Melania Trump barely campaigned at all for her husband last year. She “wrote” a book (which became a bestseller) and she got spa treatments at Mar-a-Lago, and she only appeared at her husband’s side a handful of times. It worked, I guess. It’s been widely reported that Melania will not move into the White House, or that she will not live in DC full-time in her husband’s second term. I’ve believed those rumors – Melania doesn’t want any part of being First Lady or living in DC. She especially has no interest in being the nation’s hostess or cultural ambassador. But in a new interview, Melania made some noise about how she will move into the White House and she already knows what furniture she’s bringing?
In a Monday interview with Fox News morning chat show Fox & Friends to tee up her return to the White House, the incoming first lady Melania Trump said she felt that “people didn’t accept me” during her first term. “Maybe they didn’t understand me the way maybe they do now, and I didn’t have much support,” she told the show’s co-host Ainsley Earhardt.
“Some people, they see me as just the wife of the president, but I’m standing on my own two feet, independent. I have my own thoughts, I have my own yes and no, I don’t always agree with what my husband is saying or doing, and that’s OK.” Asked if she is able to tell her notoriously combative husband about her political disagreements, she replied: “I give him my advice, and sometimes he listens, sometimes he doesn’t.”
Asked by Earhardt to explain what would exactly be “different” this time in office, Trump didn’t offer any additional policy specifics. Instead, she said—this time—she knows about the home she is moving into. “The difference is I know where I will be going, I know the rooms where we will be living. I know the process, the first time was challenging… But this time I have everything… I already packed, I already selected the the furniture that needs to go in. So it’s, it’s very different.”
She is slated to be the subject of a documentary distributed by Amazon, which she said was an idea that came out of the success of her memoir—the book’s reception, she said, made her realize “my fans and people would love to hear more from me.”
“I told my agent, ‘You know, I have this idea, so please go out and make a deal for me,’” she said of the film project, which is slated to be directed by the disgraced former Hollywood director Brett Ratner. Amazon is set to pay $40 million for the licensing rights to the documentary. Tipping Ratner’s production as MAGA through the prism of Frederick Wiseman, Trump said the documentary—which started shooting in November—will cover the minutiae of her everyday life, from transition team meetings and staff recruitment to packing up and moving to the White House.
The part about the $40 million Amazon documentary is correct and I think the idea is that Melania wanted to show how a transition actually works from the logistics of moving out and moving in, changing furniture, assigning offices, choosing staff, etc. Which, honestly, is not a bad documentary concept in general, if this was some kind of apolitical PBS-style documentary about presidential transitions. That’s not what this documentary will end up being – it will be MAGA propaganda in which Melania will somehow get final cut, I guarantee. Anyway, I’m completely shocked that Melania has agreed to even move back into the White House. I wonder how much she’s getting paid and by whom?
Photos courtesy of Cover Images.
