Disclaimer: at the time of writing, the results of the 2020 Presidential Election are unknown.
Throughout Donald J. Trump’s presidential campaign and his near four-year term as POTUS, Melania Trump has lacked any significant, consistent presence in government and the media.
In 2016, she was the center of a fair amount of controversy surrounding her Republican National Convention speech, which was partially plagiarized from a speech delivered by Michelle Obama. Then, in 2018, the media latched on to her decision to wear a jacket with the words, “I really don’t care. Do u?” on a trip to McAllen, Texas, where she went to visit the immigrant children who had been forcefully separated from their families as a result of a Trump administration policy.
However, information regarding Melania’s political views had been minimal until September 2020, when Stephanie Wolkoff, Melania’s former senior adviser, published Melania and Me. In her book, Wolkoff discussed her close relationship with Melania in detail, later releasing the audio recordings now known as the Melania Tapes in October, consisting of July 2018 phone calls.
The tapes exhibit Melania complaining, for the most part, about having to plan for Christmas, the criticism of Trump’s border separation policy, and about those who questioned the jacket she wore on her trip to Texas. Melania’s statements are littered with profanities. According to CNN, concerning Christmas, the preparation for which is a traditional duty of the First Lady, she complained, “They say I’m complicit. I’m the same like him, I support him. I don’t say enough, I don’t do enough. Where I am. I put—I’m working like a—I’m working my a** off with Christmas stuff that, you know, who gives a f*** about Christmas stuff and decorations, but I need to do it, right?”
As described by CNN, she went on to express her annoyance concerning the critics of Trump’s border separation policy, stating, “…they said, ‘Oh, what about the children that were separated?’ Give me a f****** break. Were they saying anything when Obama did that? I cannot go, I was trying to get the kid reunited with the mom. I didn’t have a chance—needs to go through the process and through the law.” Former POTUS Barack Obama and his administration never had a family separation policy, despite Melania’s comments claiming otherwise.
Perhaps the most troublesome part of these leaked recordings is her defense of the conditions in which separated children are being kept. As reported by CNN, Melania noted, “All these kids that I met, they were, they’re here in the shelters because they were brought by it through coyotes [a common term for those who help immigrants cross the border illegally]… the kids, they go in shelters. And the way they take care of them, it’s—you know, they even said, the kids, they said, ‘Wow, I will have my own bed. I will sleep on the bed. I will have a cabinet for my clothes.’”
She continued on, claiming, “It’s so sad to hear it, but they didn’t have that in their own countries. They sleep on the floor. They are taking care nicely there. But, you know, yeah, they’re not with parents. It’s sad. But when they come here alone or with coyotes or illegally, you know, you need to do something. And a lot of, you know, a lot of, like, moms and kids—they, they are teached how to do it. They go over and say, ‘Oh, we will be killed by gang members. We will be—they—will be, you know, we will be. Ahh, it’s so dangerous.’ So they’re allowed to stay here.”
Immediately after the tapes’ release, Melania’s chief of staff Stephanie Grisham released a statement to CNN: “Secretly taping the First Lady and willfully breaking an NDA to publish a salacious book is a clear attempt at relevance. The timing of this continues to be suspect—as does this never-ending exercise in self-pity and narcissism.” As reported by the New York Times, Grisham accused Wolkoff of using the tapes as a selling point for Melania and Me, stating, “Her only intent was to secretly tape the First Lady in order to peddle herself and her book.” On October 16, Melania herself released a statement on the official White House website, which read, “We all know that more often than not, information that could be helpful to children is lost in the noise made by self-serving adults… A person who said she ‘made me’ even though she hardly knew me, and someone who clung to me after my husband won the Presidency. This is a woman who secretly recorded our phone calls, releasing portions from me that were out of context, then wrote a book of idle gossip.”
Regardless of the context or conditions under which the tapes were created, what they demonstrate is startling. It’s rare to see such a prominent political figure speaking so trivially about a widespread and damaging issue like the separated families. The way in which she defends what is essentially innocent children in cages as an acceptable situation is shocking. She echoed the perceived message of her infamous green jacket by mocking the mothers of children who feared that gang violence would endanger their lives, and the stream of profanities is something that Americans haven’t seen in the White House until the Trump administration. The recordings of phone calls between Wolkoff and Melania revealed to many that Melania just doesn’t seem to care.
Do u?