By Alistair Bell
WASHINGTON, April 9 (Reuters) - Melania Trump, an enigmatic former model from Slovenia, has occupied the role of U.S. first lady on her own terms.
She has often stayed silent on political issues or signaled tacit support for her husband, President Donald Trump. Thursday’s press conference decrying the idea that she had any relationship with sex offender Jeffrey Epstein marked one of the few times she has addressed a group of journalists directly.
Intensely private for such a high-profile figure, Melania Trump made only eight speeches in her husband’s first year in office in 2017. By comparison, Michelle Obama made 74 in 2009, the first year of her husband Barack Obama’s presidency.
“She is very unknowable,” Kate Andersen Brower, author of the book “First Women: The Grace and Power of America’s Modern First Ladies,” told Britain’s The Times in 2024.
But the first lady has occasionally made waves publicly, such as when she backed her husband’s false assertions of victory after the 2020 presidential election. “Every legal – not illegal – vote should be counted,” she wrote, echoing language used by him to claim that he had been the victim of electoral fraud.
In 2018, she caused a media frenzy by wearing a jacket emblazoned with the words: “I REALLY DON’T CARE, DO YOU?” for a flight to Texas to visit migrant children separated from their parents. Years later, she said the jacket was a response to critics in the media.
This year, she released a movie documenting her life in the 20 days leading up to her husband’s second inauguration. “Melania” was touted as giving viewers rare behind-the-scenes access to her, although critics said it failed to offer much in the way of new insight.
Melania, 55, is Donald Trump’s third wife and the first U.S. first lady to be a naturalized citizen. She started modeling at 16, eventually traveling to Paris and Milan for her career before moving to New York in 1996.
She met her future husband at a New York party two years later and married him in January 2005.
Donald Trump has compared her to the famously glamorous Jackie Kennedy, later Jackie Onassis. In 2019 he told the Fox News “Fox and Friends” TV show: “We have our own Jackie O today. It’s called Melania. We’ll call it Melania T.”
“People love her. She gets no credit from the media, but she gets credit from the people,” Trump said.
(Reporting by Alistair Bell; Editing by Rosalba O’Brien and Sergio Non)
