In Profile: Melania Trump and Her Family (Including Her Hustler Father)

GQ has a well-done long-read profile on Melania and her family.

It turns out her father physically somewhat resembles Trump and is something of a hustler himself. It turns out he was likely a heroic black market operator when Slovenia was communist:

Even in those days, when Slovenia was part of Communist Yugoslavia and times were lean...

The family struck a worldly image, too, vacationing in France, Italy, and Germany. Every room of their apartment in Sevnica was painted a deep, lush color—blue in the living room, red in the kitchen, yellow in Melania’s room..., a rarity in Yugoslavia.

Melania’s childhood friend Mirjana Jelančič....remembers Melania’s father, Viktor, spending every Saturday lovingly washing his antique Mercedes, another rarity. “It was like a ritual,” Jelančič tells me. After leaving his job working for the mayor of Hrastnik, Viktor, then a member of the Slovenian Communist Party, became a salesman at a state-owned car company. Police files from the time indicate Viktor aroused suspicion for illicit trade and tax evasion in 1976. (He was charged with a tax offense, though his record was later cleared on account of Slovenia’s statute of limitations, a process the courts described to me as “legal rehabilitations.”) Melania blocked my efforts to speak to Viktor, and she denies that any such investigation took place. “He was never under any investigation, he was never in trouble,” she snaps. “We have a clean past. I don’t have nothing to hide.”