NEWS'She Wanted To Be Known': Inside Melania Trump's Ambitions And Marriage To Donald Trump
While Melania Trump has been tight-lipped since the Trumps' White House departure in January, everyone still has eyes on the former First Lady, especially when it comes to her marriage to former president Donald Trump.
"I think a lot of people thought she just wanted to be rich," Mary Jordan, author of The Art of Her Deal, told the outlet. "And she wanted not just to be rich — I heard that several times from key people: 'You don't understand, she wanted to be known.'"
Melania pursued modelling in her younger years because she wanted to be "where the action is," according to Jordan. And while Kate Bennett wrote in Free, Melania that dating Trump in the '90s may have boosted her career, Melania would have preferred to have succeeded without him.
While being first lady wasn’t something she necessarily dreamed about, Bennett said she enjoyed it, despite being perceived as reluctant — although she did work on her anti-bullying campaign, Be Best, while in office.
"The first lady is supposed to act as the 'consoler in chief,' especially when you're married to a man who is so inept at consoling people and has a real empathy gap there," Andersen Brower previously said. "She should be the one who is speaking to the American people and reassuring Americans that things are going to get better and being positive, in the way Laura Bush did after 9/11. But we just don't hear that from her."
Melania famously took months to move to D.C. after Trump was sworn into office to reportedly renegotiate her prenup... but not for her own benefit.
"With most things Melania her first concern was Barron, right?" Bennett noted after Melania and Trump tested positive for COVID-19. "He tested positive as well, and he did not have any symptoms, according to two people I spoke with, but Melania did. She was pretty sick."
While rumors of an impending divorce regularly circulate in addition to reports that the pair sleep in different rooms, the Trumps have more in common than meets the eye. The often-silent and mysterious former first lady is quite "conservative."
"She's aligned with [Trump] on immigration. She was aligned with him when the #MeToo movement came out. It was really hard to decipher what she was saying," Bennett explained.
Melania can also handle her husband’s temperament and is said to be one of the few people he listens to.
"She is upset, I hear, of the way it ended with the Jan. 6 riot," Jordan said of their last days in office. "It put a huge dent in her own legacy, because she didn't come out and talk about it quickly enough." Jordan added that it would not be a surprise if Melania decided "to come back and change the narrative."
"Donald and Melania are different people — from she's as quiet as he is loud to how they look, their ages — everyone knows how they're different," Jordan explained.
"But they're also very alike. They both believe in comebacks. They both believe that the Trumps will rise again."
