The era of Donald Trump has been bad for everyone and everything, mostly, apart from the superrich and their tax bills, the real estate developers and their tax breaks, and the white supremacists, who seem to have been granted permission from the top to say the quiet part out loud. And apart from the cottage industry of Trump–themed books—all the fire and fury that’s been fit to print, dominate cable-news coverage, and hover on bestsellers lists. The successful books of this genre have often followed a form: Reporters teasing the juiciest, scariest, most revealing accounts from people who know Trump or worked with him or served under him, the “adults in the room” who whispered anonymously about the horrible things they witnessed, but who did nothing about them beyond said whispering. I say this with both affection for and intimate knowledge of the genre because I myself contributed to it.
Three variations on the form are hitting the market this summer: books from Mary Trump, the president’s niece; Michael Cohen, his longtime fixer; and now Stephanie Winston Wolkoff, a former close friend and adviser of first lady Melania Trump—three accounts from the most inside insiders of Trumpworld. What has struck me most about these books is not what salacious stories they have to share, though the stories are delicious and damning as advertised. It’s that some of the people closest to the Trumps have felt so jilted by them, so burned, so wrung out, that they’re willing to spill their guts about their own family or closest friends. The only reason these books exist is because the Trumps created a climate of backbiting and mistrust that subsumed everyone around them—a climate in which things like recording run-of-the-mill conversations to cover their hides or protect themselves from criminal investigations became the norm. For three different sets of reasons, Mary Trump, Cohen, and Wolkoff had the same knee-jerk response. They felt like it was the only way. And an even wilder notion: they were right.
That simple fact is more revealing than any leaked anecdote in any of these stories. Wolkoff’s book, Melania and Me: The Rise and Fall of My Friendship With the First Lady, out September 1, is the height of this revelation, the ceiling of the floor. Ultimately, it’s an illuminating story of the dissolution of a female friendship, with drama both high and low, slights overt and subtle, and visceral pain. It just so happens that the two friends are the first lady of the United States and the Vogue alum with event-producing bonafides who helped plan the presidential inauguration and joined the East Wing staff before their relationship came publicly unglued in the midst of questions over inaugural spending and security clearances in the White House. In February of 2019, I reported on the fallout—that the White House tried to throw Wolkoff under the bus by making it appear that she had taken millions of dollars from the inaugural funds to line her own gilded pockets. This portrayal fit right into the grifter narrative so many in Trumpworld had perpetuated by actually grifting that most people believed it without hesitation. The truth, as Wolkoff lays out, was that there wasn’t a grift on her part, and she was told privately that her firing from the White House had nothing to do with inaugural spending, despite reports to the contrary. Melania did nothing to defend her at the time, and after more than a year of feeling like there was something amiss with the way the inaugural funds were spent and the events were planned, Wolkoff started to protect herself. Since then, she has participated in investigations into inaugural spending.
Wolkoff, who’s around a stunning six feet tall and who looks like Melania’s sister, or first cousin, or at least a client of her hairstylist, saved everything. And there was plenty to hold onto because they had all communicated so much, through Signal messages and texts, emails, contracts, phone calls. Her Park Avenue apartment started to look like the set of Criminal Minds. She wanted to get to the bottom of what had happened and why her reputation had been sullied and her name dragged through the mud, all because the woman she thought was one of her closest friends had turned her back on her. If humiliation was the wound, the betrayal was the salt, and the way Wolkoff wanted to wash it all away was with proof.
That proof, as it appears in the book, is part of what sets Melania and Me apart from other Trump books. It is fair game to doubt the veracity of some of the more out-there tales spun in other accounts from this era. But it is hard to disbelieve Wolkoff’s, because the conversations quoted appear to be from direct phone calls or meetings, emails or encrypted messages (at one point in the book, Wolkoff writes that Melania, ever private and paranoid, asked her to delete their texts because what they discussed was their business).
What makes it all the more marked is that Melania has been so unknowable for so long, quiet and coiffed and largely out of view. This is the first real look at what’s under her hood, backed up with receipts. And what’s there, according to the book, is much more callous and uglier than it has appeared.
