Melania Trump’s eponymously titled memoir is a 180-page exercise in buck-passing and blame-dodging. The former US first lady blames staffers for plagiarizing Michelle Obama; repeatedly stresses her love for her husband despite professing to abhor lying liars who lie; and declares abortion a fundamental right, without pausing to consider Donald Trump’s role in attacking it via the US supreme court.
Melania is by no means an exhaustive read, but it does leave the reader asking why she has chosen to bare her soul just weeks before the election. Or whether Kamala Harris might more accurately channel her policy preferences than her husband, the Republican nominee yet again.
Many subjects are missing. Not surprisingly, Melania has nothing to say about other women in her husband’s life: E Jean Carroll (the woman Donald defamed and sexually assaulted); Stormy Daniels (the adult film star whose hush-money payments led to Donald’s criminal conviction); Karen McDougal (the former Playboy Playmate who also had an affair with Donald). There are less than a handful of passing references to Ivanka, Donald’s oldest daughter who he said he would have dated if she weren’t flesh and blood and who Melania is widely reported to loathe. Trump’s children by other women barely get a look-in. Melania does repeatedly say she loves her own son, Barron, and her parents too.
True to form, no clue is offered as to who assisted in writing Melania. In contrast to Breaking History, the White House memoir by Jared Kushner, Ivanka’s husband, Melania does not offer acknowledgments. It’s a decent bet someone lent her a hand.
Her book does contain 64 pages of photographs. The lead-off is a passport page, stamped on 27 August 1996 at JFK in New York, the day Melania arrived in the US. The final page includes a “digital collectible”, available from melaniatrump.com. Like her husband, the brand is all. “Financial independence is a core value of mine,” Melania writes. “Melania Timepieces and Jewelry represented my passion, my project and my business – a symbol of independence, self-respect and empowerment for all women.”
Understandably, Melania’s takes on policy have received more attention. Without mention of Dobbs v Jackson, the ruling by which a supreme court including three hardliners installed by Donald Trump gutted the constitutional right to abortion and privacy, her stand for personal freedom is full-throated.
“It is imperative to guarantee that women have autonomy in deciding their preference of having children, based on their own convictions, free from any intervention or pressure from the government,” she thunders. “Restricting a woman’s right to choose whether to terminate an unwanted pregnancy is the same as denying her control over her own body. I have carried this belief with me throughout my entire adult life.”
Simply put, such words jar with her party’s record. And yet, another chapter is more telling still.
Melania dumps on staffers for drafting the speech to the 2016 Republican convention in which she plagiarized Michelle Obama. Except Melania manages also to point the finger at herself.
“During my review of many speeches of previous first ladies, Michelle’s emphasis on the fundamental values of hard work, integrity, and kindness resonated deeply,” she writes, of a conversation with the aide who wrote the speech.
In other words, Melania shows she was familiar with Michelle Obama’s 2008 speech to the Democratic convention, portions of which she would repeat to Republicans in Cleveland in 2016.
There’s more. Before speaking at the RNC, Melania “rehearsed multiple times with the teleprompter, feeling confident in my delivery”. And yet, she claims, when the plagiarism was noticed and a media firestorm blew up, she was shocked.
“Upon closer examination, the undeniable similarities between the two speeches left me reeling.”
Really?
“I trusted that any and all political and legal vetting had been taken care of, but now I realized that the campaign and RNC had left me on my own.”
Talk about throwing the staff under any passing bus. And yet, to quote the deathless words of Kimberly Guilfoyle, Don Jr’s fiancée: “The best is yet to come.”
“‘Why was the speech not vetted?’, I asked Donald in frustration … From then on, I realized the importance of being intimately involved with every detail of my public life. No longer would I delegate specific tasks or trust others to ensure my reputation was protected.”
Specifically, Melania blames Meredith McIver of the Trump Organization – to whom she says she herself read Michelle Obama’s words, words Melania then repeatedly practiced. As the saying goes, shit rolls downhill.
When it comes to her husband, too, Melania is not in the blame game. The chaos of January 6 is dealt with as swiftly as anything inconvenient that actually makes it to her pages. She wags her finger at those who assaulted the Capitol in an attempt to overturn Donald’s 2020 defeat but also claims to have been unaware of events for most of that terrible day.
“The violence we witnessed was unequivocally unacceptable,” she writes. But in her next breath, she adds that she “recognized that many individuals felt the election was mishandled and that the vice president should halt the confirmation process”.
Naturally, Melania’s take on protests following the murder of George Floyd is far more strident, complete with a condemnation of “the inflammatory rhetoric of Black Lives Matter leaders”. Indeed, she does not expressly name Floyd, the Minneapolis man whose murder by police triggered the long hot protest summer of 2020.
As for her husband’s exhortation to the far-right Proud Boys to “stand back and stand by” around the election, or his forecast of a “Big protest in DC on January 6th[,] Be there, will be wild!”, or his exhortation to followers to “fight like hell”?
Crickets.
Almost eight years have passed since Melania reportedly cried in sorrow on election night 2016, when her husband won the White House. She could yet return. Maybe that will provide enough material for another 180 pages.
Melania is published in the US by Skyhorse
