Melania Trump Recalls 'Beautiful Childhood' Under Communism, Flags Freedom Gap
Melania Trump described her childhood in socialist Yugoslavia as happy but less free than life in the United States, and said her work reuniting Ukrainian children with families is ongoing.
US First Lady Melania Trump has described her upbringing in socialist Yugoslavia as a largely happy one, while acknowledging that life under communist rule came with limits that Americans do not face.
Speaking in a television interview, she said she did not feel deprived as a child and that her parents gave the family a good life. Asked whether growing up in communist Eastern Europe shaped a different understanding of freedom, she said there were restrictions people had to keep in mind.
She noted that life was not as free as it is in the United States, though she added that circumstances have changed over time.
Trump was born in 1970 in Novo Mesto, in present-day Slovenia. She grew up in socialist Yugoslavia, which was governed by a communist leadership after the Second World War and comprised six republics — Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Serbia, Montenegro and Macedonia — before breaking apart in the 1990s. She moved to the United States in the 1990s for a modelling career and became a citizen in 2006.
The remarks came during a discussion of her efforts to help reunite Ukrainian children who were taken to Russia during the war. She said a direct channel exists with both Russia and Ukraine, and that her representative is working on another reunification. She described the situation of the children as heartbreaking and said seeing a child returned to a parent is the best outcome, adding that her focus is on reuniting as many as possible.
Her comments were made as President Donald Trump has increasingly invoked the term "communism" to criticise Democrats and democratic socialists. At a Republican convention this month, he said Democrats who describe themselves as democratic socialists are in fact communists.