“Melania was not thrilled about Ivanka steering the schedule and would not allow it,” Wolkoff writes. “Where will it be?” “Princess,” as Ivanka’s stepmother calls her, was eager to be included in a portrait of the new first family, usually shot in the Blue Room of the White House Mrs. “Will there be a step and repeat?” Ivanka emailed. Wolkoff goes into great detail about Ivanka Trump’s intense focus on guest lists, seating charts, messaging and motorcades. Trump launched Operation Block Ivanka to make sure the president’s older daughter didn’t steal the spotlight at the inauguration. Wolkoff doesn’t address the question of whether she took notes, recorded the calls or pieced them together from memory.) Mrs. But the patrols told me the kids say, ‘Wow, I get a bed? I will have a cabinet for my clothes?’ It’s more than they have in their own country, where they sleep on the floor.” (“Melania and Me” contains lengthy quotes from phone conversations. In a phone call with Wolkoff, she allegedly said: “They’re not with their parents, and it’s sad. Trump’s oft-repeated lines: “Pleasing anyone else is not my priority.” And later, Wolkoff writes: “Ever the pragmatist, she reasoned that since she had no control over people’s thoughts, why should she care what they believed.”Īt the height of the family separation crisis in 2018, Melania bemoaned the media’s coverage of children being taken from their parents. Here’s a look at what readers will learn on Wolkoff’s tour of what she calls “Mel-La-Lania Land.” The first lady really doesn’t care. Watching her now, and seeing that only the gold shell remains, I have to wonder if that’s all she ever was, and I was the sucker who bought the fake watch on the street corner.” Throughout our early friendship, she lived up to what I saw in her. I believed she had the heart to match, that she was genuinely caring and loving and worth all of our attention. “I witnessed the transformation of Melania from gold plate to 24-karat gold. “I was there at the beginning,” Wolkoff writes. In the aftermath of her dismissal - handled by email, in a message addressed jointly to Wolkoff and a similarly fated colleague - she was, by her own admission, “a freaking basket case.” She was protective of the first lady, believed in the potential of the Be Best initiative (if not its name) and worked to the point where her body buckled under the stress of office politics. ![]() Regardless, from the early 2000s to February 2018, when Wolkoff was abruptly dismissed from her role in the East Wing, the former Vogue staffer remained loyal to Mrs. Trump rarely appeared at Wolkoff’s charity events, and persistently called the author’s son by the wrong name (“Taylor” instead of “Tyler”). With strings of happy and sad faces and hearts galore, she telegraphs a remarkable range of triumphs and disappointments - and now readers will see how correspondence from first ladies has evolved since the days when Abigail Adams implored her husband to “remember the ladies.”Įven in its heyday, the Wolkoff-Trump merger was rife with red flags: Mrs. Trump’s enthusiasm for emojis appears to rival her husband’s for Twitter. In fact, the greatest reveal in “Melania and Me” may be the fact that Mrs. Melania Trump was the sister Stephanie Winston Wolkoff never had - “a really confident, perfectly coiffed, ultimate older sister,” the former senior adviser to the first lady writes in “Melania and Me,” her epic scream of a tell-all, which comes out Tuesday.įor 15 years, the women were “like Lucy and Ethel, or Snooki and JWoww,” lingering over lunch in chic restaurants, attending each other’s baby showers and surprise parties, and trading adoring emoji-laden texts.
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