Melania Trump: a Case Study on How We Consume Politicians’ Wives

DIGGING INTO THE ALLURINGLY OPAQUE Melania Trump: A Case Study on How We Consume Politicians’ Wives

Intro

2016년 11월에 있을 미국 대통령 선거를 앞두고 도날드 트럼프가 미 디어에서 한시가 바쁘게 오르내리고 있습니다. 한국 미디어에서도 도 날드 트럼프가 이민자나 여성에 대한 발언으로 종종 구설수에 오르는 반면 그의 아내인 멜라니아 트럼프에 대한 이야기는 비교적 덜 알려진 것 같습니다. 아이러니컬하게도 그의 아내도 이민자 출신의 모델이었 습니다. 멜라니아 트럼프의 사례로 정치인의 아내들이 어떻게 문화적 으로, 사회적으로 소비 되는지 알아볼까요?

우선 슬라이드 9-10번에 있는 유튜브 동영상과 트위터 계정을 통해 Melania Trump를 만나보세요.

그 다음엔 슬라이드 14-25번에 있는 기사를 통해 Melania Trump가 어떻게 인식되고 있는지 살펴보세요.

자 그럼 이제 Ringle의 튜터와 함께 미국의 영부인이 될지도 모르는 Melania Trump에 대해 더 자세히 알아볼까요?

Photo credit: GQ Magazine 3

Intro

Not a day passes by without seeing Donald Trump’s face on media these days. His incendiary remarks on immigrants, ethnic minorities, and women often upset people and leave the public divisive. While we see and hear from him more than once a day, many people do not know much about his wife, Melania Trump. Ironically, Melania Trump is an immigrant herself. Born in what is now Slovenia, Melania Trump became an American citizen only in 2006. This photogenic lady also used to be a model in Europe and NYC.

How do we think and talk about Melania Trump or other politicians’ wives? What do we ask of them? How does media portray them? Why?

Meet the woman who might become the next First Lady of the United States and think about these questions with your Ringle tutor today. Photo credit: GQ Magazine 4

Politicians’ Wives

How many of these women do you know? What do you know about them? 5

Left: Carla Bruni Left: Michelle Obama

Right: Nicolas Sarkozy Right: Barack Obama (former president of France) (President of the U.S.) Left: Queen Rania Left: Prince William

Right: King Abdullah (The United Kingdom)

(The State of Qatar) Right: Catherine Middleton 7 Food for Thought Exchange your ideas with the tutor.

HOW MANY? How many of these women did you recognize? What do you know about them? Do you know what they do for living or what they used to do? What are their passions?

HOW DID YOU LEARN ABOUT THEM? How did you learn about these women? If you are particularly drawn to any of these women, who is it and why?

MEDIA PORTRAYAL What do you think about how they are portrayed in media? Does it make you feel like they are real human beings too? Why or why not?

IN YOUR COUNTRY? Is there any politician’s wife that is well-known or popular in your country? Introduce her to your tutor and explain why she is well known. If not, is there any public figure’s wife that is well known? 8

Meet Melania Trump 9

INTRODUCING MELANIA TRUMP

Interview with Melania Trump and Donald Trump Credit: ABC News 10

GLIMPSE INTO MELANIA TRUMP’S MIND AND LIFE

Melania Trump’s Official Twitter Account 11 Food for Thought Exchange your ideas with the tutor.

FIRST IMPRESSION Is this your first time seeing Melania Trump? What is your first impression on her?

A MODERN ROMANCE? What kind of couple do Donald Trump and Melania Trump want the people to believe they are? In other words, what kind of image are they projecting? Why do you think they are doing so?

RELATIONSHIP DYNAMIC From the interview clip, what kind of relationship or power dynamic do you observe between Donald Trump and Melania Trump? Or between the interviewer and Melania Trump?

PEEPING THROUGH HER TWITTER

What did you notice about her Twitter account? What kind of image do you think she (or perhaps her publicist) wants to project to the public? 12

“Nobody Will Ever Know”

Discuss the following article with your tutor. 13 “Nobody Will Ever Know”

It wasn’t always this way. Once upon a time, a man could marry his Slovenian sweetheart, invite Bill and Hillary Clinton to the lavish wedding, and only the society pages would bother with it. “It was completely different than it is now,” Melania Trump tells me, recalling those bygone days of sanity, speaking in her now famous accent, a kind of dreamy Transylvanian.

