"Melania"

A foreign woman's odyssey through the American jungle.

My favorite biography is Stefan Zweig’s masterpiece Marie Antoinette. Already as a boy, Zweig became fascinated by the Hapsburg princess who was married to King Louis XVI of France in a political gambit to unite the two great Catholic monarchies of Europe.

With great affection, Zweig portrays Antoinette as a young and naive girl who has no idea what awaits her at the French court. At the French frontier, she is stripped completely naked and deprived of everything—including her beloved pug—from her life as an Austrian girl to prepare her for becoming an entirely French woman and queen.

It’s only after the Revolution gets underway that her character really starts to develop. After she is arrested and her husband is guillotined, she is subjected to shocking abuse and humiliation at the hands of her captors. In the final scene, she is trundled through Paris to the Place de la Concorde—mocked the entire ride—where she mounts the scaffold and places her neck in the guillotine. After the blade falls, her severed head is raised to the screaming jubilation of the crowd. And yet, even at the time, many noticed that she behaved with composure befitting a royal from one of the oldest houses in Europe. Her dignity contrasted with the atavism and bloodlust of the mob.

I was reminded of Antoinette when I saw the New Yorker’s mock review, “Me, Lania”: A First Lady’s Memoir” in its August 5, 2024 edition. In our era of humbug faux piety about women in which few if any men are at liberty to write frankly about them, New Yorker writers have made a notable exception when it comes to penning nasty pieces about Melania Trump. The author of the purportedly humorous “Me, Lania” piece scarcely conceals his contempt for the woman—contempt that verges on outright hatred.

As is usually the case when I read this kind of trash penned by a privileged chickenshit writer, the mocking review inspired me learn something about Melania’s memoir. Though I haven’t yet had the chance to read it, I have corresponded with the publisher—Tony Lyons at Skyhorse—who characterizes it as a frank account of Melania’s odyssey from the small-town Slovenia of her birth to New York, and ultimately to becoming the first foreign born First Lady.

I have sympathy for ex-pats, having been one for much of my life. I left my native United States in 1996 and settled in Vienna, Austria. Melania, who is exactly my age, was born in Novo Mesto, Slovenia, about 250 miles south of Vienna. Also in the year 1996, she moved to New York to seek her fortune as a fashion model. Two years later she met the real estate developer, Donald Trump, who was 52 at the time.

While the New Yorker mock review characterizes the older Donald Trump as looking like “rotten produce” at this time, in fact the tall and still slender man cut a dashing albeit garish figure, as was showcased in the following illustration from a Vanity Fair feature one year after Melania met him.

To be sure, this was over a decade before Trump was elected president, at which time the New York press that had previously liked him—or at least only made gentle fun of him—suddenly discovered that he is a monster.

According to Mr. Lyons, Melania tells of her Slovenian childhood and her journey into high fashion in Europe and New York. She colorfully relates the story of meeting Donald Trump and the fun and exciting time he showed her during his courtship. She then offers candid accounts of motherhood, her life as First Lady, and her advocacy work for various causes.

Like Marie Antoinette in her day, Melania Trump has, since 2016, often been the subject of mocking derision by the press. Like Antoinette, she has responded to this scorn with quiet dignity. I look forward to reading her memoir, both out of curiosity and as an act of defiance against all of Melania’s rude detractors. Please consider pre-ordering a copy so that we can make it a bestseller to the chagrin of the weenies at the New Yorker.