First lady Melania Trump is an enigma, married to a man who blasts his feelings to the world via social media on a daily basis. Unlike her husband, Trump is no fan of the spotlight and has given few interviews since the president launched his campaign in 2016.
Her silence, paired with very public allegations of infidelity, which the president has denied, has prompted many to speculate that she could divorce the man she’s been with for two decades.
Free, Melania, a new biography about the first lady by CNN reporter Kate Bennett, peers into Trump’s intensely private life. Bennett makes the case that Trump is not the woman many think she is. She’s smarter, more independent, and authentic than she gets credit for, according to Bennett.
“Melania is the only one in Trump’s orbit who can flick his hand and get away with it. She is the only one who can say what she thinks to his face. She is the only one who can and does give advice and opinions contrary to his, and she can do so without suffering a barrage of name-calling tweets in the days that follow. She is, essentially, untouchable,” Bennett writes.
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You wrote a nearly 300-page book on one of the most mysterious people in Washington, Melania Trump. You make a good case that she has the upper hand in her marriage, which may come as a surprise to many people.
There’s a common misperception that she is a trophy wife or just sort of arm candy. It does a gross disservice to her individuality and her influence. I think she really is a very strong and important voice in Donald Trump’s world. That surprises people when I say that, but all of my reporting indicates that that is the truth.
Melania is often viewed as being cold and upset about her circumstances. You report that she’s also misunderstood in that way. How did traveling to Slovenia, where she grew up, help you understand that?
All my three years covering her have been crucial, but really going to Slovenia and seeing where she came from and meeting other people and sort of understanding the country more, within three hours of me setting foot in Sevnica, which is the town where she’s from, and then Ljubljana, which is the city where she lived for a good deal of time, I understood her so much better.
The Slovenian people are not necessarily sort of a smiley, in your face, ‘How can I help you today?’ kind of people. They have been through communism, they have been sort of passed around to various countries and leadership. They stick to their own. They’re meddlers, and women there are powerful and really are sort of the de facto heads of household, and it made a lot of sense to me.
I don’t think Melania Trump is a fake smiler. Sometimes it can be a little cringey for us Americans to watch her frown or what looks like a scowl sometimes, but I think it’s authenticity. We’re not used to seeing that from a political spouse who walks by a camera.
Does she like living in the White House?
Yes, she does. This is another weird fallacy about Melania Trump. Everybody I’ve spoken to, from people who work with her to the residence staff to friends that she’s talked to since she’s moved in, there is something she really enjoys about this period of her life, and she knows that it has a finite date to it. Running a household or running several households of that size is something she’s been doing basically as a job for many, many years.
Another sort of crappy part of being first lady is that not only do you have to have a platform, you also have to run this place. You have to organize hundreds of events, there’s a staff of hundreds of people there, 55,000 square feet of space.
This is where she really excels, and it’s her wheelhouse and therefore has enjoyed it, I think, in a different way than most of her most modern predecessors. She finds that part of the job probably the most interesting and the most worth her time.
What is it about Melania that inspires such a fierce devotion from her staff? Because they don’t leak like the West Wing does.
It’s really night and day, the two sides of the building. There’s never been a more distinct division between the two. Typically, historically, the East Wing is in lockstep with the West Wing, and they kind of take their cues from the West Wing. Not under this administration. Melania Trump runs things the way she wants to run them.
She always says it’s quality, not quantity when it comes to her staff. She’s known to interview people multiple times before she hires them. She has one-on-one discussions. She’s kind to her staff. She’s the kind of person who will remember a birthday and, beyond that, remember your favorite flower and send you an arrangement of that flower for your birthday. She’s generous in terms of time for people on her staff who have children. She is thoughtful. She’s created a world in the East Wing where her staffers just adore her and would no sooner roll over on her and leak than someone on the West Wing side wouldn’t roll over on Donald Trump and leak.
How does she align with her husband politically?