Back then, in 2005, it didn’t seem odd that she and Donald Trump would mark their happy occasion with the former president and First Lady, then a senator from New York. “When they went to our wedding, we were private citizens,” Melania reminds me. Just two private citizens getting hitched at the groom’s 126-room Florida palace. He in a tux; she in a $100,000 Dior dress that laborers’ hands had toiled upon for a legendary 550 hours, affixing 1,500 crystals —jewels fit for private citizens like them. A pair of ordinary people, really, uniting in matrimony, as Billy Joel serenaded the couple and guests slurped caviar.

Those were, in some ways, simpler times. But things change quickly—which is perhaps the enduring fact of Melania Trump’s entire improbable life—and when your husband works up a plan to make America great again, the very same Clintons you once smiled with on your wedding day can now become your family’s mortal enemies. And you can think, as Melania Trump says she does, that it’s no huge deal, really. “This is it, what it is,” Melania tells me. “It’s all business now; it’s nothing personal.” 14 “Nobody Will Ever Know”

Of course, Melania had the foresight to imagine that politics would bring chaos. Donald’s first wife, Ivana, may have wanted Trump to be president, but Melania, his third, was never hot on the idea. “When we discussed about it, I said he really needs to make sure he knows he really wants to do it, because life changes,” Melania says. We’re speaking on the phone, though I have no idea where she’s calling from. Is she in her penthouse, a gilded triplex in the Trump Tower? Perhaps somewhere out on the campaign trail? While she’s a crowd-pleaser on the stump, she appears infrequently and only when she deigns to. “Nobody controls me. I travel with my husband when I can,” she says, “when I know that I can go, and I know that my son is okay alone for a few days with the help.” While Donald often says that Melania would make a stellar First Lady, the former model offers little clue about what a move to the White House would mean for her. She once said she would be “traditional,” like Jackie Kennedy, and on the question of what causes she might support, she has noted she is already involved in “many, many charities.” She elaborated: “Many different charities involving children, involving many different diseases.” In this respect, she is just like her husband. She’s alluringly opaque. She makes meaningful eye contact and emphatically repeats affirmative, folksy banalities—she “has a thick skin,” she takes things “day by day,” she follows the news “from A to Z”—until the interviewer either is transported into a supra-verbal understanding or decides it’s pointless to press for specifics. But unlike her husband, Melania is reserved, polite, and steady, say those close to her. “There is a peace in her,” one old friend from Slovenia tells me. She is a homebody. She’s rich, but not a socialite; she prefers family to the It set and retires early after events. 15 16 “Nobody Will Ever Know”

This image of a retiring homebody, of course, is not the one that Trump’s enemies present when they conjure her in the White House. Ahead of Utah’s primary, allies of Ted Cruz posted a photo from a shoot for a 2000 issue of British GQ in which a naked Melania is lying on her stomach on a white bearskin rug. “Meet Melania Trump. Your next First Lady,” read the ad, aimed at conservative Mormon voters. “Or, you could support Ted Cruz on Tuesday.”

Trump shot back in a cryptic, menacing message that he would “spill the beans” on Heidi Cruz and then re-tweeted two photos, side by side: one, a mid-sentence Heidi, looking like a gargoyle; another, a bronzed, blue-eyed Melania, looking like a fox. “The images are worth a thousand words,” the caption read, though Trump’s tweet itself was really communicating only four: “My wife is hotter.”

It’s easy to think America has changed a lot since Hillary Rodham Clinton was chastised in the early ’90s for her ambition as First Lady—refusing to sit at home and make cookies. But our conception of a presidential spouse hasn’t evolved much. Michelle Obama, a Princeton graduate and legal hotshot who was once her husband’s law- school-era mentor, has been mainly confined to dealing with soft issues: childhood obesity, planting vegetables. Rather than Hillary or Michelle, it was Laura Bush—a teacher who supported her husband’s turning from bottle to Bible—who seemed most suited to Middle America’s idea (or at least a man’s idea) of a First Lady. Of course, the paragon of them all is still Jackie Kennedy, endlessly glamorous and endlessly tolerant of her husband’s philandering. 17 “Nobody Will Ever Know”

Those who know Melania say the Jackie template isn’t a bad one for her to aspire to. “She’d be great at picking out the china patterns; she’d be a classic First Lady,” says stylist Phillip Bloch, who has worked with both of the Trumps and attended fashion shows with Melania. But unlike Jackie, who met John Kennedy when he was already a congressman, Melania wasn’t signing on to be a political spouse when she met the notorious Donald Trump in 1998.

