She grew up under the shadow of the Soviet Union.
During President Trump’s announcement yesterday that he would be sending more American weapons to Ukraine via European allies, he mentioned a comment from his wife, Melania. While Trump was hopelessly trying to persuade Vladimir Putin with kindness to end his brutal war, something the first lady said helped move the president toward a different posture.
Trump said in the Oval Office, “I go home and I tell the first lady, ‘You know I spoke to Putin today, we had a wonderful conversation.’ She said, ‘Oh really? Another [Ukrainian] city was just hit.”
What do you know? Melania Trump knows what kind of man Putin is. In all likelihood, that’s because of where and how she grew up.
Melanija Knavs was born in a part of former Yugoslavia in 1970. The country’s full name was, at that time, the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. It lived up to that name. Melanija’s father worked for a state-owned vehicle manufacturer. Her family lived in a state-run housing complex.
Behind the Iron Curtain, Melanija’s father was formally a member of the League of Communists of Yugoslavia, the state’s founding and ruling party, but he broke from its dogma time and again. He secretly baptized his daughters as Roman Catholic. He took his family to other parts of Europe. He even decorated the family’s apartment walls unusually, with bright colors.
Later in her life, Melania Trump described the presidency of Ronald Reagan as the beginning of a new era for her country. The shadow of the Soviet Union next door began to recede for the first time in a long time. She stayed in Yugoslavia long enough to watch it break up into the nations that it had long chained together: Croatia, Serbia, Macedonia, Bosnia, Montenegro, and her native Slovenia. That dissolution — a reconstitution, really — corresponded with the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Melania is now an American, but she will also forever be an Eastern European. She knows what Putin’s Russia would do to her people if it had the chance. She has already experienced something like that growing up, the tyranny of having one’s nation subjugated and suppressed. It’s what Russia is doing right now to large swaths of Ukraine — what it wants to do to all of its people someday.
Her comment to her husband, reminding him that Vladimir Putin has no intention besides inflicting misery upon the Ukrainian people, reveal that Melania Trump recognizes what Russia is doing. She would rather it not go any farther.