By
Amalija Knavs, the mother of former first lady Melania Trump, has died.
The former first lady announced the death Tuesday night, calling her mother a “strong woman who always carried herself with grace, warmth, and dignity.” Knavs was 78.
“She was entirely devoted to her husband, daughters, grandson, and son-in-law,” Melania Trump wrote on X. “We will miss her beyond measure and continue to honor and love her legacy.”
Knavs had been “very ill,” according to Donald Trump, who spoke about his mother-in-law’s condition during a New Year’s Eve event at Mar-a-Lago.
“It’s a tough one, it’s a very tough one,” he told the Florida crowd, adding that Melania Trump was at a Miami hospital with her mother. The former first lady had also been absent from a family Christmas photo at Mar-a-Lago days earlier.
Donald Trump posted about his mother-in-law’s death on his social media platform late Tuesday and shared a photo of the two of them together.
“This is a very sad night for the entire Trump family!!!” he wrote. “Melania’s great and beautiful mother, Amalija, has just gone to a beautiful place in the sky. She was an incredible woman, and will be missed far beyond words!”
Born in 1945, Knavs worked as a pattern maker in a textile factory in Slovenia until she retired in the ’90s, according to a New Yorker profile of Melania Trump in 2016. In her speech at the 2016 Republican National Convention, the future first lady said her “elegant and hardworking mother” had introduced her to fashion and beauty.
Knavs and her husband, Viktor Knavs, became U.S. citizens in 2018 through a family-based immigration program that then-President Trump had repeatedly maligned as “chain migration.” He vowed to end the system and falsely claimed in his State of the Union speech earlier that year that it allowed a single immigrant to “bring in virtually unlimited numbers of distant relatives.”