THE ART OF HER DEAL

THE UNTOLD STORY OF MELANIA TRUMP

MARY JORDAN

Simon & Schuster, 352pp, £20

Melania Trump was once asked if she would be with Donald if he were not rich. ‘If I weren’t beautiful,’ she replied, ‘do you think he would be with me?’ There’s no answer to that, as the great Eric Morecambe used to say. But is there more to Melania than meets the eye? Mary Jordan, a Pulitzer prize-winning journalist, believes there is. As Dwight Garner rather caustically noted in the New York Times, ‘the author bends over backwards so far to be fair to her subject that, at times, you fear she might need chiropractic help’.

Humbly born in Slovenia in 1970, Melania was photogenic enough to become a second-tier model, first in Europe, then America, where in 2005, six years after they met, she became Trump’s third wife. Unlike her loudmouth husband, Melania is tight-lipped – ‘I am not an attention seeker,’ she told Jordan – so speculation that long before he became a candidate she encouraged his Presidential ambitions has never been confirmed. Unsurprisingly, Mary Jordan’s copious research included only one interview, by phone, with her subject. The book was, she admits, ‘an unprecedented challenge’.

But is this ‘elegant accessory’, as she’s been portrayed, worthy of a biography? In the Times, Justin Webb was unconvinced: ‘Melania Trump is, whisper it, not very interesting.’ The Washington Post’s Jane Eisner disagreed. ‘Reinvention may be an American trope,’ she conceded. ‘But as described in this book, Melania repeatedly stretches and even abandons the truth if it’s inconvenient for her, and her alone … She and Trump are cut from the same shiny cloth.’