A Lot About Melania Trump's Origin Story Doesn't Add Up
For a family that has built an entire political brand on demanding papers from everyone else, the Trump family remains awfully allergic to producing its own.
That hypocrisy is nowhere more glaring than in the public mythology surrounding Melania Trump. We are told to see her as the immaculate immigrant success story: the beautiful girl from a small Slovenian town who arrived in America, followed every rule, worked hard, married well, and became first lady. It is a tidy fairy tale. It is also a story with some very conspicuous holes.
Melanija Knavs was born in Novo Mesto in 1970 and raised in Sevnica, a small town in what was then Yugoslavia, where her father, a member of the Communist Party, sold car parts and her mother worked as a seamstress. She began modeling as a young girl in Slovenia and in 1992, she was runner-up in Jana magazine’s “Look of the Year” contest. She subsequently signed with a modeling agency before spending the following years working in Europe.
Much of Melanija’s — or Melania’s, as she soon renamed herself — story is self-manufactured. In 2016, when Trump was first running for president, The New Yorker (typically no slouch in the investigative journalism department) wrote a story about her that actually claimed Melania was “a model with the past of a nun” and quoted Slovenian gossip columnists as saying that she seemed to be a virgin when she met Trump.
https://saltypolitics.substack.com/p/a-lot-about-melania-trumps-origin
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