Melania had signed up for a life of conspicuous conspicuousness, one she dutifully chronicled on Instagram and Twitter up until about a year ago, when her social-media accounts—unlike those of her husband—went silent with Trump’s entrance into the race. There was Melania in a white robe, working with her “glam team” of stylists, perched on a gilded throne, overlooking Central Park. Here she was, head to toe in white, posing on the Trump jet. There she was, relaxing at “#home #NYC” on a Thursday night, in a room that looked like a fevered baroque dream. In one of her last posts—right before somebody deemed it advisable to slam shut this opulent little window on her life—she snapped a parting selfie in a gold-mirrored bathroom. “Bye! I’m off to my #summer residence.”

While Melania enjoys the services of a chef and an assistant, there’s no nanny raising their son, Barron. That’s the mother’s duty. “We know our roles,” Melania once told Parenting.com, referring to the division of labor with her husband. “I didn’t want him to change the diapers or put Barron to bed.” The boy she calls “little Donald” wants one day to be a “businessman and golfer” and, as she told the publication, almost always dresses in suits. “He’s not a sweatpants child,” she’s said. 18 “Nobody Will Ever Know”

Melania is as fastidious a wife as she is a mother, which Donald appreciates. Things come easy with her. “I work very hard from early in the morning till late in the evening,” Donald told Larry King in 2005. “I don’t want to go home and work at a relationship.” To the twice-divorced Donald, Melania is terrific. He’s never heard her fart or make doodie, as he once told Howard Stern. (Melania has said the key to the success of her marriage is separate bathrooms.) He can trust her to take her birth control every day, he boasted to Stern; she’s just amazing that way. She has the perfect proportions—five feet eleven, 125 pounds—and great boobs, which is no trivial matter. Stern once asked Trump what he would do if Melania were in a terrible car accident, God forbid, and lost the use of her left arm, developed an oozing red splotch near her eye, and mangled her left foot. Would Donald stay with her?

“How do the breasts look?” Trump asked.

“The breasts are okay,” Stern replied. Then, yeah, of course Trump stays. “Because that’s important.” There are other pluses. He appreciates Melania’s restraint when it comes to Shopping While Trump. “She’s never taken advantage of that situation, okay, as many women would have, frankly,” he has said. (“I prefer quality over quantity,” Melania tells me.) Donald does his part to make things work, too. “He is a very understanding husband,” Melania once told an interviewer. “If I say, ‘I need an hour, I’m going to take a bath,’ or I’m having a massage, he doesn’t have nothing against it. He’s very supportive in that way.” She lets him have his space; she’s not “needy” or “nagging,” as she tells me. 19 “Nobody Will Ever Know”

As for passions beyond the familial, there are a few. Melania dabbles in design. Her line of affordable gem-spangled jewelry and watches, launched on QVC, reportedly sold out in 45 minutes during its initial broadcast. (Melania’s caviar-infused anti-aging creams haven’t sold as well.) An old friend whom I met in Slovenia, and who asked not to be named, sums up Melania’s talents more generally: “People say she’s smart, she’s well-educated like Jackie Kennedy, but…” The friend pauses to find the right words. “She’s smart for the things she’s interested in, like jewelry. She’s not stupid, she’s not a bimbo, but she’s not especially clever.”

To Melania’s traditional way of thinking, Trump’s aspirations for the White House have little to do with her. The same can be said for his more controversial positions, like his general disdain for immigrants, even though his wife became an American only in 2006. “I chose not to go into politics and policy,” she tells me. “Those policies are my husband’s job.” She has opinions, she assures me, and shares them with Trump. “Nobody knows and nobody will ever know,” she says of the advice she provides him. “Because that’s between me and my husband.”

