Melania Trump discusses #MeToo and her marriage
First lady sits down for first interview since 2016 election.
Melania Trump, in an interview that aired Friday, offered an assessment of being first lady: “This won’t last forever.”
Trump gave a rare insight into her White House life during an interview on ABC’s “20/20,” taped during her visit last week to Africa, in which she addressed an array of topics, including the #MeToo movement, her husband’s alleged infidelities, and her efforts to rein in her husband’s notorious Twitter habits.
“I don’t agree always with what he posts,” she said of President Donald Trump’s use of the social media platform.
In the interview, Melania Trump also took on one of her own biggest controversies — the jacket she wore to visit the U.S.-Mexico border, where migrant children were being separated from families under the Trump administration’s policies, that read “I really don’t care, do u?” That message was “for the left-wing media” and other critics, she said, echoing her husband’s explanation of the jarring sartorial choice.
The network had been teasing the Friday night interview, the only one that the first lady has sat for since her husband was elected, by releasing snippets throughout the week.
Melania Trump considers herself “one of the most bullied people in the world.” She revealed that there were people working in the White House that she doesn’t trust. She said women accusing men of sexual assault needed to show “really hard evidence.”
And she said she said allegations of her husband’s infidelity were “not a concern and focus of mine.” On the state of her marriage? “Yes, we are fine.”
Which might not sound like a woman baring her soul — but for the normally tight-lipped first lady, who publicly sticks to short, teleprompted remarks, such statements were something close to revealing.
In the 20 months of her husband’s presidency, Melania Trump has said little publicly about the news of the day, of the scandals swirling around her husband’s administration, or about policy issues. When she has spoken in front of cameras, it has almost always been scripted, invariably brief, and carefully crafted to avoid controversy.
Her silence had led some of her husband’s critics to project their own ideas on her or to imagine that she might not be fully on board with President Trump’s divisive administration. People read volumes into the smallest gestures: her swatting the president’s hand away was seen as a rejection of him (“Melania Trump Hates Her Husband and She’s Becoming Our Spirit Animal,” read a headline on The Root. And whenever cameras capture an unhappy expression, it’s immediately tagged with a #FreeMelania hashtag.
“Democrats want to imagine that she’s the resistance inside the White House, and that’s just not the case,” said Kate Andersen Brower, the author of “First Women: The Grace & Power of America’s Modern First Ladies.” “She’s showing that there’s much less daylight between her and President Trump on issues than people might think.”
Although Melania Trump has shown flashes of independence from her husband — for example, by taking up cyberbullying as a plank of her platform, despite the fact that President Trump is known for making belittling comments on Twitter, or her visit to the border to witness people impacted by her husband’s policies — her answers to questions from ABC’s Tom Llamas indicate that behind her reticence to engage in public life is a resolute embrace of Donald Trump’s worldview.
“I believe in the policies that my husband put together,” she said when asked about his immigration policies. “Because I believe we need to be very vigilant who is coming to the country.”