On May 7, the president came lumbering out into the Rose Garden. After greeting the vice president, already sitting in the front row of a gathering on the lawn, Trump took his seat on a folding chair.
A big outdoor television monitor began showing a video. The president’s wife, in a voice-over, speaking in her carefully enunciated, accented English, introduced the themes she would focus on as First Lady. For seventeen months the White House had been uncertain about what Melania Trump’s message or purpose should be. So here it was: she would advance the interests of children, alert people to the dangers of social media, and help bring attention to the opioid epidemic. The First Lady’s initiative was called, oddly emphasizing her constricted English, “Be Best.”
A week later, Melania entered Walter Reed National Military Medical Center. The White House was almost wholly unprepared for this event. No one seemed to have a plan for how to announce or characterize her hospitalization; no one appeared to know how to deal with the natural questions that might arise for what was described as a “benign kidney condition,” a designation that satisfied no one.
First Ladies are good copy. A hospital stay for a First Lady is flood-the-zone media stuff. The standard White House playbook is straightforward: have answers for all inquiries. Mystery or secrecy opens the door to speculation, which is, inevitably, the White House’s enemy. But with few credible answers forthcoming, speculation about Melania’s health quickly became breathless. Why was the First Lady in the hospital for the better part of a week—and at Walter Reed, where no one chose to linger—for a condition that, as described, should have required no more than a single night’s stay, or even should have been an outpatient procedure? Soon a hundred theories blossomed, from the conspiratorial to the macabre.
In the end, blame for the communications failure seemed to logically fall on one of two targets: the hopeless dysfunction of the White House comms team or the hopeless dysfunction of the president’s marriage. The president chose the former. It was a frequent rant: the idiots on his comms staff. But almost everyone else in the White House chose to blame his marriage.
All presidential marriages are a mystery. How do you justify, and compensate for, the loss of the very point of marriage, a private life? In this case, however—at least in the opinion of nearly all those who had an up-close view of their relationship—the situation was more clear-cut. A deal had been struck. “It’s a Katie Holmes–Tom Cruise deal” was the general understanding. The mystery here was about whether the deal would hold.
As the Trump campaign gained altitude in 2016, the questions surrounding the marriage became more serious. Ivanka, hardly a fan of her stepmother, kept posting red flags. Of much concern were the issues related to Melania’s background as an eastern European model, as well as questions about how the couple had met. Who was Melania Knavs (or, as the president preferred, in its German variation, Knauss)? More problematic, at least in traditional political terms, was the fact that for quite some time the Trumps had seemed to live openly parallel lives.
Other intimates, worried about the questions that would invariably be asked and the lack of ready answers, tried to raise the subject with Trump. Among them were Keith Schiller, Trump’s security man, and Tom Barrack, Trump’s closest businessman friend. Trump’s response was dismissive: he wasn’t any different from Kennedy. The counsel that at this point in time JFK would hardly offer cover for a disorderly personal life was met by a particularly sour Trump face: Don’t be a pussy.
After the Daily Mail implied in August 2016 that Melania’s career as a model had at times crossed the line to being an escort, Trump’s solution was to hire a lawyer. Charles Harder, who had won Hulk Hogan’s suit against the gossip site Gawker for posting a privately made Hogan sex tape and thereafter become the go-to lawyer for celebrity libel complaints, sued the Mail on Melania’s behalf. The suit was filed in the UK. Harder was suing under the more favorable libel laws in Britain, hoping for a result they almost certainly could not have gotten in the United States, where a president and his family, as public figures, face insuperable hurdles to a defamation or invasion of privacy claim. Eventually, the suit was settled for a retraction, an apology, and an unspecified amount in damages. Trump’s willingness to sue, and to shop for venues outside the United States with libel laws that would favor him, together with Harder’s post-Gawker reputation, helped limit campaign coverage of Melania’s past and the Trump marriage.
Melania did not really become a political wife until the moment, on November 8, 2016, at approximately 8:45 p.m. EST, when it became clear that, almost miraculously, her husband—or, in the interpretation of some, her estranged husband—would become president of the United States. Over time, a political wife develops habits and rationalizations and personal armor to deal with the loss of privacy and self, as well as the sometimes alarming public face of the man she has married; Melania had none of these defenses.
To the extent that the Trumps had lived a don’t-ask-don’t-tell life—helped by the considerable distance between them allowed by their ample real estate, including at least one house near his golf club in the New York suburbs that Trump kept carefully hidden from his wife—this now became impossible. Whatever polite arrangement they had had prior to the campaign had certainly come crashing down in October with the grab-them-by-the-pussy tape. There was not only this terrible public coarseness, but the ensuing public testimony of multiple women claiming abuse at Trump’s hands. But now, with her husband’s election, Melania was exposed beyond anything she could have possibly imagined.