The approach is in keeping with her view of her wifely functions. “She stays in her lane,” Bloch says. “When asked, she gives her opinion, but otherwise she stays out of it.” Vladimira Tomšič, who went to the same school as Melania and is friendly with her parents, tells me that her upbringing helps explain her marriage. “The secret of why he’s with her,” she explains, “is her traditional values and the importance of family to her.” 20 “Nobody Will Ever Know”

Melania is the ideal wife for the conservative base. Melania Trump is as tailored to The Donald as if a divine plastic surgeon had sculpted her out of his rib. When he first met Melania—at a party during New York Fashion Week in the fall of 1998—Donald Trump was 52. He was brash and brassy, fabulously wealthy, the stuff of New York legend. Melania Knauss was 28, a tall, shy brunette whose face had yet to acquire the taut, plasticine squint that makes it look as if cameras are forever catching her a second before a sneeze. “I didn’t know much about Donald Trump,” she says of that introduction. “I had my life, I had my world. I didn’t follow Donald Trump and what kind of life he had.”

In Slovenia these days, there is a certain sense of resentment that Melania has forgotten her roots; there is talk that she refuses to speak Slovenian, that Donald visited the country only once and only long enough to have dinner. There’s a sneaking suspicion that she thinks Slovenia is not good enough for her, and that she might be right. But in interviews, Melania doesn’t shy away from her Slovenian life; she’s not embarrassed by it. “I love my childhood,” she tells me. “It was a beautiful childhood.” Her son speaks Slovenian fluently—he uses it to speak with his grandparents, who have immigrated to New York and live near them in Trump Tower—but for Melania, Slovenia represents a relatively short and distant period of her past that she quickly outgrew. 21 “Nobody Will Ever Know”

Those who remember Melania also say she seemed somehow on a plane above her peers, her gaze always focused on a point above and beyond them. At an age when her classmates were pimply, casual high schoolers, Melania was always perfectly made up, recalls Sedej. Foundation, mascara, blush, lip gloss, all in just the right, subtle amount. “Even in summertime,” she says, “she was always perfect, every day.” In college, Melania dated a fellow model, a sought-after guy studying physical education. But she was unsatisfied with his lack of seriousness. He was a good-looking, sporty 20-year-old; she was a beautiful young woman who wanted something more than a hummingbird college romance. That this boy couldn’t provide what she sought disappointed Melania. By 1992—the year Melania won second place in a Slovenian Look of the Year modeling contest—she seemed to have outgrown not just Ljubljana but all of newly independent Slovenia. The large media market of Yugoslavia—with some 24 million people—had been chopped up. Staying in her tiny new country of 2 million would mean the end of her modeling career. To have a shot at something bigger, at a real future in modeling, she had to move. “She was sure that there was nothing for her in Slovenia,” says the friend from Ljubljana. “She wanted to leave.”

Melania decamped to Milan after her first year of college, effectively dropping out. Her connections to home grew faint. Sedej saw her for the occasional coffee on the rare occasions she visited Ljubljana, but has lost track of her since. She and her classmates wrote to Melania about their 20th high school reunion a few years ago. They e- mailed Melania’s representatives, they wrote to her on Facebook. There was no response. “She cut the line behind her,” says the friend from Ljubljana. “She started to live another life, and all this is behind her.” 22 “Nobody Will Ever Know”

Melania thrived in Milan and Paris, and in 1996, having fallen in with Zampolli, the agent who brokered her visa and American modeling contract, she moved to New York with visions of truly making it big. But Melania, still only 26, would confront the perils of growing older as a model. “It was a frustrating age for models, the late 20s. It’s not a friendly industry to models of that age,” says Atanian, the former roommate. “She aired frustration over the work issue,” Atanian recalls. She wondered often why this or that photographer picked someone else over her, often someone younger. “She wasn’t working every day,” he added. “She was going to castings every day and not succeeding every day. She said things were very different in Europe, that she had been more successful.” Melania was having a hard time supporting herself, worried that her best years were behind her. (“Pictures tell for itself,” Melania says firmly when I ask her about Atanian’s characterization of this supposed tough patch. “My portfolio says what I did,” including “the best catalogs.”)

