Melania escapes affair headlines in Florida estate
WEST PALM BEACH, Fla. — Spring break couldn’t have come at a better time for Melania Trump.
With fresh details spilling into the headlines daily about how Donald Trump allegedly cheated on her early in their marriage, the former model escaped the intense glare by spending the past week at the family’s estate in Palm Beach, Fla., with their 12-year-old son, Barron.
But even then, there was no perfect refuge from the attention to recent legal activity related to the president’s past conduct with women.
On Mrs. Trump’s first full day away, when the president also was at their Mar-a-Lago estate, Trump had dinner not with her but with attorney Michael Cohen — who paid porn actress Stormy Daniels $130,000 in 2016 to keep her from going public with her story of a 2006 tryst with Trump. The Trumps did dine together Thursday night after the president returned to Florida, with boxing promoter Don King stopping by to chat.
Some say the first lady should exit her 13-year union with Trump, much like Hillary Clinton was urged to do after President Bill Clinton’s affair with White House intern Monica Lewinsky became public in the late 1990s.
“Melania should do for this generation of girls what Hillary Clinton did not do for mine and leave her jerk of a husband,” conservative commentator S.E. Cupp wrote in an opinion piece that recently was splashed across the front page of the New York Daily News — one of Trump’s hometown newspapers — with the headline “Dump Trump!”
Trump himself recently joked about the possibility of his wife leaving him. She was seated at the head table at a Washington dinner last month where the president, in a speech that traditionally pokes at friends and adversaries, addressed the heavy staff churn at the White House.
“Now the question everyone keeps asking is, ‘Who’s going to be the next to leave? Steve Miller or Melania?’” he said, referring to policy adviser Stephen Miller. “That is terrible, honey, but you love me, right?”
A Marist-McClatchy Poll in February found the public divided on the issue. Forty-three percent said the first lady should stay married to Trump, 34 percent said she should leave her husband and 23 percent weren’t sure what she should do.
Through it all, Mrs. Trump has kept a steely silence on claims by Daniels and former Playboy model Karen McDougal that they had sexual relationships with Trump that began in 2006 just after the future first lady gave birth.