What Melania Trump and Hillary Clinton have in common now
A former Playboy model who claims she had an affair more than a decade ago with President Donald Trump apologized to his wife, First Lady Melania Trump, in an interview Thursday. Melania Trump now shares the questionable distinction of being a publicly despised first lady with another woman: with her husband's 2016 rival for the presidency and declared enemy, former first lady Hillary Clinton.
Karen McDougal told Anderson Cooper, in an exclusive interview on CNN, that she had a sexual relationship with Donald Trump a decade ago, when Trump was married, and that she was "sorry" for what he had done to Trump's wife. , Melania. "What can I say except I'm sorry?" She said, and she added, teary-eyed, "I wouldn't want them to do it to me."
The White House has denied these allegations, which were made public in an article in The Wall Street Journal before the presidential election. This outlet detailed how the parent company of The National Enquirer had paid McDougal for the story and never published it.
McDougal's apology, along with other very public allegations from adult film star Stormy Daniels - that she, too, had an affair with Trump - have brought the Trumps' marriage into the limelight in a way not seen since the decade. The 1990s, when Bill Clinton's affair with Monica Lewinsky, then a White House fellow, made headlines.
To be sure, many first ladies have had to put up with their husbands' infidelities, although they occurred far below the public radar.
The stories of unbridled deception by Franklin D. Roosevelt, John Kennedy, and others are so legendary that, in a 1997 letter that Monica Lewinsky sent to Bill Clinton begging him to see her, she even referred to Roosevelt's lover, Lucy Mercer: “ Oh, and Handsome [Lewinsky's nickname for Clinton], remember FDR would never have turned down a visit to Lucy Mercer! ”He wrote.
It was Mercer, not Roosevelt's wife, Eleanor, who was by his side when he died in Warm Springs, Georgia, in 1945. And Jackie Kennedy knew her husband saw other women, but at the time there was a gentlemen's agreement in the press to never reveal it.
Jackie suffered from depression due to her husband's infidelities and once, when she was giving a Paris Match reporter a friend of hers a tour of the White House, she saw a woman, whom she suspected was having an affair with her husband, sitting in Secretary Evelyn Lincoln's office. Jackie said to her friend, in French, "This is the girl who is supposedly sleeping with my husband."
But it wasn't until Hillary Clinton that a first lady would be forced to face head-on public, shameful and hurtful accusations about her husband's infidelity. This national exposure - global, really - went well beyond Clinton's years of experience as Arkansas' first lady when her husband was governor.
But everything is new for Melania Trump, who does not like to be the center of attention.
Bill Clinton's leanings were no secret and were well known to his inner circle and probably to his wife long before he won the presidency.
But Bill Clinton's past came back to haunt him in the White House. As I detailed in a 2016 book I wrote about first ladies, a Clintons guest to the White House recalled hearing the phone ring in the hallway of the second-floor residence around midnight. The president took the call, then collapsed, yelled "shit!" And hung up the phone. Clinton came to herself and continued with his guests well into the morning, as if nothing had happened.
The next morning, the guests of the house - there were always guests at the White House during the Clinton years - got up and headed to the solarium. The Washington Post, The New York Times, and The Wall Street Journal were at a table and saw what had upset the president: Paula Jones had filed a formal lawsuit accusing Clinton of making sexual advances to her when he was governor of Arkansas and she was working. with the.
Unlike Jackie, Hillary Clinton had no choice but to address her husband's weakness for the female sex in a very public way. Like Pat Nixon during Watergate, Hillary Clinton stopped reading newspapers at the height of the scandal and blamed others, Republicans in this case, for trying to topple her husband.
"She solved it in a way that worked for her," said Susan Thomases, her close friend and adviser to hers. "Keeping her marriage together was very important to her," she added. Of course, between the walls of the presidential residence there was deep pain.
But like the Roosevelts before them, political society and deep mutual affection held the Clintons together. The same thing happened with the Kennedys. A week after their 10th wedding anniversary, Jackie wrote a letter to her friend Charley Bartlett, who had reconciled them. She told him that she knew that Jack (JFK) would have been happy without being married but, without Jack, her life would have been "a wasteland, and she would have known it every step of the way."
She remains to be seen if the bond between the Trumps is that strong.
