For most of her husband's administration, Melania Trump has been a cipher.
She launched her ungrammatical "Be Best" campaign while married to the world's No. 1 cyberbully. Seriously?
She set off to visit migrant children in a Texas shelter wearing a jacket emblazoned with the words, "I really don't care, do you?" Really?
She wore stilettos to a hurricane, then changed into blinding white tennis shoes for a tour of the damage.
She and her husband rarely show affection in public. In fact, their occasionally odd interactions spark viral memes: She flicked his hand away as they walked from a plane on a visit to Israel. She set the internet aflame at his inauguration, when she was seen smiling at her husband one moment, then frowning as soon as he turned away.
Is she an ingenuous immigrant who happened into an almost fairy tale expression of the American dream? Or is she just another empathy-challenged Trump out for herself and her family?
Last week, I curled up with "Melania and Me: The Rise and Fall of My Friendship With the First Lady," a new memoir by her former friend and adviser Stephanie Winston Wolkoff, hoping to understand what, exactly, makes our first lady tick.
The pair met in the offices of Vogue magazine in 2003, where Wolkoff was director of special events and a mentee of Anna Wintour, and Melania Knauss was a model and girlfriend of Donald Trump.
Melania projected confidence from the get-go, writes Wolkoff.
The future Mrs. Trump appeared in an early episode of the show, giving contestants a tour of Trump's gilded penthouse.
"You're very lucky," said one.
"And he's not lucky?" Melania replied.
