While anyone has a résumé of previous jobs that follows them, there’s a big difference when your résumé comes in the form of photos, especially magazine covers.
A racy New York Magazine cover showing Melania Trump smooching a Big Apple firefighter in the wake of 9/11 has been unearthed nearly two decades later.
At the time of the photo shoot in 2002 — meant to be reminiscent of the iconic Victory over Japan (V-J) Day smooch between a sailor and a nurse in 1945 — Trump was a little-known model named Melania Knauss who had been hired to pose on the cover of the publication’s Valentine’s Day “Singles” issue, according to New York.
The magazine cover featured Melania before she married Donald Trump, before she was a mother, and certainly before she carried the pressure of representing the United States (US) to the rest of the world.
New York Post reporter Matt Haber was the first to recently uncover the buried photo of Melania Knauss.
In 2002, we booked a model to pose on the cover of @nymag. We didn't know we'd hired the future First Lady of the United States. But we had.https://t.co/YNtdF93saS
— Christopher Bonanos (@heybonanos) February 27, 2020
Engine 7, Ladder 1 smoke-eater Daniel T. Keane — who also moonlighted as a part-time model — recalled how he and Knauss re-created Alfred Eisenstaedt’s famous end-of-WWII photograph.
They held the pose “a couple hundred times” — Knauss each time grabbing him and planting a big kiss on him, said Keane, now an Fire Department of the City of New York (FDNY) battalion chief.
Just three years later, Knauss would appear on the cover of New York as Mrs. Donald Trump, and this time she was the star.
Trump’s New York Magazine cover isn’t the only photo that’s surfaced since she became first lady, there have been others — and far racier ones than kissing a firefighter.
In response to a recent tweet about Melania’s New York Magazine cover, comments flooded in. Someone commented, “Well, at least she has clothes on – for a change.” Another person simply wrote, “She is not a Lady.” Someone else said, “Jeez, she looked kind of fat.”