In an increasingly unfriendly market, Melania looked for advantages. She went on casting calls for alcohol and tobacco ads, which her under-age competitors couldn’t be hired for. Once, she landed a Camel ad, a billboard in Times Square. She sought an edge in other ways. “She went away for a two-week vacation, then came back, and was more…buxom,” Atanian says, groping for the right but least offensive word. “She admitted it to me. She just said it needed to be done to get more lingerie jobs.” 23 “Nobody Will Ever Know”

Again, Melania scoffs when I ask if she had had a breast augmentation. “I didn’t make any changes,” she says. “A lot of people say I am using all the procedures for my face. I didn’t do anything. I live a healthy life, I take care of my skin and my body. I’m against Botox, I’m against injections; I think it’s damaging your face, damaging your nerves. It’s all me. I will age gracefully, as my mom does.”

In New York, Melania lived a quiet, homebound life, taking assiduous care of her body: walks with ankle weights, seven pieces of fruit every day, diligently moisturizing her skin. She rarely partied, never brought anyone back to the apartment, and was always home early. “She didn’t go out to dance clubs; she’d go to Cipriani for dinner at ten and be home by one,” Atanian recalls. “Men she would go out with tended to be wealthier, the industrious, European type. They were Italians, playboys. But they’d go out for dinner and she’d be home before I was.” It was Zampolli, again, who rescued her in 1998—with that invitation to the party at the Kit Kat Club, unwittingly putting her on a charmed trajectory toward a certain playboy’s phone number and, who knows, maybe even the White House.

Though she had appeared wordlessly behind her husband on plenty of stages throughout the long, weird winter of Trump’s primary march, Melania’s debut as a campaigner came on a snowy April night in Wisconsin. I was there for the unveiling and watched as her husband warmly ushered her to the podium. “She’s an incredible mother, she loves her son, Barron, so much,” he said. “And I have to say, she will make an unbelievable First Lady.” The crowd went wild. “I’d like to introduce my wife. Melania,” he said. “Come.” 24 “Nobody Will Ever Know”

Obediently, she teetered out onto the stage on vertiginous Louboutins, a long-legged doll in a summery dress the color of sea foam. She was unseasonably tan, clearly comfortable in this role: being admired as a specimen of physical beauty. She began by reading from the remarks waiting for her at the podium, a list she’d compiled of her husband’s attributes. “He’s a hard worker. He’s kind. He has a great heart. He’s tough. He’s smart. He’s a great communicator. He’s a great negotiator. He’s telling the truth. He’s a great leader. He’s fair.” The speech—all short, declarative sentences—sounded like it had been written by her son as a homework assignment but quickly got to what sounded like recess talk. “As you may know by now, when you attack him, he will punch back ten times harder,” she said loudly, firmly, and to wild applause. “No matter who you are, a man or a woman. He treats everyone equal.”

To Melania’s right, the presidential aspirant, the equal-opportunity puncher, nodded approvingly. Maybe Melania hadn’t wanted any of this a year ago—hadn’t wanted her husband to run, hadn’t wanted all the prying scrutiny, hadn’t wanted to become a politician’s wife. But here she was, taking the strangeness of life in her long, tan stride. She smiled, tautly, like a sphinx and beheld the throng before her. She was proud of her husband. He had a great heart.

This article is edited from Julia Ioffe’s article written for GQ. 25 Food for Thought Exchange your ideas with the tutor.

CHANGE IN RELATIONSHIP WITH THE CLINTONS How did Donald Trump and Melania Trump’s relationship with the Clintons change, around the time for the presidential campaign?

MELANIA’S PAST AS A MODEL & SCANDAL How did Melania Trump’s past as a model cause a scandal? How did the Trumps respond to it?

PERCEPTION ON THE FIRST LADY According to the author, what is the perception on the role and qualities required for the first lady? Why do you think it did not change over the course of history?

DONALD TRUMP’S EXPECTATION What kind of roles does Donal Trump expect Melania Trump to perform in the family? 26 Food for Thought Exchange your ideas with the tutor.

DONALD AND PUBLIC’S PERCEPTION Does Donald Trump’s perception of his wife resemble or differ from that of the public and/or media?

DONALD’S ANTI-IMMIGRANT REMARKS Learning Melania Trump’s history of immigration, what do you think about Donald Trump’s stance on immigration or his remarks on immigrants?

MELANIA TRUMP’S ANATOMY & FASHION Both Donald and the author says a lot about Melania Trump’s physique and what she wears. What do you think this says about them?

PRIVACY? Do you think there is any ethical issue with digging out about Melania Trump’s personal life when she herself is not a politician? Do the facts that she used to be a model and that she is married to Donald Trump influence your opinion?