After Melania Trump’s husband lost the 2020 election, people close to her said she would tell her story in a post-White House memoir but that it wouldn’t be the usual book that former first ladies write.
Instead, Donald Trump’s famously elusive wife would produce a “photo-centric coffee table book about White House hospitality history, or one perhaps centered on the design projects she has completed while first lady,” CNN reported at the time.
Could a version of that coffee table book finally be coming in 2024? And will it share photos taken of White House interiors that were famously shot, with Melania Trump’s supervision, on Jan. 6, 2021, one of the darkest days in the history of American democracy?
On Thursday, Trump’s third wife announced that she was penning a memoir called “Melania,” and it would be released sometime in the fall, the Associated Press reported. Her office said the book promises to share “a powerful and inspiring story of a woman who has carved her own path, overcome adversity and defined personal excellence.”
Former US President Donald Trump (R), with former First Lady Melania Trump (C) and her father Viktor Knavs (L), attends the graduation ceremony of his son, Barron Trump, at Oxbridge Academy in Palm Beach, Florida, May 17, 2024. (Photo by Giorgio VIERA / AFP) (Photo by GIORGIO VIERA/AFP via Getty Images)
According to her office, the former model is offering her memoir in three editions, all of which sound like they could be versions of that long-promised coffee-table book. There’s the $150 “Collectors Edition,” which is “in full color throughout” and signed by the author, and the signed and unsigned “Memoir Editions,” ($75 and $40), which include 48 pages of “never-before-seen photographs.”
Actually, Melania Trump’s office didn’t say much else about her book, including whether it will be available to fans before the Nov. 5 election, when her 78-year-old husband hopes to win the presidency for the second time. AP also said her spokesperson wouldn’t say whether she worked with a co-author, what she plans to do to promote it and what the financial terms were.
Given the lack of details, people are left with many questions about if or how the former first lady will address some of the most scandalous aspects of her life with Trump and of his presidency. For example, does she address her husband’s criminal conviction in May on 34 counts of falsifying business records, stemming a hush money payment to porn star Stormy Daniels.
Speaking of Daniels, does Melania share how she felt when learning that her former reality TV star husband allegedly had sex with the porn star a few months after she gave birth to their son Barron? And what might Melania say about her decision to wear that Zara jacket, emblazoned with the words “I Really Don’t Care, Do U?” when she traveled to Texas in 2018 to visit immigrant children separated from their parents under her husband’s family separation policy?
US President Donald Trump speaks after pardoning Thanksgiving turkey “Corn” as First Lady Melania Trump watches in the Rose Garden of the White House in Washington, DC on November 24, 2020. (Photo by MANDEL NGAN / AFP) (Photo by MANDEL NGAN/AFP via Getty Images)
Other questions circle back to Melania Trump’s reported coffee-table book. On Jan. 6, 2021, she was overseeing a photo shoot of historic rooms of the White House, as she herself revealed to Fox News in 2022. She said she was doing so to archive the contents and renovations that she supervised, a job undertaken “on behalf of the nation.”
But former CNN White House correspondent Kate Bennett, who also wrote a 2019 biography of Melania, reported in January 2021 that the former first lady also may have wanted the photos for her coffee-table memoir. In her remaining time in the White House, Melania was overseeing photo shoots “of rugs and other items in the Executive Residence and the East Wing,” a person familiar with the day’s activities with the first lady told Bennett.
Whatever Melania Trump’s purpose, she told Fox News that she was so pre-occupied with the photo shoot that she wasn’t “aware” that thousands of pro-Donald Trump supporters had stormed the U.S. Capitol, two miles away, in an attempt to overthrow the results of the 2020 election.
“On January 6, 2021, I was fulfilling one of my duties as first lady of the United States of America, and accordingly, I was unaware of what was simultaneously transpiring at the U.S. Capitol building,” she said on Fox News.
In her 2021 memoir, “I’ll Take Your Questions Now,” Stephanie Grisham, Melania Trump’s former White House aide and spokesperson, said the former first lady knew what was going on at the Capitol, the New York Times reported.
Grisham said she informed Melania herself in an effort to get her to speak out on the violence and to urge the rioters to stand down. Grisham has shared screenshots of a statement she drafted and sent to the former president’s wife, but the then-first lady responded with the word, “no,” declining to send a statement condemning the insurrection.
Both Bennett and Grisham reported that Melania was pretty “checked out” by the time of the insurrection and focused on getting her family ready to move to her husband’s Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida.
Since then, Melania has mostly stayed out of the public eye, seeking to maintain her privacy as she continued to raise their son, Barron, who graduated from high school in May. While she appeared at her husband’s campaign launch event for 2024 and attended the closing night of the Republican National Convention, she has otherwise stayed off the campaign trail.
But now comes her book, which isn’t being released by a mainstream New York publisher, such as Penguin Random House or Simon & Schuster. Those houses released Michelle Obama’s memoir, “Becoming,” and Laura Bush’s memoir, “Spoken from the Heart,” both of which were massive bestsellers. Large, established publishers have have largely shunned Donald Trump and others in his MAGA circle since the insurrection, the Associated Press said.
Instead, Melania Trump’s book has found a home at Skyhorse Publishing, an upstart conservative press that has built a reputation for taking on books that other houses consider too controversial to publish, the New York Times reported in December. Some of its titles include works by personalities, such as Alex Jones and presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who are known for trafficking in conspiracy theories.
Skyhorse also has garnered attention for taking on books that have been dropped by other companies because of scandal or public backlash, the New York Times reported. That includes Woody Allen’s memoir, “Apropos of Nothing,” whose publication was canceled by Hachette. Skyhorse scored a hit with Allen’s book, which went on to become a New York Times best seller.