Abstract
The article uses the case of Melania Trump, the former First Lady of the United States, to analyse the discursive strategies through which the print media in Slovenia represented ‘Melania’ as an ethnically born Slovenian on a national scale. The article also demonstrates how patriotism, based on the love and feelings of belonging to the Slovenian nation-state, was nationalized in the case of ‘Melania’. The main argument is that numerous and repetitive media representations of ‘Melania’ aggressively put nationalism in the commercial context, and consequently transformed the nation into a commodity and an object of trade which can be sold and of which the Slovenians can make a profit. Consequently, the Slovenian press coverage of Melania Trump created her as a national brand meant to perform on the local, national market when merging emotional attitudes with commercial allure. The article concludes with the discursive strategies such as representing ‘Melania’ as ‘ours’, as a tool to accelerate the country’s economic growth and as a branding strategy to sell the Slovenian landscape and culture and produce the Slovenian nation as an imagined commodity. Furthermore, such branding of the nation is directed towards domestic rather than international audiences.
Highlights
First Lady and nation branding as a media practiceOn 20 January 2017, the inauguration of the 45th President of the United States took place
Donald Trump swore on the Bible held by his wife, Melania Trump, who was born in the small Slovenian town of Sevnica1 and who migrated to America in the 1990s
The aim of the article is to show the specifics of the Slovenian nation branding in the case of ‘Melania’, which is connected with celebrity nationalism on one side and with the commodification of the nation on the other
Summary
First Lady and nation branding as a media practiceOn 20 January 2017, the inauguration of the 45th President of the United States took place. One of the stories in the Slovenian media recently cited a source from the Slovenian Foreign Ministry that highlighted the positive economic trends and gains, including ‘Melania Trump, in many public appearances before and after the election of Donald Trump as the President of the United States, emphasized her Slovenian origin and expressed her affection for the country, in which she was born and raised’ (Pust, 2019) It was the fact of the First Lady being born in Slovenia that was stressed initially in the media, and the expectation that Slovenia was going to gain a lot economically with ‘Melania’
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