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Enigmatic Melania Trump is just as transactional as hubby Donald

23 Mar 2025

They may not often be seen side by side, but their moves and motives make them a perfect couple.

The author and chronicler of the first Trump presidency, Michael Wolff, has singled out Melania Trump as Donald Trump’s weakest link.

Wolff, who has just published his fourth book, How Trump Recaptured America: All or Nothing, was given extraordinary access to the first Trump administration, wandering around all over, making notes. He was an insider then but has since been “banned” from the White House.

Captured in a podcast that will no doubt become a choice piece of internet amber, Wolff recently explained to Rory Stewart and Alastair Campbell, hosts of the popular British podcast The Rest Is Politics and now Leading, that Melania “could pull the rug out from under him at any time”.

Melania Knauss Trump (neé Knavs), he added, might be the only person who is a true match for Trump. “She pulls the strings. She plays him, she gets what she wants,” said Wolff.

Her motivation? “Purely transactional. She is transactional. That and also a kind of hatred of him. She enjoys being this kind of existential threat to him,” opined Wolff. (Melania amended a prenup with Trump during the early stages of his first incumbency to increase the value of a trust fund for their son, Barron – a good move with Eric, Don Jnr and so many others waiting in the wings.)

Investigative journalist Bojan Požar wrote the book Melania Trump: The Inside Story, which he later, with colleague Igor Omerza, shaped into a booklet that points out nine untruths Melania has repeated while curating her American self. The first is that she obtained a degree in architecture and design from what she called the University of Slovenia (on her official website).

There is “no university with this name in Slovenia” and her purported degree was also not found in the central state register of degrees from all Slovenian universities, nor do her then university colleagues, now architects, recall ever seeing her at exams.

Match made in heaven.

First foreign First Lady

Journalists around the world have been digging into Melania’s past. In Russia, state television flashed a series of her early nudes to the nation on the night Trump won his second term. Elsewhere, her history in the US has been under scrutiny.

She is the first First Lady to become a naturalised US citizen. It occurred in 2006 while she was on an EB1 or “Einstein” visa, according to analysis presented in June 2019 by Jon Velie, corporate law expert and chief executive of OnlineVisas.

Velie wrote that one of the things the Trump administration was doing at the time, which had not been done before, was “analysing permanent residency and citizenship cases to determine if they were obtained through fraud”.

Melania had entered the US on a B1/B2 tourist visa in 1996, which “allows the person to enter the US to visit, but they can also interview for jobs”, Velie noted. She had been brought from Slovenia to New York from Milan by her modelling agent, Paolo Zampolli, who had “discovered” her as a model there.

It was Zampolli who secured Ms Knavs’s visa to the US and introduced her to Donald in 1998. That was in the famous New York Kit Kat Club (ironically named after a famous Weimar Republic club). In fact, Melania’s agent flew with Trump to attend his wedding to Melania in the Palm Beach Episcopal Church, with a reception at Mar-a-Lago.

As a freshly naturalised immigrant in 2006 and married to Goldfinger, she was able to sponsor her parents to become Green Card holders, and eventually US citizens, in 2018, in a process known as “chain migration”. Ironically, the Trump administration is trying to reduce this drastically again.

Donald and Melania Trump on 6 November 2024. (Photo: Ron Sachs / Getty Images)

The question Velie posed and answered in 2019 was: “Would Melania be able today to enter the US under a new merit-based immigration system and how exactly would she meet the criteria for the EB1 visa?”

After arriving in 1996 on a B1/B2 tourist visa, Melania then obtained an H-1B visa. One of the criteria for that H-1B was that she had to be a “fashion model”. It is speculated that she had flown in for some interviews and had been offered a job to obtain the H-1B visa. If it were ever to come out that there was a record of Melania being a fashion model before the approval of her H-1B visa, then “her citizenship could be taken away”, wrote Velie. There are a limited number of H-1B visas available each year, “and these are not awarded on a first-come-first-serve basis”.

Much has been made about Trump’s utterances about the EB1 or “Einstein visa”, which many believe hopes to harvest globally those with scarce skills. But this is not the case.

The EB1 is for “extraordinary ability”, which could mean people who have risen to the top of their professions or of their sport or in science and research.

The Washington Post reported in 2000 that Melania had filed for an EB1 visa in 2000 and was able to secure it in 2001, which is the standard amount of time. She’d had runway shows in Europe and featured in a Camel cigarette billboard in Times Square. Then came the Sports Illustrated swimsuit edition featuring Melania on a beach hugging a huge inflatable whale.

The Camel billboard might be regarded as a notable achievement since Camel would be regarded as “an organisation of distinguished reputation”. Velie also noted that only so many models could hope to feature on a billboard in Times Square. “In any case, if somebody else had these same criteria, I think they would probably be granted an EB1 visa,” he wrote.

The Trump administration has not changed the formal EB1 criteria. So these are the same requirements that existed when Melania applied for it.

Melania once threatened to sue the British tabloid Daily Mail over allegations that Zampolli had run an “escort agency” for wealthy clients. After the article appeared, she issued a statement that she had known Zampolli since 1995 when they met in Milan.

“He loved my portfolio and encouraged me to expand my career to New York City. Paolo was a very professional agent and still remains a friend today. The defamatory statements reported by the Daily Mail are 100% false.”

Zampolli recalled that he had been present when Trump had asked Melania if she would like to “come to New York to try the market”.

Melania, of course, replied that she would be “very interested” in such an adventure.

No Eleanor Roosevelt

The longest-serving and most beloved First Lady of the US was Eleanor Roosevelt. Her husband, Franklin Roosevelt, did four terms from 1933 to 1945 and left a massive legacy. She involved herself in community projects and was a leader in her own right. She was articulate, educated and compassionate.

Compare this with Melania, who is seldom seen at her husband’s side and enjoys shopping more than life itself. By her side is Barron, who speaks Slovenian. Trump does not.

For her, life is “a balancing act” of raising her beloved son and starting several online businesses since becoming Flotus in 2016 and through to 2025, selling pendants, trinkets, cryptocurrency and jewellery.

Her strong East European accent seems jarring for a First Lady in a country where immigrants, even those legally in the US, are finding themselves at the receiving end of some Trump-fevered anti-immigration dream.

What is good for the goose is good for the gander.

So, if there is a tinge of doubt about Melania Trump’s naturalisation or any evidence that she was fraudulently processed through the system, it’s tickets for her.

More so than for Trump, who will remain in the US when the entire wrecking ball of his presidency comes to an end and he needs to account.

For now, Melania has him by the short and mushroomy. DM

This story first appeared in our weekly Daily Maverick 168 newspaper, which is available countrywide for R35.

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Opinionistas

First foreign First Lady

No Eleanor Roosevelt