
“I’ve heard so many stories about people sitting next to her saying, ‘Oh my God, I thought I would get the scoop’,” says Mary Jordan, author of
The Art of Her Deal — the first closeup portrait of America’s confounding First Lady.
Traditionally, First Ladies are fabulous hosts and raconteurs. You think of Eleanor Roosevelt, Jackie Kennedy or Nancy Reagan. Now here you are shoulder-to-padded shoulder with Melania, who grew up in a small town in the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia; the daughter of a car mechanic/salesman and a factory worker, who became a model, the third wife of a New York playboy and then the First Lady. She must have some stories?
Well, apparently Melania can sit in perfect silence from the first sip of soup to the last draught of coffee. “There are some people, like the wife of President Macron, she can chat with,” Jordan says. But usually, it’s a total nightmare. She is known as “a tough one to sit next to”. In this, as in so many other things, Jordan says, “she’s broken the mould for expectations”.
All of which tends to make her more interesting, if not at dinner.
Just after Trump was installed in the White House, Melania disappeared for about three weeks. “We were used to having a First Lady’s office that you would send a note in and say, ‘What city will she be in? When is the next public event?’” says Jordan, a longtime correspondent for The Washington
Post, who lives in DC. “It was just blank, blank, blank. Nothing.”
This was when she got properly interested in the First Lady, Jordan tells me.
She interviewed all the President’s men, more or less, for the biography, as well as everyone from Melania’s childhood friends to the maid who cleaned her bathroom of smudges of the tanning spray Melania apparently applies whenever she goes outside. “So many people would say, ‘The Trumps will kill me. I can’t talk,’” Jordan says. She once interviewed the boss of a drug cartel in a maximum-security prison in Mexico. That was a cakewalk in comparison. “This was just the hardest thing I’ve ever done,” she says.
She made some striking discoveries. At the start of the Trump presidency, Melania lingered at Trump Tower, rebutting pleas from her husband’s advisers that he was so much calmer when she was around. She claimed that it was so their son, Barron, could finish his school year in New York.
Jordan says Melania was renegotiating their prenuptial agreement to give Barron a larger share in his estate, using her absence as leverage. She cites three sources who say the moment that Melania began to seem happier in public with her husband, in mid-2018, corresponded with the conclusion of “a new and improved financial agreement”.
Around the same time, amid outrage over the separation of migrant children from their parents at the southern border, Melania took a trip to see one of the camps where kids were interned. She wore a jacket from Zara with big white letters on the back that read, “I REALLY DON’T CARE, DO U?”
“The fact that she . . . wore it shows how weak the support around her is,” says Jordan. In any other First Lady’s office, someone would have told her it would look as if she were saying she didn’t care about the kids. Melania had issued a statement condemning the Trump administration’s child separation policy; Jordan was told she got cross that her stepdaughter, Ivanka, seemed to be trying to take credit for stopping it. Jordan was told that the jacket was partly a message to Ivanka.
Melania’s parents often stay at the White House. They also visit Trump’s New Jersey golf club. He and Melania’s father do not always see eye to eye, according to former housekeepers. When Trump threw away a red cap he often wore, Melania’s mother thought it might suit her husband, unaware of an unwritten rule at the club that only Trump could wear a red cap on the grounds. Trump demanded that Viktor take it off.
Trump and his wife had a “strange marriage”, the housekeeper thought. The family was often in the same room but seldom seemed to interact.
Jordan thinks, however, that in many ways the relationship is tight. Melania was the one who wanted Trump to get serious about a political run, she writes. She always wants him to succeed: often she seems the only person he can turn to who always has his best interests at heart. Jordan says Trump picked Mike Pence as his Vice-President on Melania’s recommendation, reasoning that the other candidates would be vying for Trump’s job. “To be clear, she’s not weighing in on economic policy, Middle East policy,” says Jordan. “But she does weigh in on personnel issues.”
Often, when it looks as if she is “trolling” her husband, she is actually working with him, to help him change direction on something, Jordan says. “Over and over again, I would say, wow, the theme there is not what it first appears. Just like when you see her looking unhappy, it’s not always what it appears.”
The Times of London