The Mystery of Melania

Melania, who is she? She’s a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma! Does she love her husband yet also hate him? Does she dislike the role of First Lady, or is she more ambitious than her poorly designed Instagram posts and lackluster initiatives make her appear?

According to yet another biography of Melania, this one authored by Washington Post reporter Mary Jordan, Melania isn’t much of a mystery after all. As Jordan writes in The Art of Her Deal: The Untold Story of Melania Trump, out on June 16, Melania, it turns out, is just like her husband—a pathological liar invested in her own mythmaking and eager to grab as much power and money as she can. Shocking, if true!

“Both are avid creators of their own history,” Jordan writes of the couple in The Art of Her Deal, according to the Washington Post, adding that Melania is “much more like him than it appears.”

One of the ways the book claims that Melania is just like her husband? Their penchant to lie. According to Jordan, Melania’s lying, or “mythmaking,” as the Post and Jordan put it, includes everything from fudging whether she’s had plastic surgery to embellishing her much-touted claims of fluency in several languages. Again, via the Post:

Despite saying she wouldn’t get plastic surgery, three photographers who worked with her said they’ve seen the scars.

She attended a highly competitive architecture program 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 suggest her claims of being able to speak four or five languages fluently are true.

“Photographers and others who have worked with her over the years — including native speakers of Italian, French, and German — told me that they never heard her use more than a few words of those languages,” Jordan writes. Reporting in the book suggests she only speaks English and Slovene fluently.

As for the nature of the relationship between the Trumps, Jordan claims that “they also seem to love each other,” in the words of the Post, a love that appears to be rooted in a similar willingness to do whatever it takes, including spew racist conspiracy theories, to attain power:

What emerges is a picture of personal ambition similar to Trump’s. In 1999, when he ran for president on the Reform Party ticket, she gave interviews musing about becoming the next Jackie O. Later, she echoed Trump’s calls for then-president Barack Obama to produce his birth certificate, an alignment with the “birther” attacks primarily driven by Trump.

“There is ample evidence that from the very beginning,” Jordan writes, “Melania not only accepted and embraced Trump’s political aspirations but was also an encouraging partner.”

But that love and eagerness for the trappings of power didn’t preclude her from renegotiating her prenup with Donald right after he won the election in 2016. She wanted “to amend her financial arrangement with Trump,” which according to Jordan, Melania described as “taking care of Barron.” And she got what she wanted:

Observers in the White House had noticed an uptick in her mood by mid-2018 that might account for her being so willing to fight for a second term. According to three people close to Trump, Jordan writes, Melania had finally renegotiated the prenup to her liking.

The Mystery of Melania—Revealed!