Bio: Melania Trump (/məˈlɑːniə/; born Melanija Knavs; [mɛˈlaːnija ˈknaːu̯s], Germanized as Melania Knauss; April 26, 1970) is a Slovene-American former model and businesswoman. She is the current first lady of the United States, assuming the role when her husband, Donald Trump, became the 45th president of the United States.
She assumed the role of first lady of the United States on January 20, 2017, continuing to live in Manhattan at the Trump Tower with their son, Barron, until the end of his 2016–2017 school year at Columbia Grammar & Preparatory School. A 2020 biography by Washington Post reporter Mary Jordan revealed that Melania stayed in New York to negotiate more favorable terms from Trump for her and their son.
She and Barron moved into the White House in Washington, D.C., on June 11, 2017. Her Secret Service code name is "Muse" (beginning with the same letter as Trump's code name, "Mogul", per Secret Service tradition). She is the second foreign-born woman to hold the title of first lady, after Louisa Adams, wife of John Quincy Adams, who was born in 1775 in London to a father from Maryland and an English mother. She is also the first naturalized citizen (rather than birthright citizen) to hold the title, and the first whose native language is not English. Though it has frequently been reported that Trump speaks up to five foreign languages fluently, evidence has shown that when speaking French or Italian, she only used basic greetings.
On March 13, 2018, Trump scheduled a March 20, 2018 meeting with policy executives from technology companies, including Amazon, Facebook, Google, Snap, and Twitter, to address online harassment and Internet safety, with a particular focus on how those issues affect children.[107] Trump's office has avoided the use of the term "cyberbullying", and Trump has come under criticism for championing Internet civility while her husband's Internet behavior has been noted as uncivil. Trump attended the roundtable event, focusing on how children are affected by modern technology. Trump said: "I am well aware that people are skeptical of me discussing this topic", but "that will not stop me from doing what I know is right".
On June 17, 2018, Melania referred to the Trump administration's "zero tolerance" policy at the border with Mexico, where children were being separated from their parents. She stated that she "hates to see children separated from their families" and wants there to be "successful immigration reform". On June 21, 2018, she made a hastily planned trip to Texas to one of the locations at which the Trump Administration's family separation policy was being carried out. She attended a roundtable with doctors, medical staff, social workers and other experts at Upbring New Hope Children's Shelter.
After the El Paso shooting in Texas on August 3, 2019, in which a lone gunman killed 23 people and injured 23 others, Melania and President Trump visited the hospital where eight of the survivors were being cared for. The couple met with the families of survivors, hospital staff, and first responders, and posed with a baby who had been orphaned when both of his parents were killed. The White House had asked that the child be brought in and he was accompanied by his uncle.
On May 7, 2018, Trump formally started the Be Best public awareness campaign, which focused on well-being for youth and advocated against cyberbullying and drug use. The campaign was accompanied by a booklet that was promoted as having been written "By First Lady Melania Trump and the Federal Trade Commission [FTC]", but it was nearly identical to a document prepared in 2014 by the FTC. The similarities prompted accusations of plagiarism, to which her office responded by admonishing the press for reporting on the issue. The fact-checking site Snopes found the charge of plagiarism "Mostly False" saying, "Melania Trump did not claim she had written the pamphlet herself, and she contributed an introduction to a slightly revised version of the booklet. The FTC was always credited for the creation of the booklet and supported its inclusion in the first lady's 'Be Best' campaign."
Born: April 26, 1970, Novo Mesto, SR Slovenia, SFR Yugoslavia
Ancestry: Slovenian
Religion: Catholic
Education: Secondary School of Design and Photography, University of Ljubljana