THE REVELATIONS OF THE FORMER INTIMATE FRIEND OF MELANIA: TRUMP'S INFIDELITIES, HIS WAR WITH IVANKA AND THE MYSTERY OF HER CLOTHING
Stephanie Winston Wolkoff, a former adviser and former confidant of Melania Trump, publishes a book offering a unique look at her personality. According to the author, what is underneath is much uglier than it seems.
The era of Donald Trump has been bad for everyone and everything, excluding the super-rich and their tax bills, property developers and their tax breaks, and white supremacists, who seem to have been granted permission from the higher ups to deliver out loud the speech they used to keep silent. The book industry has also benefited - when it comes to Trump - thanks to all the fire and fury it gives off, managing to dominate the news headlines and place itself on the best-seller list.
Successful books of this genre have often repeatedly followed one form or structure: reporters scoff at the juiciest, scariest, and most revealing accounts of people who know or work with or serve under Trump; the "adults in the room" who end up whispering anonymously about matters they witnessed, even though these people did nothing about it, nothing beyond tip-offs. I say this with affection and with a deep knowledge of the subject, as I have contributed to it myself.
Three variations on this genre have hit the market this summer: books by Mary Trump, the president's niece; Michael Cohen, the person who has solved his problems all his life; and now Stephanie Winston Wolkoff, close friend and adviser to the first lady, Melania Trump; three stories of some of the characters closest to the Trump universe.
However, what has struck me most about these books has not been the bold stories they share, although they are surprising and damning as advertised; It is rather the fact that some of the people closest to the Trump family have felt so mistreated by them, so humiliated, so squeezed, that they have been willing to talk about their own family and friends. The only reason these books exist is because the Trump family created a climate of rumors and mistrust that subsumed everyone around them; an environment in which "the norm" became to record ordinary conversations to cover their backs or to protect themselves from criminal investigations. For three different kinds of reasons, Mary Trump, Cohen, and Wolkoff had the same knee-jerk response; they felt it was the only way and they were absolutely right.
That simple fact is more revealing than any anecdote leaked in the stories mentioned. Wolkoff's book, Melania and Me: The Rise and Fall of My Friendship With the First Lady, which was published on September 1, reaches the pinnacle of this revelation, as it takes us to an illuminating story about the rupture of a friendship between the two women; with high and low levels of drama, with blunt snubs and others more subtle, and above all with visceral pain, but it just so happens that the two friends are the first lady of the United States and a Vogue star in event production who helped planning the presidential inauguration and joined the East Wing staff, before their relationship broke down publicly amid questions about the inaugural spending and security measures at the White House.
I, in February 2019, predicted the consequences, as I reported that the White House tried to tarnish Wolkoff's reputation by making it appear that she had left millions of dollars in funds for the inauguration ceremony. This story fit perfectly within the scam narrative that many in the "Trump universe" had perpetrated, because they were really good at cheating, so much so that most people believed them without hesitation. The truth, as Wolkoff puts it, was that she never had a complaint about her work; she was told privately that her firing from the White House had nothing to do with her inaugural spending, despite reports showing otherwise. Melania did nothing to defend her at the time, and a year after feeling that something was wrong with the way the inaugural funds were spent and events were planned, Wolkoff began to protect himself from her. That is why she has since participated in investigations into inaugural spending.
Wolkoff, who is around an impressive six feet tall and looks like Melania's sister, or first cousin, or at least one client of her stylist, saved it all because there was so much to hold onto because everyone had communicated. quite a bit through text messages, Signal messages, emails, contracts, and phone calls. Her Park Avenue apartment began to look like the Criminal Minds compound; she wanted to get to the bottom of what had happened because her reputation had been tainted and her name thrown to the ground; all because the woman he thought was one of his closest friends had hit him on the back. If humiliation was the wound, betrayal was the salt, and with proof was the only way Wolkoff would clean it up.
"The proof," as mentioned in the book, is one element that sets Melania and Me apart from the other books on Trump. It is understandable to doubt the veracity of some of the more outlandish stories that have appeared in recent times, but it is very hard not to believe Wolkoff because the quoted conversations seem to come from direct phone calls, meetings, emails or encrypted messages (in a At the time of the book, Wolkoff says that Melania, always very private and paranoid, asked him to delete her text messages because what they discussed was her business).
What makes it even more obvious is the fact that Melania has been unknowable despite so many years; she is always quiet, well groomed and out of the public eye. This is the first real look at what's underneath her personality and all backed up with evidence; what is underneath, according to the book, is much more insensitive and ugly than it seems.
