The scene when Melania Trump on 20. January 2017 smiles freeze on the Capitol steps as her presidential inaugurated spouse turns back to the manageable crowds in Washington is etched in the collective memory. She is symbolic of the supposedly emotionless working marriage between the New York construction entrepreneur and the former Slovenian model.
All wrong, writes Stephanie Winston Wolkoff In her new book, "Melania and Me: The Beginning and End of My Friendship with the First Lady". The trigger for the bizarre facial expression was a mundane one, she said: Son Barron had unintentionally kicked his mother in front of the ankle. Donald and Melania Trump are anything but enemies.
Stephanie Winston Wolkoff was close friends with Melania Trump
Winston Wolkoff, long a manager in charge of New York's famed Met Gala, might really know it. The two women had been close friends since the early 2000s, going to lunches at Manhattan's top restaurants and hobnobbing on the same party stage of the rich and beautified.
When Trump became president, the mother of three slipped into a delicate multifunctional role. As a friend, advisor and speechwriter for Melania Trump. And as head of Trump's inauguration committee, which remains shrouded in corruption allegations to this day. When in 2018 it was launched via the "New York Times" that Winston Wolkoff had received $26 million for her work (she herself claims on the basis of documents that it was 480.000 had been), the White House ended the relationship.
Revealing book about Melania: best enemies
Melania Trump, it is meticulously dissected on 350 pages, dropped her bosom friend like a hot potato. Winston Wolkoff feels like a pawn in the game. Status of the relationship today: best enemies. Despite the book's billing nature, the author holds fresh insights because of her rare close-up perspective. For example, the rumor that Melania Trump was deeply shaken when the "grab-you-between-your-legs" conversation recording of her husband shortly before the 2016 election was made public.
Iwo. "I know who I married," she told Winston Wolkoff, who admitted to recording many conversations with the first lady. Some tapes to become public soon. Melania Trump's reaction was similarly chillingly unshaken when Trump's sex affair with porn star Stormy Daniels filled the newspaper columns, she said. Trump denies it to this day. A similar picture of the First Lady drew last year already the U.S. author Kate Bennett in her expose book.
There's a potential scandal in the book about Melania Trump
More trouble than the book could come to Mr. and Mrs. Trump from Winston Wolkoff's hint that the first lady long communicated through private email accounts rather than government servers. In 2016, Donald Trump had wanted to use it to frame his Democratic opponent Hillary Clinton as a state affair.
Winston Wolkoff describes her ex-girlfriend as a calculating person, hermetically woven into a cocoon of her own, who is pretty much oblivious to the outside world. When Mrs. Trump wore a jacket with the words "I really don't care – and you guys" while traveling to visit refugee children separated from their parents at the Mexican border in 2018?" and thus set off a media storm, she told Winston Wolkoff smugly: "I drive the liberals crazy. And you know what: serves them right."
And the children's separation woes? Many would have been given their own beds for the first time in the reception centers, Winston Wolkoff quotes Mrs. Trump as saying. "They take very nice care of her there."
Power struggle between Melania and "Princess" Ivanka?
A large part of the book is devoted to the cabal that Melania Trump has waged against her husband's favorite daughter from his first marriage, Ivanka, is said to have staged.
Here's how the first lady, who is said to refer to her stepdaughter disparagingly internally as "Princess," allegedly prevented her from appearing in official government photos. Attempts by Ivanka Trump to install herself as shadow first lady have been rigorously sabotaged by Melania Trump, she says. The White House let it be known that Winston Wolkoff's book was completely untruthful and driven by a desire for revenge.
Not denied, on the other hand, is what millions of TV viewers were able to see live the other day before the president's speech at the White House. As Ivanka Trump passes her father and stepmother on stage, Melania Trump has only a split second of a smile for her. After that, her face will be as icy as it was in 2017. Even without a kick from son Barron.