The principal of Melania Trump’s old primary school knows juvenile behaviour when she sees it. And she has some advice for the candidate who once described his own campaign as “a little childish”.
“Melania is very wise,” Mirjana Jelancic says. “Donald should listen to her more.”
It’s a common refrain in Sevnica, a quiet industrial town of 5,000 nestled in a lush tree-lined valley on the banks of the Sava river in central Slovenia.
Melania Trump, then known as Melanija Knauss, grew up in Yugoslavia in the 1970s and ‘80s.
Those who knew Melanija Knauss as a child are proud that the soft-spoken hometown girl could soon be First Lady of the United States.
And they’re reluctant to publicly criticise Donald Trump, despite their concerns over recent allegations about his behaviour towards women.
Melania, now US First Lady in waiting, was born in 1970 in what was then communist Yugoslavia, the daughter of textile worker Amalija and car salesman Viktor, who friends say bears a striking resemblance to her husband.
“She was always very sophisticated, extremely well brought up in a very traditional way,” recalls Jelancic, her former classmate and neighbour. “In that respect she was different from us.”
If Donald was something of a troublemaker in his younger days, Melania was the opposite - a reserved and diplomatic presence on the playground outside the modest concrete apartment where she grew up.
“She was well spoken, she never swore if there were arguments between us,” says Jelancic.
“She always mediated, forged a compromise and unified us again.” In their grade school days, the girls would knit gloves, sweaters and leg warmers as they flipped through the fashion magazines that inspired Melania from an early age.
“Melania never said she wanted to be a model, she wanted to be a designer,” says Jelancic. “But I always had a feeling that Sevnica and Ljubljana would be too small for her.” TOO RESERVED
In 1987, photographer Stane Jerko noticed Melania — by that time a high school student in Ljubljana — outside a fashion show waiting for a friend.
“She was a bit shy, but she learned very quickly,” Jerko says of Melania’s first ever fashion shots, described by the Trump campaign as test photos. “The second time she was very good, like a model.”
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