"Pragmatic" and "with crocodile skin": what Melania Trump's former best friend reveals about her in her new book
Stephanie Winston Wilkinson, who was close to the first lady of the United States, recounts intimacies such as the ex-model's enmity with Ivanka Trump
"General Winston" has spoken. Whoever was Melania Trump's best friend for more than a decade, her confidante at weekly lunches and her regular guest at the Mar-A-Lago mansion in Miami has shown her side as Doctor Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by revealing in an anticipated book the intimacies of the former Slovenian model.
Stephanie Winston Wilkinson has launched this week, with less than two months left until the elections that will decide the future of the country and of Donald Trump, her memoir. Melania and Me: The Rise and Fall of My Friendship with the First Lady, published with Gallery Books, has become the number one book on Amazon . Winston - adoptive daughter of the heir to the famous jewelers Harry Winston - has known Melania for more than 15 years, so the level of confidences is expected to be of quality. To begin with, because the White House has come out to attack it quickly, claiming that it is "a strange distortion of reality."
Winston was part of the Vogue event organization team for years, planning big parties like the Metropolitan Museum gala with Anna Wintour, and when Trump was elected president in November 2016 he became part of the team that organized the event. inauguration. Her organizational capacity was what led her to be called "General Winston". However, she left the White House months later due to a controversy regarding the financing of said act. In fact, one of the issues that the author ugly to the first lady is that she never defended her when she was forced to leave her position, according to media such as The New York Times, the BBC and CNN.
That was the axis from which everything broke with that "kind of older sister", as he comes to describe her, and the germ of this volume. For her that became "a betrayal", she felt "stabbed in the back" and then they broke her friendship.
Now, Winston describes in his book who was his good friend (the one he ate with every week in the best places in Manhattan) as someone very pragmatic and with "crocodile skin", since he does not care what they think of she. In fact, one of the most repeated phrases of her, constantly, is: "Pleasing others is not my priority."
One of the issues it deals with is that, as has been commented on more than one occasion, Melania does not get along with her stepdaughter Ivanka and apparently had drawn up a whole plan so that the young woman did not achieve a high-ranking position in the his father's cabinet. She also didn't want her to appear in the official portrait of her family. The first lady disparagingly calls Trump's daughter "princess" and calls her and her husband, Jared Kushner, "snakes."
Her arrival at the White House is also reflected in the book, often based on memories and phone conversations. One of the quotes that Winston remembers is that her friend told him that she refused to move into the presidential residence until she was "renovated and redecorated, starting with a shower and a toilet."
Melania's disappearance from public life for a few weeks in May 2018 was also the subject of speculation. The official reason was a kidney operation, but the condition of the first lady was in doubt. Although the author of the book was no longer on the White House staff, she was still having conversations with the former model, and she raised her thoughts on those rumors that she had been undergoing other types of medical treatments. "A facelift? I would be too scared! A nervous breakdown? Seriously? Those people don't know me, "Melania commented. And then the first lady quoted what a friend of hers used to say to her: "You give people nervous attacks, you don't have them."
Another issue raised is Donald Trump's rude and abusive comments about women and how Melania reacts to them. In 2016, when the recording was made public in which the then presidential candidate stated “when you are a star, they let you do anything to them. Grab them by the cunt ”, his wife heard her. She “was beaming, smiling. It was as if nothing had happened, ”says Winston. “She knows perfectly well who she has married. She knew where she was getting, and so did he. "
"I was there from the beginning," says Winston Wolkoff about how his friend has evolved over the years. “I witnessed Melania's transformation from having a gold bath to turning into 24 karat gold. She believed that she had a heart to connect, that she was genuinely caring, and that she deserved our full attention. Through the early days of our friendship, she lived up to what I saw in her. But now I see that only the gold plating remains, and I have to wonder if that is what it always was, and if I was the idiot who bought the imitation watch in a corner. "