“Exogenous events” was the term Steve Bannon used for the unexpected disruptions that seemed to constantly accompany Trump. High on quite a long list of exogenous events that Bannon believed could end the Trump presidency were these two: if someone came forward with proof that Trump had ever paid for an abortion or if his wife publicly left him.
Perhaps a Trump-style denial could deal with even an abortion. But however much Trump could flat-out lie, he could hardly deny a public meltdown with an unforgiving and pitiless wife. And Bannon believed that it was not so much the scandal of a public breakup that would bring him down, but the pain of his own public embarrassment.
In 1996, his second wife, Marla Maples, was caught one night with a Trump bodyguard on the beach near Mar-a-Lago under the lifeguard stand. This, Bannon was aware, had been a primal blow for Trump.
“Almost everything he does is about trying to avoid humiliation,” said Bannon. “And he’s close to it all of the time. He’s drawn to it. Caught red-handed, he’ll stare you down. He’s psychologically gifted. His father humiliated him. That humiliation broke Trump’s brother. But he learned to withstand it. But that’s the Russian roulette he’s playing, waiting for the humiliation that will break him.”
Trump seemed entirely incapable of acknowledging that he even had a personal life, much less that it necessitated any kind of emotional allowance or understanding. Indeed, his personal life merely demanded the same kind of “fixing” as his business life. When Marla Maples became pregnant in the early 1990s, before their marriage, he debated with one friend how he could avoid both the marriage and the baby. The scenarios included pushing Maples down the stairs to cause a miscarriage.
Marriage, for Trump, was at best a fitful complication. For his advisers, this became a serious political challenge, because Trump, in one more instance of being unprepared for the presidency, would not—or could not—allow for a discussion of how his personal life should be figured into the administration’s basic messaging or the look and feel of the White House. “I never saw any evidence of a marriage,” said Bannon of his time in the White House. Most mentions of Melania drew a puzzled look from Trump, as if to say, “How is she relevant?”
Trump came into the White House with a ten-year-old son. Having young children is usually a humanizing and uplifting part of a presidential biography, but Trump had scant relationship with Barron.
Early in the administration, one aide, new to the Trump circle, suggested to Trump that he be photographed playing golf with his son. The aide went on giddily talking about the special bond golfing dads have with their sons until it was clear that he was getting the Trump freeze—an ability to pretend you didn’t exist while at the same time intimating that he might kill you if you did.
By contrast, Melania’s singular focus was her son. Together, mother and son occupied a bubble inside the Trump bubble. She assiduously protected Barron from his father’s remoteness. Ever cold-shouldered by Trump’s adult children, Melania and Barron were the non-Trump family inside the Trump family.
Melania sometimes spoke Slovenian with Barron, particularly when her parents were around—and they were frequently around—infuriating Trump and causing him to bolt from any room they were in. But the private living quarters in the White House were much smaller than their home in Trump Tower, making it more difficult for Trump and his wife to escape each other.
“We don’t belong here,” she widely repeated to friends.
Indeed, a distraught Melania, repeatedly assured by her husband during the campaign that there was no possibility he would win, had originally refused to move to Washington.
And, in fact, the First Lady was not really in the White House. It had taken Melania almost six months to officially relocate from New York to Washington, but that was largely in name only. Even beyond their separate bedrooms in the White House—they were the first presidential couple since JFK and Jackie to room apart—much of Melania’s time was spent in a house in Maryland where she had installed her parents and established what was effectively a separate life for herself.
This was the arrangement. For Trump, it was workable; for Melania, quite a bit less so. Maryland was fine—she had become quite involved with Barron’s school there, St. Andrews Episcopal School in Potomac—but what duties she had in the White House became more and more onerous as Trump’s relationship with his son became increasingly difficult.
Over the previous year, Barron, who turned twelve in March 2018, had become more distant toward his father. This might not be unusual behavior for a boy his age, but Trump responded with hostility. This took the form of ignoring his son when they had to be together; Trump also went out of his way to avoid any situation where he might have to encounter him. When he did appear with his son in public, he would talk about him in the third person—seldom to him, but casually about him.
Trump had a fetish about being the tallest person in the room; by 2018 Barron, after a sudden growth spurt, was already approaching six feet. “How do I stunt his growth?” became a chronic mean joke made by Trump about his son’s height.
Trump’s friends, including Keith Schiller, advised Melania that this was the way Trump had always treated his children, especially his sons. He often failed to acknowledge his son Eric when they found themselves together. He seemed to single out Don Jr. just for ridicule—and at the same time praise Don Jr.’s rival in the Trump political circle Corey Lewandowski. Tiffany, his daughter by his second wife, Marla Maples, largely went unmentioned, whereas he treated his official favorite child, Ivanka, with heightened, rat-pack-like solicitude. “Hey, baby,” he would say when greeting her.
