She did not arrive as the typical American political spouse. Born Melanija Knavs in Sevnica, Slovenia, she grew up far from wealth, wearing homemade clothes in a town where money was scarce. From there, she leapt into high fashion, leaving university after a year to pursue modeling in Milan and Paris. Her face soon appeared in Sports Illustrated, Vogue, Vanity Fair, and Harper’s Bazaar, and she became the first future First Lady ever to pose nude in magazines, a fact that would later fuel endless controversy.

In Washington, she remained an outsider in every sense: only the second foreign-born First Lady, the only one whose native language wasn’t English, one of the tallest, and just the second Catholic after Jackie Kennedy. She delayed moving into the White House to keep Barron in school, then later stepped into the digital frontier, launching her own $Melania cryptocurrency on the eve of Trump’s 2025 inauguration. Through it all, she stayed mostly silent—letting speculation roar while she moved, carefully, on her own terms.