Interview with Melania Trump

From DuJour:

Despite her own substantial fame, Melania is rarely photographed by paparazzi. That’s by design, she explains. “I have a life. I go out every day. I bring my son to school. I pick him up. I’m not an attention seeker. I’m not the one who calls paparazzi, ‘I have lunch with the girlfriends, and I’m going to this restaurant.’ ” I ask her what those after-school pick-ups are like; I can imagine her, like many of my friends with young kids, being forced to make awkward small talk with the other moms and nannies as they wait outside for the kids. “I get along,” she says, sincerely. “[With] the moms at the school pick-up, it’s ‘Hello, how are you?’ But it’s not friends friends. I like quality over quantity.”

Indeed, she isn’t the type to spend every night on the town. She is active in several charities—the American Red Cross and the Boys’ Club of New York—but she prefers time with her son to red carpet events, telling me about Saturdays spent on the sidelines of his baseball games in Central Park. 

“I was there taking pictures and videos, quietly so he didn’t see me. I was never screaming or cheering. I know my son and he would say, ‘Stop it.’ ” She is up at five forty-five most weekday mornings to have some time to herself before she wakes Barron, whom she once described as a mini-Donald—at 7 years old, he preferred a suit-and-tie to sweats, though he’s long since outgrown that phase. “The third floor is Barron’s,” she says. “It’s much easier that way. For him as well. He has friends over, he has his toys. He has a play date tomorrow and is bringing two friends over. They come here, they go upstairs and they play. They kick a ball, they play with iPads. I don’t allow Xbox before homework is done.”

Marrying a celebrity, Melania says, requires strength. “When you walk in a room, everybody knows the person. Sometimes people see you with that man and maybe they know more about the man, and they judge you or see you differently. You need to know who you are and you need to be very secure. You need to stand up for yourself. You need to have your own yes and no.” When Donald is on the road campaigning, they talk several times a day, but there is no evening routine. “We don’t Skype,” she says. “We don’t text. He’s only a phone person. No e-mails and no texts.”

As she repeats more than once, she is fiercely independent. Before Donald announced his candidacy, “I said to him, ‘You really need to think, because our family life will change.’ The three of us will change. I know what it takes, traveling and all that stuff. I told him if he really wanted to do that I would support him 100 percent. But I would also be a mom first, I would be with our son, I would be home. Our son needs parents, and I don’t want somebody other than me taking care of him. We made that decision. It’s a big decision [to run], and a selfless decision. To go into that is very selfless because of what we’re going through.” (Read more.)

Melania's statement regarding Donald's apology is HERE. Share