Trump saw the world through the filter of other people’s weaknesses. He saw people through their physical and intellectual shortcomings, or through oddities in the way they talked or dressed. He defended himself by ridiculing others. It sometimes seemed that his only option, other than outright scorn, was to make Barron invisible to him.
Melania, meanwhile, appeared to make every effort to live her separate life and protect her son from the ill wind of his father.
In the fall of 2017, as the New York Times and the New Yorker focused to devastating effect on Harvey Weinstein’s long history of sexual predation, Trump was busily defending him. “Good guy,” he would say about Weinstein, “good guy.” He was sure that like the Russia investigation this, too, was a witch hunt. What’s more, he knew Harvey, and Harvey would get away with it. That was the thing with Harvey, said Trump—he always got away with it. It was the casting couch, the casting couch! For every girl who now had her panties in a twist, Trump claimed, there were fifty others, a hundred others, eager and willing. In Trumpland, there were few good ways to respond to such statements, perhaps none in the moment, so most people simply pretended they hadn’t heard what he’d said.
#MeToo as a cultural phenomenon and political variable occupied a place of nervous denial in the Trump White House. It was of course never mentioned in the context of Donald Trump’s behavior with women. That Trump might be the direct cause of this media, cultural, legal, and corporate uprising, one that would ultimately bring down scores of powerful and prominent men, was certainly never discussed.
Trump himself had not even an inkling of the new sensitivity regarding women and sex. “I don’t need Viagra,” he declared to everyone else’s general mortification at a dinner party in New York during the campaign. “I need a pill to make my erection go down.”
Since it could not be discussed, nobody in the White House could address the political what-ifs of renewed scandal.
And yet: What if the uprising were to finally reach him? Bannon—who had played the central political role during the pussy-tape scandal and was still incredulous that they had survived it—likened #MeToo to an episode of the old detective show Columbo, wherein the unrelenting, methodical, ever probing detective finally and invariably finds his way to the perpetrator’s door. In Bannon’s view, #MeToo would not be satisfied until it reached the White House.
Nobody knew the number of women who might have cause to come forward and accuse Trump of harassment or abuse. Bannon sometimes used the figure of a hundred girls, but sometimes, too, a thousand. Trump’s lawyer Marc Kasowitz kept the books on this, but sometimes Trump diverted issues involving women to Michael Cohen. Or perhaps it was the other way around, and Cohen was the true bagman for dealing with his affairs and for what would now be understood as sexual assault, with Kasowitz handling the runoff. Either way, nobody knew what was out there.
A year before Weinstein, when the pussy-grabbing video had broken, Trump was faced with numbers of women suddenly making assorted cases—in Bannon’s accounting, there were “twenty-five women, locked and loaded.” At the time, all the cases had somehow conflated to a confused, almost undifferentiated, claim. But since then, the very nature of sexual harassment and assault accusations had changed. Each had an emotional narrative attached, each represented a singular attack and wound. Each accuser had a name and face. What’s more, Trump’s own denials regarding Stormy Daniels and Karen McDougal had, detail by detail, been stripped back to no basis in fact at all. He had dismissed and disputed everything, and everything had turned out to be true. He had become not just the ultimate, archetypal sexual predator, he had become the model denier—the main exhibit for why women ought to be believed.
After #MeToo broke, a haunting question in the White House became: What happened to those women whose accusations in 2016 Trump had dismissed and disputed? When might they come back? And not just those women—others, too.
“We compressed all these women,” said Bannon of the campaign-period accusers. “People couldn’t parse it. We just denied it all. Lumped it all together and denied it all. I ask everybody about the women, but nobody remembers. But I remember—I kept track of them all. They’re in my dreams. Remember the girl at the China Club? I do. Kristin Anderson. She says he put two digits in her vagina at the bar. She’s forty-three, forty-four now, and one of these days she’s gonna look right in the camera on Good Morning America and she’s going to say, ‘He came in the back of the bar when I was eighteen years old and put two fingers in my vagina … my vagina … my vagina.’ And you’re going to hear that at 8:03 in the morning and she’s going to start crying. And then two days later there is going to be the next girl … and the next girl. It will be siege warfare. This one today, then let it cook, then take out another and put it on. We got twenty-five or thirty or a hundred. Or a thousand. We’ll take them one at a time, and every woman in the country is going to say, ‘Wait, what did he do, why is she crying?’”
