Recordings of First Lady Melania Trump ranting about her duties back in September 2018 were released and played on CNN.
What We Know:
- Audio recordings of First Lady Melania Trump were played during a segment of CNN’s “Anderson Cooper 360” on Thursday. It was a conversation between the first lady and her former friend and senior advisor Stephanie Winston Wolkoff, who not only recorded the secret conversation but wrote a book about their relationship called Melania and Me. The book also touches on juicy details about Melania’s life like the bad relationship she has with her stepdaughter Ivanka Trump and her marriage.
- The recordings are Melania going on an angry rant about how she never gets good publicity, from her being criticized for her “Be Best” program that encourages children to be good role models to her speech that was identical to former first lady Michelle Obama. At the beginning of the audio, she is heard talking about her role as the first lady, specifically about when she works on Christmas decorations for the White House around Christmas time but is ridiculed for focusing on Christmas and not the children of immigrants who are being separated from their families.
- “OK, and then I do it and I say that I’m working on Christmas and planning for the Christmas and they said, ‘Oh, what about the children that they were separated?’ Give me a f****** break,” she continued. “Where they were saying anything when Obama did that? I can not go, I was trying get the kid reunited with the mom. I didn’t have a chance — needs to go through the process and through the law.”
- Under the presidency of Barak Obama, authorities would separate children from their parents when there were suspicions of the child not being taken care of or there were questions regarding the parents being legal guardians of the children. Under President Donald Trump, it was an entirely different thing.
- In another tape, Melania stated how heartbroken she was about the children who were separated and taken to detention centers that weren’t familiar with things a lot of children do have like beds and closets. Melania mentioned how these are the same children whose parents teach them the things to say and do to stay in America if anything were to happen to the parents.
“Because they could easily stay in Mexico but they don’t want to stay in Mexico because Mexico doesn’t take care of them the same as America does.”
- The conversation happened after Melania was seen visiting a children’s immigrant shelter in Texas near the Mexican border while wearing a jacket with white letters saying, “I really don’t care. Do U?” She told Wolkoff that she only wore the jacket to annoy Donald Trump’s critics. “I’m driving liberals crazy, that’s for sure,” she said. “And that, you know, that’s — and they deserve it, you understand. And everybody’s like, ‘Oh, my God. This is the worst. This is the worst.’ After, I mean, come on. They are crazy, OK?”
- Melania’s chief of staff and close friend Stephanie Grisham described Wolkoff’s actions to break the NDA by publishing the book and releasing the tapes as a “clear attempt at relevance,” saying that although it’s unclear whether the tapes were edited or not, she believes Wolkoff handpicked clips and presented them “with no context”. According to Grisham, despite the negative attention, Melania is continuing to focus on her family.
Early 2018, Wolkoff left the White House after it was discovered that her firm gained $26 million to help with the presidential inauguration.
