Melania Knauss was born on April 26, 1970, is a Slovenian and American former model who served as first lady of the United States from 2017 to 2021 as the wife of Donald Trump, the 45th president and current president-elect of the United States. Trump is set to return to her role as first lady on January 20, 2025, following her husband's second inauguration.
She is the first naturalized citizen to become first lady, the second foreign-born first lady after Louisa Adams (first lady 1825–1829), and the second Catholic first lady after Jacqueline Kennedy. She will become the second first lady in history to serve two non-consecutive terms.
How Trump
and Melania first met
In September
1998, Paolo Zampolli, a former modeling agent, hosted a New York Fashion Week
party in which both the Slovenian-born model, then-named Melania Knauss, and
Donald Trump were in attendance. But Donald Trump wasn’t alone at the event.
The real estate mogul, who was separated from second wife Marla Maples at the
time, had yet another woman on his arm that night.
“He wanted
my number, but he was with a date, so of course I didn’t give it to him,” the
first lady later explained in a 2016 interview with Harper’s Bazaar. “I said,
‘I am not giving you my number; you give me yours, and I will call you.’ I
wanted to see what kind of number he would give me, if it was a business
number, ‘What is this? I’m not doing business with you.’”
Instead, she
recalled that he gave her all of his numbers, including “the office,
Mar-a-Lago, home in New York, everything.”. After waiting a few days, she
dialed his digits.
The first
time Donald Trump tried his hand at presidential politics was in 2000, when he
attempted to secure the Reform Party nomination. Earlier that year, he
announced that he and Melania had split. However, she wasn’t missed for long.
By February of the same year, Trump had abandoned his Reform Party race and was
pictured with his girlfriend by his side again.
On January
2005, Donald and Melania Trump got married. The couple swapped vows in a
ceremony held in Palm Beach, Florida. The newlyweds and their guests then
partied at the reception held at Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate.
As for the honeymoon, Trump said they remained at Mar-a-Lago for the duration. “Why are we going to leave our gorgeous, beautiful house, called Mar-a-Lago, and venture out to some tropical island where things aren’t clean or whatever?”