I. “Not My Thing”

Back in 2014, when Donald Trump was considering yet again a run for president, he polled his friends and advisers about what he should do. He went through a lengthy process, toyed with running for governor of New York, and went back and forth on making any decision. Trump’s dalliance with politics dated back to 1987, when he was promoting The Art of the Deal. He generated publicity for the book (and himself) by buying space for “open letters” in major newspapers, criticizing American foreign policy. He then helicoptered to New Hampshire (which hosts the first presidential primaries) to give a well-attended speech at a local Rotary Club. Trump had seriously entertained a run in 2012, against Mitt Romney, whom he eventually endorsed, but then drew back. Roger Stone, a veteran Republican troublemaker and an early Trump adviser, told me recently that Trump had had “immediate seller’s remorse that he decided not to run” that year. In 2014, Trump was even more serious, and in the end he consulted one of his most discreet advisers—his wife, Melania. “She was very clearly the one who said, ‘Either run or don’t run,’ ” Stone explained. He went on, paraphrasing Melania: “ ‘Your friends are tired of this striptease. Every four years you talk about it.’ ”

It is unlikely that Melania Trump used this exact language. But another source has backed up Stone’s account: that it was in part Melania’s impatience with her husband’s dithering that helped push Trump to declare his candidacy. “She knew it was in his blood,” Stone said. “He always wanted to run. She is the one who pushed him to run just by saying run or do not run. I don’t think she was ever too crazy about it.” She knew her husband wanted to run for president. And she knew that, if he didn’t, he was likely to be knocking around their gilded triplex in Trump Tower, muttering about how he should have done so. “She said, ‘It’s not my thing. It’s Donald’s thing,’ ” according to Stone. “And I think she understood he was going to be unhappy if he didn’t run.”

Trump declared his candidacy, and the decision ultimately thrust Melania Trump into a role she had never sought.

“Behind every successful woman, there is a man in shock,” Ivana Trump writes in her recently released memoir, Raising Trump, about her 13-year marriage to the man who is now president, and about her experience bringing up their three children. She took an active role in managing the Trump Organization, and some of Trump’s associates told me that it was Ivana, not Donald, who was the brains behind the operation. “I was too successful to be Mrs. Trump,” Ivana writes in her book. “In our marriage, there couldn’t be two stars. So one of us had to go.” Trump and Ivana were divorced in 1990 while he was having an affair with Marla Maples, whom he married in 1993, and who is the mother of the much-overlooked (perhaps to her relief) Tiffany Trump. Then, in 2005, he married Melania. At a party in 2015, Ivana Trump was overheard talking about her ex-husband’s prospects as a presidential candidate. According to the New York Daily News, Ivana scoffed, “Yes, but the problem is, what is he going to do with his third wife? She can’t talk, she can’t give a speech, she doesn’t go to events, she doesn’t seem to want to be involved.”

Melania Trump is an unusual First Lady. She is only the second FLOTUS in history not to have been born in the U.S. (The first was Louisa Adams, John Quincy’s wife, who was born in England.) She is the only one to have been raised in a Communist country. She is the only First Lady to delay moving with her husband to the White House, in her case, until five months after the inauguration. She is the only one to be the third wife of a president, and the only one to have ever posed nude for published photographs. She is fiercely protective of her son, but, unlike other First Ladies, the mystery around her day-to-day movements gives rise to rumors that she spends less time than is typical in the White House.