Melania Trump, Donald Trump’s third and current wife, is speaking tonight at the Republican National Convention in Cleveland.
Melania Trump, explained
Photo by Spencer Platt/Getty Images
According to Google search trends data, many people would like to know where she is from and how old she is. The answer is that she’s 46 — born in 1970 in Sevnica, Slovenia.
Slovenia, to be clear, is not the same country as Slovakia. Slovakia is north of Hungary and south of Poland and used to be part of Czechoslovakia. Slovenia is east of Italy and south of Austria and used to be part of Yugoslavia.
Melania left Slovenia relatively young for a career as a model in Milan and Paris and then New York, where she met Donald Trump in the late 1990s and married him in 2005.
Melania says her husband isn’t Hitler
Melania Trump has not articulated many strong political views over the years but has attempted to assure American audiences that her husband is “not Hitler” and really simply “wants to unite the country and bring people together and bring jobs back.”
Trump’s first wife, however, says he used to keep a book of Hitler’s speeches by his bed, and after Julia Ioffe profiled Melania for GQ, Ioffe started receiving anti-Semitic Hitler-themed harassment.
Now I'm getting phone calls from a blocked number that play Hitler's speeches when I pick up. Sad!
— Julia Ioffe (@juliaioffe) April 28, 2016
Melania’s view on this was a little odd.
“I don’t control my fans,” she told DuJour when asked if she should do something to stop this kind of harassment, “but I don’t agree with what they’re doing. I understand what you mean, but there are people out there who maybe went too far. She provoked them.”
Melania would arguably be America’s first immigrant first lady
John Quincy Adams’s wife, Louisa Catherine Johnson, currently has the distinction of being the only foreign-born first lady in American history, but her father was an American merchant and diplomat who was living in London when Louisa was born — making her something of a liminal case.
There is a certain irony in Melania’s foreign-born status given the strong association between the Trump campaign and anti-immigration themes — including promises to restrict legal immigration — but polling Vox has done in partnership with Morning Consult shows that European immigrants are perceived very differently from Latin American or Middle Eastern immigrants.
When she speaks tonight, you’ll notice that Melania speaks English with a fairly heavy accent despite having lived in the United States since 1996. When listening, keep in mind that English is actually her sixth language, behind not just Slovenian (her native language) and Serbo-Croatian (the main language of Yugoslavia when she was a kid) but also Italian, French, and German, all of which she learned over the course of her career as a model.
