WHAT'S BEHIND MELANIA TRUMP'S DIVORCE RUMORS: TEARS, A HOUSE OF OWN, AND BARRON'S INHERITANCE
The first lady never wanted to be, and both former friends and biographers say that she conditioned her stay in the White House to renegotiate her prenuptial agreement in the face of a hypothetical divorce.
One of the possible consequences of the electoral defeat of Donald Trump could be the divorce of Melania. Omarosa Manigault, a former adviser to the president who has known the couple for 15 years, claimed that Melania was "counting the minutes" for the divorce. Sources familiar with what is happening in the White House have informed CNN that the first lady has told her husband that it is time to admit defeat. And practically all the books that have documented the couple's passage through the White House agree on the same point: Melania did not want to be there, and she does not want to be one minute longer than necessary in Washington.
Journalist Michael Wolff was the first to reveal that on election night 2016, when Donald Trump's victory was known, his wife cried, "and they were not tears of joy." He was not the only one to assure that that campaign had taken a toll on Melania, who refused to move to Washington for five months. Trump had promised (her and many, many people) that he was not going to win the election, that the goal was not to win, but to become "the most famous man in the world." Confessions he made to quite a few of his advisers and confidants of those years, such as Anthony Scaramucci, who was director of communications for the White House, who revealed that the plan for the day after the election was to go to Scotland to play golf. Not to the White House.
That victory cost her dearly in one respect: that Melania's stay in New York, refusing to act as first lady, was due to the renegotiation of her prenuptial agreement. A negotiation in which the conditions would be established for the president to have a first lady, and she would agree to abandon her dissipated New York life. Especially when it came to Barron, their son, who Melania was pregnant with when she married Donald. This is what Mary Jordan, a journalist for the Washington Post, defends in The art of her deal, her biography of Melania. Where it was already intuited what would happen when they left the White House. Among other things, Melania asked for written assurances that Barron would not become another Tiffany Trump, the abandoned daughter of Trump's second marriage. And that neither Donald Jr. nor Eric nor Ivanka, the siblings who are beneficiaries of the fund where most of the apparent Trump fortune resides, could limit Barron's estate.
A renegotiation that gives credence to the idea of a divorce after the marriage left the White House, either now or in 2024. Furthermore, in 2018 Melania bought an apartment in her name, with one bedroom, in the Tower Trump, His habitual residence, until the 2016 elections, was the giant attic of the skyscraper, which has belonged to Donald for two marriages, and which could survive a third divorce.
A purchase made more or less when he broke his friendship with Stephanie Wolkoff, friend and confidante for 15 years of the first lady, who in an interview on the BBC (and in her book Melania and I) also defends the idea of divorce after "a mercantile marriage ", as defends the relationship between Donald and Melania. In which the first lady has never had any political interest: Melania has only participated in one campaign event in 2020 (two, if we count the seconds in which she took the stage at the end of the last debate) and at no time has she encouraged in her networks to vote for her husband. Although divorce right now seems the least of it: the current priority, according to the US media, is to convince Trump to admit that she has lost. The first necessary step for Melania to get her life back.
