Glamorous and accomplished, it is hoped Melania Trump can shine a positive light on Donald Trump. Melania Born in 1970, Ms Trump lived in an apartment block in the small Slovenian town of Sevnica with her family as a child.
When she was a teenager, the family moved to a modest two-storey house above the Sava river on the outskirts of town, which sits below a well-maintained medieval castle.
Residents say her father sold car parts and her mother worked for a factory that made a brand of children’s clothing very popular in communist Yugoslavia, before the country fell apart in the 1990s.
Melania’s modelling career took her to Milan and eventually to the United States, far away from her native Slovenia — a tiny former Yugoslav republic of 2 million people comparable in size to New Jersey.
“Even as a child Melania was creative, innovative and Sevnica was too small for her,” said Mirjana Jelancic, Ms Trump’s friend who is now a headmistress of Ms Trump’s old primary school.
She is effusively praised by her husband as an excellent mother to their ten year old son, Barron, and portrayed as an elegant businesswoman destined to be the perfect first lady.
But the Slovenian model, 46, is known to be happier on the sidelines. She shies away from the spotlight, preferring to remain behind the scenes – especially since her previous foray into politics, introducing her husband at the Republican National Convention, was ridiculed when it turned out her speech was plagiarised from Michelle Obama.
She would certainly break the mold, being the first third wife to occupy the White House, the first non-native speaker of English, and the first fluent in five languages – Slovenian, German, French, Serbian and English.
Contrary to popular belief she would not be the first foreign born – that was Louisa Adams, the English wife of sixth president John Quincy, who served from 1825 to 1829.
Nor would she be the first model – both Betty Ford and Pat Nixon worked as models, with Mrs Nixon using those skills to become the first first lady to appear publicly in trousers, and model them for a national magazine.
Mrs Trump would, however, certainly be the first first lady to have posed naked – the now famous 2000 GQ photo shoot has been widely reproduced, with the then-girlfriend of Mr Trump reclining naked on a fur blanket inside his private jet, and posing in a bra and thong with a gun.
“We have incredible sex at least once a day,” she told “shock jock” Howard Stern that year. “Sometimes even more.”
Mr Trump boasted about how “hot” she looked in “a very small thong”.