In front of the grand jury, prosecutors from the special counsel’s office drilled down into the details of Trump’s sexual behavior—where, how often, with whom, and of what nature. This was, speculated one witness who described Trump’s “nefarious activities” in testimony, as much a way to bias the grand jury against Trump the lowlife as it was to help chart the relationships—such as those with Daniels and McDougal—that resulted in payoffs, and to look further at the allegations in the Steele dossier. Likewise, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, also looking to corroborate the Steele dossier and to ascertain how much the Russians might have on Trump, had taken, under seal, testimony from an individual who accompanied Trump to Moscow in 1996. This individual also introduced as exhibits in the confidential record photos of Trump with escorts on the trip.
If there were new or renewed accusations, no one could predict how well the blanket Trump denials would continue to hold up, especially with the base. But as bad as these potential situations might be, the ultimate bad-news scenario was that new accusations would cause Melania to leave him.
It did not help that, led by Michael Avenatti, Trump’s relationship with the porn star Stormy Daniels became a daily saga by spring 2018. That was bad enough, with the First Lady doing her best to keep her son from the constant accounts. The unfathomable offense to Melania, however, was the unprotected sex. And Michael Avenatti repeated this almost as a personal taunt. In Avenatti’s description, Trump and his client had not just had sex, they had engaged in a specific category of sex, “unprotected sex.”
Trump’s people had developed a heightened respect for Melania: she kept her cards close and played them well. She might, in the end, be the better Trump family negotiator. She made her leverage clear and settled for what she could get. But the constant patch-ups and new arrangements masked volatility on both sides. Nobody discounted the possibility, as a whole genre of stories and theories had it, that the rumored elevator video of Trump striking Melania might in fact exist. Inside the White House, the view was that if the video did exist, the incident had happened in Los Angeles, probably in 2014 after a meeting with lawyers that had been arranged precisely to negotiate a revision in their marital agreement.
The deal was always about letting Donald Trump be Donald Trump. “I only fuck beautiful girls—you can attest to that,” he said to a Hollywood friend who visited the White House. (He had once left a voice-mail message for Tucker Carlson, who had criticized Trump’s hair: “It’s true you have better hair than I do, but I get more pussy than you do.”) Being Donald Trump—the Donald Trump, unfettered Donald Trump—was the most important thing to him. And he would compensate Melania handsomely for that.
But the stakes, and Melania’s leverage, had risen astronomically since Trump entered the White House.
Nobody in the West Wing believed the explanation for the First Lady’s hospital stay. Melania entered Walter Reed on Monday, May 14, and for twenty-four hours there was hardly even an attempt to provide a coherent story. It was pure avoidance. I see nothing. I know nothing. And then, credulity pushed to its end point, the excited speculation inside the White House mirrored, or perhaps led, the speculation outside. Plastic surgery? A physical fight? An overdose? Mental breakdown? A standoff in a financial negotiation?
It was the East Wing—where Melania’s aide Stephanie Grisham was seen as especially protective of the First Lady—against the West Wing, which, taking the president’s lead, behaved as if Melania was of little concern. And as the week went on nobody could say when exactly Melania was coming back.
What was as notable as her absence was Trump’s imperturbability. With questions mounting, John Kelly requested a far more detailed briefing. What exactly is wrong with her? Kelly asked. The president countermanded: “Nobody cares except the media. She’s the First Lady, not the president.” As with all his existential crises, arguably coming as fast as any in political history, he flipped it. He was fine. Melania was fine. Their marriage was fine. Totally fine. It was the world around him that was toxic, cruel, evil, obsessed, full of lies.
Indeed, the consensus was that Trump did not recognize that anything here was beyond the normal course of business, either in his marriage or, more generally, in his personal life. His marriage might be a Potemkin village, but that’s what it was supposed to be. That was the arrangement!
This was a perverse sort of logic. There was no marriage—not, at least, that anyone had ever seen. So how could there be a problem with the marriage?
Here, to various onlookers, was the distinction upon which many of their own careers and futures depended. Was Donald Trump the what-me-worry cynical master of having it all? Or was Donald Trump simply oblivious to the terrifying fragility of his world, wholly unaware of the very real possibility that, at any moment, it could fall in on him?
On Saturday, May 19, the First Lady returned to the White House—or, in fact, she shortly returned to her home with her parents in Maryland. Nine days later, she missed the annual Memorial Day wreath-laying ceremony at Arlington National Cemetery. On June 1, Trump made a rare trip to Camp David with the entire family—including Tiffany—but without Melania or Barron. On June 4, she finally reappeared; the occasion was an annual White House event honoring Gold Star families. She had not been seen for twenty-four days, not since her appearance on May 10, just after her “Be Best” debut.
On June 21, during a surprise trip to a shelter for migrant children in Texas, she was photographed in a Zara jacket with a legend scrawled across the back: I REALLY DON’T CARE, DO U?
The president insisted that she was referring to the fake news media.