Melania Trump: Who is the current First Lady, how old is she and when did she marry Donald?

Melania Trump
Getty Images
April Roach @aprilroach283 November 2020

Melania Trump could continue on as the US First Lady if her husband, Donald Trump wins a second term on November 3.

As a former model, Melania has been known as a more modern First Lady.

When her husband first spoke of running for president in 1999, Melania told reporters: "I would be very traditional, like Betty Ford or Jackie Kennedy."

Melania recently appeared on her first solo trip of the 2020 campaign in Pennsylvania. The First Lady criticised her husband’s rival, Joe Biden, as she accused the Democrats of putting  “their own agendas ahead of the American people’s wellbeing”.

Here’s all you need to know about the woman who could be staying on with Mr Trump in the White House for the next four years.

Who is Melania Trump?

Born Melanija Knavs in April 1970 in Sevnica, Slovenia, Melania’s name was eventually Germanised to Melania Knauss. She is currently 50-years-old.

Melania began her modeling career at the young age of 16 and eventually went on to sign with an agency in Milan at the age of 18. Melania was enrolled at the University of Ljubljana to study design and architecture but dropped out after one year to pursue her modelling career.

Melania Trump's UK state visit wardrobe - In pictures

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Her modeling work took her to Paris and then to New York in 1996. She has landed covers on major magazines including Harper’s Bazaar and Vanity Fair. Melania is the first First Lady to have previously posed nude for a magazine.

She also landed a few brand campaigns, which included becoming a catalogue model for Bergdorf Goodman and Lord & Taylor as well as Camel cigarettes.

In 2016, radio presenter Howard Stern faced accusations of misogyny after he quizzed Melania about how often she had sex with Mr Trump and what she was wearing.

Melania has also sued the Daily Mail over an article which she said implied that she had been a sex worker in the 1990s. The Mail agreed to pay damages and apologised to the First Lady in April 2017.

How did Melania meet Mr Trump?

When Mr Trump asked for Melania’s number at a party in New York in 1998, she is said to have refused and instead told Mr Trump: “You give me yours, and I will call you.”

The couple were married in 2005 and a year later they had their son Barron. The lavish wedding took place at Mr Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate in and is said to have cost £1.9 million thanks to an expensive spend on a £76.5k Christian Dior wedding gown which weighed 60 pounds and a £76.5k catering bill.

When Mr Trump beat Hilary Clinton in 2016 for the presidency, Melania did not move into the White House until 2017, after Barron’s school term had ended.

According to the BBC, Melania became an American citizen in 2006. She has previously spoken about her immigration status by insisting that she did everything by the book.

FILES-US-VOTE-TRUMP-MELANIA
Melania Trump made her first solo campaign stop in Pennyslvania last week
AFP via Getty Images

"It never crossed my mind to stay here without papers," she told Harpers Bazaar. "You follow the rules. You follow the law. Every few months you need to fly back to Europe and stamp your visa."

Melania was famously accused of copying Michelle Obama’s convention speech in 2008 after she delivered a speech during the 2016 campaign that sounded similar to the former First Lady’s.

The former model once again made headlines in 2018 by wearing a jacket with the words “I really don’t care do you?” written on the back on a trip to a migrant child detention centre.

Melania was absent for a short time from the campaign trail after she contracted coronavirus.

At her first solo campaign stop in Pennsylvania last week, the 50-year-old sought to shift the blame of the coronavirus pandemic away from her husband and on to the Democrats, telling Republican supporters about the “sham impeachment”.

She defended her husband’s handling of the virus and said his administration “chooses to keep moving forward during this pandemic, not backward”, insisting that schools, restaurants and businesses have learned to operate safely during the pandemic.

“We don’t close down and hide in fear. We get to work to find real and lasting solutions,” she said.

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