When you do talk to those around her and the few things that she has said politically, she is more aligned with President Trump than most people would think. She’s certainly a conservative. She is a rule follower. She is a traditionalist in many ways. I think people would probably be surprised to know just how in step she is politically with him.
You also wrote that she and the president never use the word “love” when talking about each other …
This is something that Donald Trump has been doing, at least with Melania and maybe other family members, for a long time. Donald Trump is a businessman. I think he loves her, but I think she doesn’t need that much. She doesn’t need public announcements of love and all that jazz. I think it works for them.
One of the interesting things about doing this book is going back through all the times he’s introduced her, especially during the campaign, even on inauguration night, and he says, “Oh, Melania, this poor Melania.” That shows he feels for her, his empathy, he cares about her. But he’s not saying, you know, like Barack Obama, she’s my guiding light. She’s the love of my life. That’s not him.
I also found it interesting that Melania, according to your book, was more upset that the allegations about her husband being unfaithful to her were made public than she was about the alleged infidelities.
When she sat down with ABC and she was asked about specifically the allegations of affairs, she said, I just don’t think about it much. I think that’s something that she’s developed being married to Donald Trump. Whatever is really going on behind the scenes, I don’t think she locked herself in some gilded bedroom and was crying herself to sleep over the fact that her husband may or may not have cheated on her. I think she was eyes wide open going into the relationship. She was in her 30s when they were married. She certainly knew his history. I don’t think she ever thought he was the bastion of morality.
A question a lot of people want answered is: Will they stay married?
It is a completely fruitless endeavor to try to understand or know what goes on in a couple’s marriage. If I were a betting person, I would say she’ll stay with him and not divorce him. I think Melania has more faith and religious devotion than most people assume. I don’t think she is quick to think about not trying to keep it together if she can. After 20 years together, their marriage might be different than some antiquated paradigm of ‘a first couple has to be this.’ But I think it works for them and I don’t really see her leaving it.
How many times have you interviewed her? She did not sit down for an interview for this book, right?
I want to make that clear that the White House, her office did not cooperate with me at all on the book. She did not sit down with me for the book. The last time I interviewed her on the record was in China. That was about two years ago. I’ve had some off-the-record time with her. But that was, again, almost two years ago.
Did any of her family members speak to you for the book?
No. No one in her immediate family did.
Do you expect Melania will read it?
Knowing how she operates, yeah, I think she will read it. She reads almost all of her press. She reads your Twitter feed and my Twitter feed. She reads everything she can get her hands on, about not just herself but her husband and the administration. She is remarkably tuned in. She probably won’t ever admit that she’s read it, but I like to think she would read it.
How has she put her mark on the White House and the Trump presidency? What, if you can tell at this point, will be her legacy?
The things that she’s done most as first lady are more or less tangible things, and more shifting the expectation of a first lady. Her legacy will probably say that she was independent, that she had moments of disparity with the president, that she was not a political spouse who stood beside him and blankly smiled while he admitted something horrible, personal, as we’ve seen other political spouses do. She is going to be known as the stoic, unfailingly polite, and appropriate in public first lady.
In some ways, though, she’s lowered the bar for what a first lady — the sort of platform she has, the audience. Her legacy will find “Be Best” to be just as convoluted as most of us find it. I think if you were to ask someone on the street right now, what is the first lady’s initiative, Be Best, they wouldn’t be able to tell you. That’s certainly a challenge for her.
Oh, and the jacket. There will be a couple of things that, unfortunately or fortunately, however you view her, will stick with her and be a part of her lasting legacy, and one of those things will be the ‘I really don’t care, do u’ jacket. That will drive her crazy. I’m sure she will very strongly dislike it.
Any predictions on what she’ll do after the White House?
I predict she’ll probably just go back to what she was doing before, which was being a very devoted mother, a very wealthy and slow life of privacy and commitment to her son. She’ll bounce around her various houses. I don’t see her all sudden saying, I want to go back to school, or I want to start a fund to help women’s education all over the world like Michelle Obama. I think we’ll just see her chalk this up to just another part of her life.
