Power and Principle

Slovenia's President Nataša Pirc Musar on her friendship with Melania Trump, U.S. credibility and why Europe is 'weak'

- by ELLIE COOK

POOL/AFP/GETTY; TOP RIGHT: DIA DIPASUPIL/GETTY

NATAŠA PIRC MUSAR HOLDS OBVIOUS AFFECTION for Melania Trump. When her name comes up while Newsweek speaks to the first lady's former lawyer in a room in the capital Ljubljana, she grins and chuckles, before remarking that Mrs. Trump still immediately replies to her emails.

But Pirc Musar isn't Melania Trump's lawyer anymore. Instead, she is approaching the three-year mark of her term as president of Slovenia.

Yet some things don't change. She's still in touch with the woman who has the ear of the most powerful politician there is—and the first lady hasn't forgotten her mother tongue, Pirc Musar says with a grin.

"I'm really proud of her," says Pirc Musar, whose law firm handled cases for Melania Trump between 2016 and 2019. "I see her as a lady who's softening President [Donald] Trump, a bit, sometimes." Melania Trump hails from Sevnica, a quaint town overlooking the Sava River to the east of the capital. Slovenia itself is a compact nation that joined both the European Union and NATO in 2004, often overlooked in its perched position just north of the Western Balkans and on Italy's northeastern edge. With a population of scarcely over 2 million—smaller than Houston, Texas—it straddles Central Europe and the Mediterranean with strands of Balkan influence woven in, but is removed from the fraught history former Warsaw Pact nations—like Poland—and the Baltics have with Russia.

The country has largely dodged the impact of the White House's tariff war, doing relatively scant trade with the U.S., while starting to wean itself off Russian products following Moscow's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.

The first lady, far more reserved in her public statements than her husband, in August penned a missive to Russian President Vladimir Putin, appealing to him to protect children imperiled by the war with a "stroke of the pen."