NY Mag rediscovers ‘future-First Lady’ Melania Knauss graced its patriotic cover in 2002

(Photo by George De Sota/Getty Images)

While ever-graceful First Lady Melania Trump has yet to be featured on the cover of any of the nation’s leading fashion magazines, New York Magazine reminded readers what the publication had apparently forgotten, that being that it had once hired the former model for a photo shoot.

This happened in 2002, when then Melania Knauss, who was dating Donald Trump at the time, was photographed posing with an actual New York City firefighter for the magazine’s Valentine’s Day issue.

Melania would attend a fashion show with Trump the week of Valentine’s Day 2002, as seen in the photo at the top of the page.

“The female model we’d hired was a pretty young Slovenian named Melania Knauss, who had been dating a New York real-estate developer on and off for several years, and married him a couple of years after that,” wrote editor Christopher Bonanos. “We did not, at the time, expect to be working with the future First Lady of the United States. But we were.”

The photo came just months after 9/11 and was intended to be somewhat of a tribute to first responders. The magazine was inspired by the iconic 1945 V-J Day photo of a sailor and the nurse kissing in Times Square — the twist being that the female would be grabbing the male, as opposed to the other way around.

“After 9/11 firefighters were the heroes of New York—they were the rock stars,” said Caroline Miller, who was New York’s editor at the time.

The firefighter, Daniel T. Keane, now an FDNY battalion chief, recently spoke with journalist Matt Haber about the shoot.

“The person who was doing my hair and makeup, they said, ‘Do you know who that is?’” Keane recalled. “I don’t know any models, I really wasn’t into the scene. And they said, ‘That’s Melania Knauss… That’s Donald Trump’s girlfriend.’ And I said, ‘Oh, okay.’”

Keane said they had posed “a couple hundred times” for the camera during the shoot.

New York Mag noted that Melania appeared a second time on a cover, in 2005, for a story about the Met Gala — apparently, she did not become persona non grata until Trump was elected president.

The hate that flowed from the New York tweet is on a shameful level rarely seen in America prior to the age of social media — especially so, given how the left fawned over her predecessor for little more than the color of her skin and her husband’s very liberal policies.

An exercise that pretty much confirms that hatred for Trump is so consuming for some that no one in its path is immune from the fury.

Here’s a sampling of some of the toxic responses from Twitter:

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