Daniels, a star of Sexbots: Programmed for Pleasure and the director of Lust on the Prairie, told Anderson Cooper that she had asked about Melania during her condom-free liaison at a celebrity golf tournament at Lake Tahoe in 2006: “And he brushed it aside, said: ‘Oh, yeah, yeah, you know, don’t worry about that. We don’t even —. We have separate rooms and stuff.’”
Lovely.
Donald Trump and Stormy Daniels in 2006. He was 60, she was 27. He is accused of falsifying business records to hide a hush-money payment to her.Credit: MySpace.com/StormyDaniels
So far, Melania has not deigned to play Maureen Dean, sitting behind her man in court every day for support. (Ivanka Trump has shunned the courtroom, too.) Melania has long called Stormy “Donald’s problem”, noting to Grisham: “He got himself into this mess. He can fix it by himself.”
She is, by all accounts, angry that she has to be dragged through this X-rated circus again, especially while she is still mourning the death of her mother.
What could be more absurd and hypocritical than the putative Republican nominee selling Bibles and promoting an America with Draconian abortion laws during his trial over a $130,000 payment to keep a porn star from telling voters about their dalliance?
Melania surely recoils from the prospect of testifying, which Justice Juan Merchan suggested may happen. He has also ruled that jurors may hear about Trump’s affair with Karen McDougal, but not about how it continued while Melania was pregnant.
The former first lady, who is helping her son prepare for college, perhaps at New York University, does not want Barron’s name thrown around in a New York court. Trump made Barron an issue, asking for a day off for his son’s high school graduation.
Signalling that she will be part of the campaign, Melania will headline a “log cabin” Republican event at Mar-a-Lago. In an interview with Fox News Digital previewing her remarks before that LGBTQ group, Melania said America “must unite”. It’s not the first time her message has been at odds with her husband’s behaviour.
As first lady, Melania clearly styled herself after Jackie Kennedy, wearing high-fashion clothes that seemed to be not only art but also armour and maintaining poise through a parade of indignities.
“Like Jackie, Melania foregrounded her role as mother, and that enabled her to keep a degree of distance,” Dawn Tripp, the author of the upcoming novel Jackie, told me. “Both had that guarded, sphinx-like quality. But Jackie used that quality to maintain her independence from her husband’s administration and used her power in public and private ways. Melania often simply seems complicit in Trump’s irresponsibility.”
Complicit, to borrow from the SNL skit about Ivanka, the perfume of Trump women.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.