She is the ultimate embodiment of Donald Trump’s bargain with the electorate. Illustration by Barry Blitt

In July of 2002, two years before Donald Trump became engaged to the Slovenian model Melania Knauss, he visited her native country for three hours. The couple had been in London. At around 8 P.M. on a Monday night, they landed at Ljubljana’s Brnik airport in Trump’s Boeing 727. Viktor and Amalija Knavs—the former Melanija’s parents; she’d long ago changed her name—awaited them. The party, which included Trump’s longtime executive assistant Norma Foerderer, proceeded directly to a pair of black Mercedeses. After a thirty-minute drive, they arrived at the Grand Hotel Toplice, a luxury property on Lake Bled. Entering the hotel’s restaurant through a side door, they were shown to a table with a view. Trump and Knauss sat on one side; the Knavses and Foerderer on the other, in what later became the manner of contestants on “The Apprentice.” The restaurant had been cleared of patrons. Over virgin cocktails (Trump had a Diet Coke*), onion escalope with pan-fried potatoes, and forest blueberries, Melania interpreted. Trump declined coffee. “Is this place for sale?” he asked his future father-in-law on the way out, according to the journalists Bojan Požar and Igor Omerza. He was back at the airport before midnight.

Donald Trump, it is worth stating, is married to an immigrant. Should he be elected, Melania will become the first foreign-born First Lady since Louisa Adams, though Louisa Adams doesn’t really count, as her father was an American, and from a politically connected family that hopped back and forth between England and its newly liberated colonies. As Louisa Thomas writes in her new biography of Mrs. Adams, “Americanness was forcefully impressed” upon her and her siblings. Her father named one of her sisters, born in 1776, Carolina Virginia Marylanda. The girls, seven of them, were told that they must marry Americans.

Louisa Adams played the harp, wrote satirical dramas, and raised silkworms. (She also survived fourteen pregnancies, including nine miscarriages and a stillbirth.) Melania Trump’s hobbies, she told People, include Pilates and reading magazines. She was born in Novo Mesto, in what was then Yugoslavia, in 1970, and raised in a Communist apartment block in Sevnica, a pretty riverside town where a smuggled Coke was a major treat. Later, according to her Web site, she was “jetting between photo shoots in Paris and Milan.” She met Trump in 1998 at the Kit Kat Club in New York, at a party thrown by Paolo Zampolli, the owner of a modelling agency. Their courtship story is as chaste as its backdrop is louche: Donald saw Melania, Donald asked Melania for her number, but Donald had arrived with another woman—the Norwegian cosmetics heiress Celina Midelfart—so Melania refused. Donald persisted. Soon, they were falling in love at Moomba. They broke up for a time in 2000, when Donald toyed with the idea of running for President as a member of the Reform Party—“TRUMP KNIXES KNAUSS,” the New York Post declared—but soon they were back together. Donald proposed to her on the night of the Costume Institute Gala in 2004, and now Melania, who once lived a quiet life in the Zeckendorf Towers, on Union Square, lives a quiet life in the Trump Tower, on Fifth Avenue. House rules require that guests don surgical booties, so as not to scuff the marble floors.

Trump’s mother was an immigrant, too, from Scotland; his first wife was born Ivana Zelníčková, in Zlín, Czechoslovakia. If he’s as concerned as he says he is by all the “people that are from all over and they’re killers and rapists and they’re coming into this country,” he might consider building a wall around his pants. He stresses that his family members were legal immigrants. Melania came to New York to work as a model. Through a quirk in immigration law, models, nearly half of them without high-school diplomas, are admitted on H-1B visas, as highly skilled workers, along with scientists and computer programmers, who are required to show proof of a college degree. “The H-1B program is neither high-skilled nor immigration: these are temporary foreign workers, imported from abroad, for the explicit purpose of substituting for American workers at lower pay,” Trump said, in March, railing against “rampant, widespread H-1B abuse.”

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Melania got her green card in 2001 and became a citizen five years later. Trump’s family members could afford their rectitude. Hiring a lawyer, as anyone who has settled in a foreign country can attest, is often the larger part of being legal. Melania has expressed little solidarity with less fortunate newcomers. “I came here for my career, and I did so well, I moved here,” she told Harper’s Bazaar. “It never crossed my mind to stay here without papers. That is just the person you are. You follow the rules. You follow the law. Every few months you need to fly back to Europe and stamp your visa.”

In the “My World” section of her Web site, she characterizes herself as a former design and architecture student, “a captivating presence in front of the camera,” “an aqua-eyed beauty,” a wife, a mother, a philanthropist, a New Yorker, and a participant in “numerous television commercials, most recently for Aflac,” in which she “stars with one of America’s top icons, the Aflac duck.” Still, she is an enigmatic presence, often remaining silent, her changeless squint less a mirror of her soul than a slick of Vantablack. She has been largely absent from the campaign trail, preferring, she says, to stay at home with Barron, her ten-year-old son with Donald. Lately, she has been appearing more frequently, in the hope of appealing to female voters, who view Trump unfavorably by a ratio of more than three to one. She sticks to a repertoire of stock answers: “He is an amazing negotiator,” “We are both very independent.” She has a jewelry line, a skin-care line (the prize ingredient is French sturgeon eggs), and a thing for the phrase “from A to Z” (“I follow from A to Z,” “I’m from A to Z hands on,” “I’m involved from A to Z with every piece I design”). Her husband seems to define her largely by her physical advantages, which confer upon him an aura of sexual potency. “Where’s my supermodel?” he yelled from the stage, at a town-hall meeting at the University of Pennsylvania, in 1999, shortly after ushering Melania onto the Howard Stern show to discuss the couple’s “incredible sex” and her lack of cellulite.

The temptation is to dismiss Melania as a dummy, a compliant figure remarkable less for her personality than for her proportions. “I saw her becoming a jointed doll on which certain rags are hung,” Hilary Mantel wrote of Kate Middleton’s transformation into the Duchess of Cambridge. But the metaphor doesn’t really work for Melania, whose fashion choices, sumptuous though they are, are largely ignored by the American public. Monica Lewinsky sold out a lipstick (Club Monaco Beauty Sheer Lipstick in Glaze) and Sarah Palin caused a run on a line of eyeglasses (Kazuo Kawasaki 704s), but there is no “Melania effect.” Her clothes are surprisingly incidental. Cloth coat? Fur coat? No idea. Her most memorable outfit is a bearskin rug and diamond cuffs. See British GQ, January, 2000, “Bed in the Clouds.”