THE PRESIDENTIAL PUZZLE

Pulitzer-winning author Mary Jordan on how she decoded the confounding first lady of the United States

- WILL PAVIA

Imagine that you have been invited to a state dinner with United States President Donald Trump. Not only that, the White House have put you next to first lady Melania Trump. “I have heard so many stories about people sitting next to her saying, ‘Oh my God, I thought I would get the scoop’, ” says Mary Jordan, author of The Art of Her Deal: The Untold Story of Melania Trump—the first close-up portrait of America’s confounding first lady.

Traditionally, first ladies are fabulous hosts and raconteurs. Now here you are shoulder to shoulder with Melania, the daughter of a car mechanic/salesman and a factory worker, who grew up in a small town in Yugoslavia, who became a model, the third wife of a New York playboy and then the first lady. She must have some stories!

Well, apparently, Melania can sit in perfect silence from the first sip of soup to the last draught of coffee. “There are some people, like the wife of [French] President Emmanuel Macron, she can chat with,” says Jordan. But usually it is a total nightmare. She is known as “a tough one to sit next to”. In this, as in so many other things, says Jordan, “she has broken the mould for expectations.”

All of which tends to make her more interesting, if not at dinner. Jordan has wormed out extraordinary details, all very hard won. Before she interviewed Melania, in 2016, Trump insisted that he speak with her first. There is “a solidity” to Melania, he told Jordan. This seems right—the first lady can seem almost intransigent. At Trump’s Florida resort, Mar-a-Lago, the president wanders about asking people if their club sandwich was any good, while Melania sits by the pool reading and no one dares to bother her, Jordan writes.