Melania Trump gives a rare interview: 3 takeaways
While promoting a memoir, the former first lady told Fox News that she blamed Democrats and members of the news media for the assassination attempts against her husband.
WASHINGTON — Melania Trump, the former first lady, said that she blamed “leaders from the opposition party and the mainstream media” for creating conditions that led to two assassination attempts against former President Donald Trump.
In an interview with Ainsley Earhardt of Fox News that aired Thursday morning — the first such media appearance the press-averse Melania Trump has made in more than two years — she echoed what her husband has said about the attempts, without the sort of harsh language he has used.
Trump, who is promoting a memoir, is intensely private. Even as first lady, her public appearances were sporadic and she lived a life that kept her largely ensconced from outside scrutiny. Her post-White House life has been similarly isolated, a reality that came through in the interview.
She has been largely absent from the campaign trail and was not near her husband during both recent attempts on his life. After a man with a gun was detained while her husband was playing golf at his Florida club on Sept. 15, Trump, who was in New York City, called to make sure he was safe “as soon as I saw it on television.”
And she said a second presidency for him would not be disruptive beyond his presence on social media. “Maybe some, you know, strong tweets. But everything else great for this country,” she said at one point.
Here are a few takeaways from her interview.
She defended Donald Trump’s record while being both vague and selective about the details.
Melania Trump, asked about her reaction to Vice President Kamala Harris replacing President Joe Biden as the Democratic presidential nominee, said that her husband’s record spoke for itself.
“My husband as commander in chief, he was leading the country through peace, through strength,” Trump said, speaking vaguely and without specifics about what her husband’s administration had accomplished. By contrast, she claimed, “the country is suffering” under Biden. “People are not able to buy usual necessities for the families.”
She argued that under her husband, the United States had prospered and “didn’t have any wars,” echoing several claims he has made, particularly about the relative lack of military conflicts abroad during his presidency.
By the end of Donald Trump’s term, nearly 13,000 U.S. troops were stationed in Afghanistan. Records show that at least 65 active-duty troops died in hostile action during his presidency, partly as a result of the Trump administration’s efforts to combat the Islamic State group in Iraq and Syria.
Melania Trump also made a glaring omission in her recounting of the Trump years: a coronavirus pandemic that devastated the American economy and led to hundreds of thousands of deaths before he lost the 2020 election.
She also made it clear how she feels about his decision to run for another term: “I support him.”
Both Trumps blame others for political strife.
Trump rarely speaks publicly, but when she does, she almost always defends her husband’s incendiary approach to politics, claiming, as she did Thursday, that his behavior represents “strong” leadership.
In the interview, she condemned the attempts on his life, and said that she had not been watching on television when a gunman opened fire at a rally on July 13, but eventually reached her husband by phone and was assured by his Secret Service detail that he would survive. “I think something was watching over him,” Trump said. “It’s almost like country really needs him.”
She said that she had written a “beautiful letter” calling for an end to the violence after that episode: “Let us reunite. Now,” she wrote at the time. She said she had declined to speak at the Republican National Convention because “in one way, the letter was my speech.”
But on Fox, Trump blamed who she thought was the source of the strife.
“Is it really shocking that all this egregious violence goes against my husband, especially that we hear the leaders from the opposition party and mainstream media branding him as a threat to democracy, calling him vile names,” she said. “They only fueling a toxic atmosphere and giving power all of these people that they want to do harm to him. This needs to stop. This needs to stop. The country needs to unite.”
So far, it’s a book tour without many book details.
It is possible that Trump’s memoir, titled “Melania,” will be filled with specifics, including about what she saw after Mar-a-Lago, the Palm Beach, Florida, home she shares with her husband, was searched by FBI agents. The book may reveal her thoughts about the wives of the many world leaders she encountered during her time as first lady. She might tell her readers more about what her husband is like in private.
When Earhardt raised those questions in the interview, though, Trump chose to be circumspect over teasing what might actually be in the book.
Asked to reveal what she saw after the FBI searched her home, the former first lady kept her answer general and called it an invasion of privacy.
“I saw unpleasant stuff that nobody wants to see it,” Trump said. “And you get angry because, you know, nobody should be putting up with that kind of stuff. Some person — I don’t even know who or how many people — they, you know, they went through my stuff.”
And she said that people who do not like her husband do not understand that he is a “family man” who enjoys listening to music — “He likes to be the DJ.”
She was light on other examples.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
To comment, please create a screen name in your profile
To comment, please verify your email address
Conversation
This discussion has ended. Please join elsewhere on Boston.com