A biography breaks (and confirms) myths of Melania Trump in the White House
Kate Bennett, a CNN reporter, says that the presidential couple sleep in separate rooms, that the first lady wears "men's clothing" to annoy the president and that she maintains a cold relationship with Ivanka Trump
Kate Bennett is the only White House correspondent dedicated to exclusively covering information about Melania Trump and the family of the American president. Endorsed by the follow-up she has done to the hermetic first lady, the CNN journalist published on Tuesday the book Free, Melania: The Unauthorized Biography (Melania, libre: the unauthorized biography), a play on words that alludes to Free Melania (Free Melania), a slogan that is read in the demonstrations in Washington. "I don't understand 'free Melania'. Why wouldn't I be happy here?" The Slovenian once said to the reporter, according to her account in the new title. The text does not succeed in breaking down the heavy walls Melania has built around her privacy, but it does allow us to get a little closer to the behavior of the most reserved first lady in modern American history. The play addresses issues such as the not very close relationship she has with Ivanka Trump, the birth of her son Barron, and constant communication with her husband.
Melania Trump is not a vase woman, according to the author. Bennett criticizes that she is underestimated in that way, when she actually has a "powerful influence" over the president, "both in politics and in the way he handles his staff," the reporter writes in the book. With the workers of the White House the first lady is "kind and warm", far from that hieratic image that she projects. Once, when the journalist asked why she was not smiling at the flashes, the first lady replied that she was not a fake. "I am not someone who smiles just because there is a camera in front of it." Another myth the journalist tries to tear down is that Melania Trump, 49, has a distant relationship with the president. The author affirms that the couple speak continuously on the phone, although she adds that in this way the first lady has "frequent and stubborn discussions" with her husband.
In the pages of the book, Bennett also rejects the widespread idea that Melania did not want her husband to run for president, on the contrary: "She put a lot of pressure on him to do it. Partly because he knew he would win and because he would do a good job. job". As already revealed in another book, the couple sleep in separate rooms. The former model occupies the bedroom that during the past Administration belonged to Marian Robinson, Michelle Obama's mother. In addition, she has a "glamor room" where she does her hair and makeup, and a private gym with a Pilates machine.
One of the juiciest episodes in the book is the one that refers to the leak of some photos where she appeared posing naked during the election campaign in July 2016 and published by the New York Post. The first lady does not rule out that it was the work of Roger Stone, a former adviser to her husband. "Melania hasn't commented on how she thinks the tabloid got the pictures, but her friends say she still refuses to believe Trump did that to her. She's not so sure in Stone's case." The journalist introduces - as in many other passages of the 264 pages of the book - some of the theories that circulated at the time: "Trump was trying to avoid a bad week in the campaign." The scandal over the photos came days after the US president lashed out at the Muslim family of a fallen soldier in Iraq.
Another passage in the book focuses on one of the most viral episodes of the first lady. In one of the toughest moments of Trump's anti-immigration policy, which even managed to enrage members of his own party last June, the president's wife traveled to McAllen, Texas, to visit a children's shelter, some of them separated from their parents by US authorities. The enormous diffusion of that moment was not produced by the visit itself, but by Melania Trump's outfit. She was wearing a trench coat from Zara, Ivanka's favorite low-cost brand, the back of which read: "I really don't care, do you?" The former model said in an interview with ABC that it was a message for the left-wing media that criticized her. However, the author of this unauthorized biography has another theory: "I believed, and still believe, that the jacket was a witty taunt for Ivanka [Trump, daughter and White House adviser] and her almost constant attempts to adhere to the Positive Management Issues "and keep quiet when your father does something controversial. According to Bennett, the relationship between the two women closest to Trump is "cordial, but not close."
The author did not want to include Barron Trump, the son of the marriage, in the book because she does not consider that being born into a public family is a reason to subject anyone to scrutiny. She does mention him occasionally to portray Melania mother or the president as a couple or as a father. Like when, 20 minutes after Barron was born, Trump was already telling the news by phone on the radio program Imus in the Morning or when Andrea Peyser, of the New York Post, commented in an interview with the ex-model how quickly she had lost the weight of the pregnancy. Trump corrected her by telling her that she had lost "almost" all of her weight. Three months after giving birth, Melania became a US citizen.