Take a conversation between Wolkoff and Melania about that infamous green jacket with “I really don’t care, do u?” scribbled across the back when the first lady toured a detention center holding children who had been separated from their parents at the U.S. border. Melania shrugged off the public firestorm around the sartorial 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 added that people “connect stuff to my clothes” and that she wears what she wears “because I like it.” Fired up about the media, she continued:
“They all went crazy about the zero-tolerance policy at the border. But they don’t know what’s going on. The kids I met were brought in by coyotes, the bad people who are trafficking, and that’s why the kids were put in shelters. They’re not with their parents, and it’s sad. But the patrols told me the kids say, ‘Wow, I get a bed? I will have a cabinet for my clothes?’ It’s more than they have in their own country where they sleep on the floor. They are taking care nicely there.” She added, “Did Michelle Obama go to the border? She never did. Show me the pictures!”
In these passages she sounds far more like her husband than anyone has given her credit for. Other choices chronicled by Wolkoff carry a distinctive Trumpian flair. According to the book, Melania told Wolkoff that she would not move to D.C. until the shower and toilet in the White House residence had been replaced. She painted her office and closet bright pink, and she added a glam room to the residence in which she could have her hair and makeup done. She would pay no mind to wearing American designers, as Michelle Obama had. If Melania had her sights set on wearing Karl Lagerfeld, she wore Karl Lagerfeld. If she wanted to wear stilettos to visit a hurricane-ravaged town, she wore stilettos. If she wanted to be referred to on a Christmas card as “First Lady-Elect,” even though no other first-lady-to-be had used the term because, as Wolkoff reminded her, it is not an elected position, she did it anyway. “Melania,” she writes, “Did. Not. Care.” Melania doesn’t dish much on her marriage in the book because, as Wolkoff writes, “Any intimate question about her marriage was deflected by her seamlessly turning the chat back to what was going on with my husband, my kids, and my career, about which she was endlessly fascinated.” The same went for questions about her husband’s alleged affairs or payments made to women in the run-up to the election. She’d brush off his “grab ‘em by the pussy” tape or settlements to Stormy Daniels with, “It’s politics.” Over the years, according to the book, when Wolkoff would express her concern, Melania would matter-of-factly respond, “I know who I married.”
Melania was more overt about her relationship with her stepdaughter, Ivanka Trump, or “Princess,” as Melania jokingly referred to her, according to the book. During the inauguration, Wolkoff writes that she and Melania launched “Operation Block Ivanka,” making sure that she was seated out of frame in the photos of President Trump being sworn in. Melania, she writes, did not want Ivanka to attend the wreath-laying ceremony at Arlington National Cemetery, so Wolkoff left it off of her schedule, until Ivanka texted her to ask why it wasn’t there.
Once they were in the White House, Wolkoff writes that Ivanka and her staff wrote to her and Melania about cohosting several events that were traditionally hosted by just the first lady. “Are you kidding me?” Melania asked Wolkoff about Ivanka’s request to collaborate for International Women’s Day. “Seriously? I’m not co-hosting.” For the annual luncheon held for the governors’ spouses that Ivanka wanted in on, Melania said, “We need to let her know that I know this is a First Lady event done every year…OMG. They just want to take credit for it.” After hearing that Ivanka had worn a KaufmanFranco dress for an event, Melania said, “Forget it.” According to Wolkoff, “If Ivanka was dressed by a designer, Melania would cross them off her list.” At one point, Melania apparently warned Wolkoff in a text: “You know how they are snakes.”
This iciness appeared to play out on the national stage on the final night of the Republican National Convention Thursday evening—an unintentional bit of native advertising ahead of the book’s release next week. A video of Ivanka breezing past her stepmother without much acknowledgment and making a beeline for her father went viral. In it, Melania’s face appears to sour almost immediately after Ivanka walks past.
Over the past four years, much has been made of Melania videos like this one: tiny, viral snippets of frowns at her husband’s major appearances and moments in which she appears to swat his hand away, often shared with the hashtag #FreeMelania. The same had, for a time, been true with Ivanka, when many believed that she would be a “moderating influence” on her father in the White House. So many people assumed that no sane woman could see Trump and his administration for what it was and still prop it up, and then projected this belief onto the women closest to him. Wolkoff’s book helps detail that this is not the case. These women were never saviors trying to break free. Melania is not cloistered away, above the muck. She is rolling around in it. As Wolkoff writes at the close of her book, making sense of why she decided to write it, “[Melania] told me in her way that she was not part of the solution, she was part of the problem. Not speaking up, and not fighting, against the problem, is being 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 is gone.”
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