This news about the state of Donald and Melania Trump’s marriage probably won’t come as a surprise to many, but one of the president’s biographers proclaimed Tuesday that he and his wife are essentially “separated.”
“They clearly do not in any way inhabit a marriage as we define marriage,“ said author Michael Wolff on the Daily Beast podcast Tuesday. ”And I think maybe we can more specifically say they live separate lives. They are separated. The President of the United States and the First Lady are separated.”
Wolff has written multiple best-selling books on Trump, including 2018’s “Fire & Fury” and February’s “All or Nothing: How Trump Recaptured America.” The Daily Beast reported that the White House doesn’t think much of Wolff’s reporting, labeling him a “a fraud. But his view that Donald and Melania Trump lead separate lives aligns with much other recent reporting about the first couple.
Despite Trump’s post-election promise that his wife would be an “active” first lady, she’s actually being “true to herself,” as her biographers have said. This has come to mean that the former model, who likes to act aloof and cultivate an air of mystery, is not playing the traditional role of first lady — and apparently not spending much time in the White House or with her husband.
Last week, the New York Times reported that Melania Trump “does not really live” in the White House — again, no real surprise. She “vanishes from view for weeks at a time, holing up in Trump Tower in Manhattan or in Florida, where she can lie low at Mar-a-Lago,” Times White House reporter Shawn McCreesh wrote.
Trump administration officials insisted to McCreesh that Melania Trump is at the White House “more often than the pubic knows.” But they would not offer any specifics on when she has stayed in the residence, where she was known in Trump’s first administration to maintain her own bedroom. Two people with knowledge of Melania Trump’s schedule told McCreesh that she had spent fewer than 14 days at the White House since her husband was inaugurated on Jan. 20.
People magazine reported in February that Melania Trump’s recent trips to the White House have focused on filming her upcoming Amazon Prime documentary about her life and her time as first lady. “Melania has been busy shooting her documentary and that has taken place in several locations, including the White House,” a political source based in Florida told People.
McCreesh said that the first lady’s whereabouts is a very “sensitive” topic in the White House. He also noted that the Trump marriage has certainly been tested in the past few years. “In the span of just a few months last year, the couple endured a public trial about his philandering, two assassination attempts and a presidential campaign,” he wrote.
Notably, Melania Trump stayed away from her husband’s trial in Manhattan. He was convicted of 34 counts of altering business records related to hush money he paid to porn star Stormy Daniels, so that she would keep her quiet about their alleged affair before the 2016 presidential election. The alleged affair took place in the summer of July 2006, during a celebrity golf tournament in Lake Tahoe. Melania Trump was back home in Trump Tower, having recently given birth to their son Barron.
During Trump’s first administration, Melania Trump waited for months to move into the White House, saying she she didn’t want their son, Barron, then 10, to relocate from Manhattan to Washington during the middle of the school year.
Now 19, Barron Trump is finishing his freshman year at New York University and is increasingly independent. Still, Melania Trump told Fox News in January that she wanted to stay close to him in New York City.
“You know, I feel that as children, we have them until they are like 18, 19 years old,” Melania Trump told Fox News before the inauguration. When asked where she planned to spend most of her time during her husband’s second administration, she said she would “be in the White House,” but that she would also be in New York “when I need to be in New York” and in Palm Beach “when I need to be in Palm Beach.”
Since Trump’s inauguration, Melania Trump’s few public appearances have fallen in line with functions typically performed by first ladies. For example, she helped her husband preside over the White House Easter Egg Roll last month and she appeared at an event last week to unveil a postage stamp honoring former First Lady Barbara Bush.
Melania Trump was not expected to accompany her husband on his tour through the Middle East, but she did accompany him to Vatican City for Pope Francis’ funeral on May 3. However, when they landed back in Newark the next day, Melania Trump got into one car, Trump climbed into Marine One, and the couple went their separate ways, McCreesh reported.