Former model Melania (née Knauss) is Donald Trump's third wife. She was born in Yugoslavia (in the part that's now Slovenia) in 1970, and became a fashion model at the age of 16. She first entered the United States in 1996 on a business visitor visa, and moved there permanently in 2001. She married Trump in 2005 and took US citizenship in 2006. She and Trump have one child: Barron, born in March 2006. (Barron is Trump's fifth child.)
Melania Trump is the second First Lady to have been born outside the USA – the first being Louisa Adams, the wife of John Adams (the sixth President). She was the daughter of the American Consul in London, and was born in London in 1775.
The first Mrs. Donald Trump was Ivana (née Zelníčková). She was born in Czechoslovakia (in what is now the Czech Republic), and moved to Canada in the mid–1970s to join a (male) childhood friend. In 1976 she moved to New York to promote the Montreal Olympics, and there she met Donald Trump. They married in April 1977, when she was 28 and he was 30. Trump was her second husband; her first marriage had ended in divorce in 1973.
Trump and Ivana had three children: Donald Jr. (born December 1977), Ivanka (1981) and Eric (1984). The marriage ended in divorce after 15 years (in 1992), amid rumours that Trump was having an affair with the former beauty queen Marla Maples. Ivana has since married twice, but both marriages ended in divorce after less than two years.
Marla Maples gave birth to Donald Trump's fourth child, Tiffany, in October 1993. She and Trump married in December of that year. They separated in 1997 and divorced in 1999.
© Haydn Thompson 2017