By Guy Trebay
Lying prone on a rug (click here) adorned with the Great Seal of the United States, the woman who might someday be first lady is wearing high-heeled sandals and a crimson bikini.
The date is February 2000. Donald J. Trump hasn’t yet thrown his hat into the ring as a Reform Party candidate, yet he’s already set in motion a machine that 15 years on will turn a voluble political maverick into the front-runner for the Republican Party presidential nomination.
The woman on the rug is Melania Knauss, a Slovene model, who at 26 is more than a quarter-century younger than her billionaire future husband. The rug is a prop in an Oval Office set mocked up in a Manhattan photo studio. Spread across two pages of the now defunct “Talk” magazine, Mr. Trump is seen in an inset close up; telescope back from the picture and what you’d see is Mr. Trump seated behind the presidential desk and at his feet his future wife, a woman striking in her beauty and docility....She obviously is respected by her peers. This was a lot of interest to put her and the wedding dress on front page of "Vogue." I am sure she is a sophisticated person. She has to be as an international model.
