First lady’s art of the prenup
The White House has dismissed a new book about first lady Melania Trump that reported she waited to move to the White House in 2017 while she renegotiated the terms of her prenuptial agreement with President Donald Trump.
Stephanie Grisham, a spokeswoman for Melania Trump, said the book was based on inaccurate information.
‘‘Yet another book about Mrs Trump with false information and sources,’’ Grisham said. ‘‘This book belongs in the fiction genre.’’
When Melania Trump stayed behind in New York after her husband’s presidential inauguration, she said it was because she didn’t want to interrupt their then-10-year-old son Barron’s school year. News stories at the time concentrated on an apparent frostiness between the first couple and the exorbitant taxpayer costs to protect Melania and Barron away from Washington.
But Washington Post reporter Mary Jordan reveals in a new book – The Art of Her Deal: The Untold Story of Melania Trump, due for release on June 16 – that the first lady was also using her delayed arrival to the White House as leverage for renegotiating her prenuptial agreement with Trump.
The campaign had been full of news about Trump’s alleged sexual indiscretions and infidelities, from the ‘‘grab them by the p...y’’ Access Hollywood tape to an affair with Playboy Playmate Karen McDougal; Melania learned details from the media coverage, Jordan writes.
The incoming first lady needed time to cool off, and ‘‘to amend her financial arrangement with Trump’’, Jordan writes.
Melania’s original prenup had not been incredibly generous, Jordan reports. But she has been married to Trump longer than both his ex-wives and had bargaining power: Her perceived calming effect on him was so great that Trump’s friends and at least one of his adult children exhorted her to come to the White House as soon as possible.
The 286-page book, which plays off the title of Trump’s well-known business guide, is a deeply reported look at the rise of the country’s only immigrant first lady since Louisa Adams.
Jordan conducted more than 100 interviews, with everyone from Melania’s Slovenian schoolmates to former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, and lays out an argument that Melania Trump is as devoted to her own mythmaking as her husband.
Jordan, a longtime Post reporter who won a Pulitzer Prize in 2003, secured a rare oneon-one interview with Melania while covering the 2016 campaign.
The reporting goes back to Melania’s childhood in a small town in Slovenia, then part of Communist Yugoslavia. Melania was walking runways by age 7, modelling clothes her mother made, and sat for a photo shoot at 16.
The mythmaking, Jordan writes, began early. Despite saying she wouldn’t undergo plastic surgery, three photographers who worked with her said they’ve seen the scars.
She attended a highly competitive architecture programme 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 back up her claims of being able to speak four or five languages fluently.
Meeting Trump accelerated the mythmaking, as he introduced her around the city as a ‘‘supermodel’’ when that was not true.
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.
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.
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.
Jordan writes that it was Melania who encouraged Trump to run for president, provided a sounding board on the campaign trail and encouraged him to choose Mike Pence as his running mate.
Observers in the White House attribute her willingness to fight for a second term to an improvement in her mood by mid-2018. According to three people close to Trump, Jordan writes, Melania had finally renegotiated the prenup to her liking.
Washington Post, AP