My friend Melania Trump is finally telling her story. Let's take a moment to hear her out
After two decades of friendship, and as someone who had the honor to serve on Mrs. Trump’s White House team for a time, I am excited that the former first lady is finally telling her story in her forthcoming book, "Melania." For this reason, I can no longer remain silent as many self-proclaimed "experts" continue to opine on her thoughts, her statements and her actions — especially when many of them have obvious malice in their hearts and money on their minds.
The hate-Trump media industrial complex is largely a money-making endeavor attracting many longing to remain relevant, become famous, advance personal agendas, or cash in while they can.
Mrs. Trump’s response to all of this — she ignores all but the most egregious attacks — is not surprising to those who truly know her as a woman of tremendous strength, grace and resilience, a loving and devoted mother, wife, daughter and friend.
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Their vitriol is only likely to reach a more fevered pitch in coming days, ahead of the Oct. 8 release of Mrs. Trump’s memoir, "Melania." Yet I remain hopeful that, with the book’s publication, the public will finally have a chance to learn her story, firsthand, and come to understand the remarkable woman I am so fortunate to call my friend.
In my role as one of Mrs. Trump’s advisers in the White House, I was in many of the rooms and witnessed many of the moments that have since been drastically recast in books, tweets and interviews by former staffers— and I am aghast at the disparity between the truth I witnessed and the skewed narrative that is widely promoted.
Consider the ongoing rants of one of her former staffers, and self-proclaimed close friend, who has since worked indefatigably to promote herself while bashing Melania. After her contract with the White House was terminated, (full disclosure: my contract with the White House was also terminated at the same time) she wrote a one-sided book about her former boss. She admitted to secretly taping personal phone calls with Mrs. Trump, who was first lady at the time. An unprecedented breach of trust and civility if not ethics.
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Further, after leaving the White House, she began her campaign to criticize Mrs. Trump at every turn, apparently not only to sell her book but also to settle imagined personal scores. Like other former Trumpians, she apparently was positioning herself to be the go-to expert about a woman to whom she has not spoken now in more than seven years.
Examine her ongoing hateful tweets, such as opining about why Melania was not on the campaign trail with her husband last fall. When Mrs. Trump told reporters to "Stay tuned" about her plans to campaign, this former staffer predictably chimed in with a supposedly all-knowing tweet: "Let me interpret this for you: DON'T HOLD YOUR BREATHE! [sic]"
How, exactly, would she know that — or anything else about the former first lady? She was clearly so far out of the loop that she was unaware that Mrs. Trump was caring for her dying mother at the time. So much for expertise.
Then there is Mrs. Trump’s onetime White House press secretary, who also appears to be competing to become the Left’s Melania expert. This, after writing a self-aggrandizing book that attacked her former boss while auditioning for the never-Trump "conservative" seat on ABC’s "The View."
This former "insider" is the same person who, embarrassingly, could not correctly explain to reporters in 2018 why the first lady wore a now-famous Zara designer jacket with its bold logo — "I Really Don’t Care, Do U?" — on a flight to visit migrant children detained at the Texas border. This press secretary told reporters: "It’s just a jacket. There was no hidden message."
How did she not know that the first lady was intentionally signaling to her critics with that jacket and not referring to the children? And if she had no understanding of Mrs. Trump then, while working for her, how can she possibly be considered an expert on her now when she has had no access to Mrs. Trump in years?
It took the former first lady herself to clear up the confusion and repair the damage. Melania told an ABC News interviewer that the jacket was "kind of a message, yes," but one directed at her critics: "I want to show them that I don’t care. You could criticize whatever you want to say, but it will not stop me to do what I feel is right."
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Sadly, we have rarely seen any positive reporting on Melania’s achievements because Mrs. Trump has seldom been recognized or credited for the important initiatives she undertook and supported during her four years as First Lady and in the years since.
As first lady, she worked to focus attention on the opioid crisis and its toll on families when visiting Lily’s Place, a treatment center in Huntington, W.Va. She championed "Be Best," her campaign which aimed at building children’s wellness and emotional intelligence in education which included her work against cyber-bullying in schools.
Since leaving the White House, she has created "Fostering the Future," to raise college scholarship funding for former foster children. Since its inception, "Fostering the Future" has given out scholarships to many students. You have probably heard little about it.
When consuming news, as with any other commodity, the old adage of "let the buyer beware" has perhaps never been more relevant. It is essential for media consumers to approach information about politics with a critical eye, to seek out reliable sources, and to question the credibility of self-proclaimed experts. Otherwise, we may learn that it was our freedoms and our very way of life that were actually for sale all along.
As a wise man once said, "Consider the source."