I caught the conversation between Wolkoff and Melania about the infamous green jacket: "I really don't care, do you?" The first lady commented on the back as she toured a center for children who had been separated from their parents at the border with the United States. Melania shrugged off the public storm around costume choice, a common theme throughout the book. "I'm driving liberals crazy," she told Wolkoff, according to the book. "You know what? They deserve it," she said, adding that people "relate things to my clothes" and that she wears what she wears "because I like it." Fired against the media, she continued:
“Everyone went crazy for the zero tolerance policy at the border, but they don't know what is really going on; The children I met were brought in by coyotes, the bad people who trafficked, and that's why they were sent to shelters. They are not with their parents and it is sad, but the patrols told me that the children were saying, 'Wow, do I have a bed? Will I have a closet for my clothes? ' It is more than what they have in their own country where they sleep on the ground; they are taking good care of them here. "And she continued:" Michelle Obama went to the border? She never did. Show me the pictures! "
In these sections she looks much more like her husband than anyone has thought; other events narrated by Wolkoff have a distinctive "Trumpian" style. According to the book, Melania told Wolkoff that she would not move to Washington DC until the shower and toilet in the White House residence were replaced; she painted her office and closet a bright pink, and set up a glamorous room in the dorm for her hair and makeup. She wouldn't mind her not routinely wearing American designer clothes like Michelle Obama had done; if Melania had her eye on Karl Lagerfeld, she was wearing Karl Lagerfeld. If she wanted to wear stilettos to visit a city devastated by the hurricane, she wore stilettos. She did want her to be called "First Lady Elect" on a Christmas card, although no other future First Lady would have used the term because, as Wolkoff reminded her, she is not an elected office, she did it anyway. “Melania,” he writes, “did it and didn't care.” Not much is said in the book about Melania's marriage because, as Wolkoff writes, “Any intimate question about her marriage seamlessly diverted her to topics like what she was doing. happening with her husband, her children and her career, and with the latter she was fascinated. ”The same happened with the questions about her husband's alleged infidelities or the payments made to women in the run-up to the elections; she avoided and she would either leave “the bull by the horns” without taking the bull by the horns or she would nod at Stormy Daniels with “it's politics.” According to the book, when Wolkoff expressed her concern, Melania would respond quite naturally, “I know who I married.”
According to the book, Melania was more open about her relationship with her stepdaughter, Ivanka Trump, or "princess," as Melania jokingly referred to her; During the inauguration, Wolkoff writes that she and Melania launched "Operation Ivanka Block," ensuring that Ivanka was sitting outside the photo frame during President Trump's swearing-in. Melania didn't want her stepdaughter to attend the wreath ceremony at Arlington National Cemetery, so Wolkoff left the matter outside of Ivanka's hours until Ivanka herself texted her to ask why she wasn't there. .
Once they were in the White House, Wolkoff recounted that Ivanka and her staff wrote to her and Melania about co-hosting various events traditionally hosted exclusively by the first lady. "Are you kidding me?" Melania asked Wolkoff about Ivanka's request to collaborate for International Women's Day. "Really? I'm not a co-host." For the annual luncheon offered to the couples of the governors that Ivanka wanted to participate in, Melania said: “We need to let you know that I know that this is a First Lady event and that it takes place every year… OMG; She just wants to take credit. "After hearing that Ivanka had worn a KaufmanFranco dress to an event, Melania said," Forget it. "According to Wolkoff," If Ivanka was dressed by a designer, Melania would cross it off her list. " At one point, Melania apparently warned Wolkoff in a text message: "You know what snakes are like."
That coldness seemed to manifest itself on the national stage at the Republican National Convention. That organic publicity that occurred before the launch of the book that would be the following week was involuntary, and this is like a video in which Ivanka quickly passes by her stepmother without much recognition and goes directly to her father, it went viral, and Melania's face seems annoyed almost immediately after she sees Ivanka go by.
In the last four years, there have been several videos of Melania like this; little viral snippets with the first lady's scowls, during her husband's most important appearances and also in some moments when she seems to take his hand away from her, often shared alongside the hashtag #FreeMelania. The same thing had happened for a time with Ivanka, when many believed that she would be a "mediating influence" over her father in the White House, but many people assumed that no sane woman could see Trump and his administration for who he really was and still continue defending her; then they projected this belief onto the women closest to him. Wolkoff's book helps to understand that this is not the case; these women were never heroines trying to break free. Melania is not cloistered by the mud, she is rather rolling in it. As Wolkoff writes at the end of her book, understanding why she decided to write it, “Melania told me in her own way that she was not part of the solution, she was part of the problem. Not talking and not fighting the problem is part of the problem, and I learned that the hard way. "
"I'm still here," she added. "The woman I once considered my close friend has disappeared."
