I first met Melania Knauss in late 1998 while flying on Donald’s private plane. It was the regular Friday night to Sunday Palm Beach trip. I was stuffing my face with popcorn and candy while watching her delicately eat apple slices. I remember saying to myself, That’s what you should be eating, Jeanine as I continued with the handfuls of popcorn.
I moved to a seat closer to her, to see what her deal was. I was even more impressed with the woman after I spoke with her.
At one point the friendly conversation turned to jewelry. I asked Melania if Donald had given her any fabulous pieces. She said that stuff was not important to her. It was clear to me that their relationship was real.
Later, I saw that same confidence in an episode during the first season of Celebrity Apprentice. Trump had the contestants in his home atop Trump Tower. Their eyes were as big as saucers as they took in the extravagant furnishings and world-class views. Melania, who was dating Donald at the time, came down the stairwell and greeted the cast.
“How do you clean a house like this?” one of the contestants asked.
“You hire people to clean it!” Melania smiled elegantly.
“You’re very, very lucky,” another one said.
“Oh, thank you,” Melania said with a smile. “And he is not lucky?”
I remember I almost choked on the water I was drinking as I yelled, “You tell them, girl!”
Melania Trump understands Donald Trump. She doesn’t have to be the center of attention, and Lord knows she could be if she wanted to. Despite what so-called feminists might tell you, this does not make her subservient.
She doesn’t need to be in the limelight, which is good because one person in the limelight is more than enough for a relationship.
An astonishing beauty, five-foot, eleven-inch Melania had a successful modeling career in Milan, Paris, and New York. Quiet, but thoughtful, engaging without being overly solicitous, she owns an inner attractiveness that matches her stunning features. She also has a deep love for the United States.
Her upbringing was modest, with parents who worked hard in Slovenia. While Melania and Donald were still dating, the future president made living arrangements for Melania’s parents in New York.
She and Donald had been dating for several years and something told me that she might be the one. Pretty quickly, it seemed others in his family thought so, too.
On one trip down to Palm Beach, Donald’s sister Maryanne Trump Barry, who is a federal circuit court judge, and I sat next to each other. We started talking about Melania.
“Well, what do you think?” I asked her.
“I think she’s the one,” she said.
“I’ll bet you’re right.” I remember thinking that strong, beautiful and independent Melania would be the perfect woman for Donald.
Sure enough, in 2005, we received an invitation to the wedding.
Al and I attended the ceremony at the Episcopal Church of Bethesda-by-the-Sea and then the reception at Mar-a-Lago. It was spectacular. We drank champagne out of crystal glasses; we ate caviar and beef tenderloin. The Grand Marnier wedding cake was five feet tall.
Melania stopped the show. She wore a Dior gown with a sixteen-foot veil. The gown was bejeweled with 1,500 tiny crystal rhinestones and pearls. Vogue magazine called Melania’s wedding gown, “the dress of the year.” She could have worn a plastic trash bag and she still would have been the most beautiful woman there.
Of course, the guest list was filled with Donald’s famous friends. Everywhere you looked, there was someone you knew. Paul Anka and Tony Bennett got up and sang. Billy Joel serenaded and hammed it up. Even Bill and Hillary were there (it was a different time).
Melania and Donald also invited several media personalities, including Matt Lauer, Katie Couric, and Anna Wintour. My, what a difference a decade makes.
No one knows the true nature of the press better than Donald Trump. And no one can call them out as liars better than he can. He works every day to penetrate the disinformation that surrounds him to get the truth to the people. He sees it as a necessary part of his job.
But it’s not Melania’s job, and yet she’s subjected to much of the same abuse as her husband.
During the campaign Melania tried to stay out of the spotlight. Her preference was often portrayed by the paparazzi of the Left as self-conscious or aloof. They tried to disparage Donald’s and Melania’s marital relationship at every turn. She pushed his hand away! He’s walking too far in front of her!
Give me a break.
In August 2017, Melania traveled with her husband to Texas to tour the aftermath of Hurricane Harvey. You would think the media’s focus would be on the devastation the people of Texas were experiencing. Instead, all they could talk about were Melania’s shoes.
As she boarded a plane from the White House, Melania wore typical pumps that she often wears, shoes she wears as easily as some of us wear slippers. The press pounced. Vanity Fair published a piece titled, “Who Wears Stilettos to a Hurricane? Melania Trump.” The New York Times called the high heels “a symbol for what many see as the disconnect between the Trump administration and reality.”
Arriving in Corpus Christi, Melania deplaned wearing sneakers. She had changed her shoes on the plane, completely oblivious to the media thrashing she’d been receiving.
Did that change the narrative? No. That New York Times quote was written after the fact. The reporter knew Melania changed her shoes on the plane, and still couldn’t help but write something nasty about FLOTUS.
It is liberal institutions that continually write about women this way. It is the liberal media that only want to write about Melania when they can trash what she wears. These are the same people who accuse conservatives of waging a “war on women.”
When Melania spearheaded the decorating of the White House for Christmas in the winter of 2017, the headlines were vicious. The New Yorker published a piece called “With the White House Christmas, the Image of Melania Trump Transforms from Fairy Tale Prisoner to Wicked Queen.”
What an abhorrently sexist and Scrooge-like way for a liberal publication to refer to the First Lady. The article called her “mostly mute” and blamed her poor English for her “unusual silence.”
Hey, dummies, the woman speaks five languages. How many do you speak?
People like the New Yorker’s Jia Tolentino and Chelsea Handler, who go after Melania Trump with a vicious ferocity, do not compare to her in any way. (Tolentino also couldn’t help but make a quip that Americans liked Melania as First Lady because of her “whiteness”)
Still, Melania is one of those women who takes a lot in stride. She’s very European. European women have a different approach. They’re not as thin-skinned. Melania has handled the role of First Lady with style and grace and a whole lot of guts.
Donald and Melania have a loving relationship. He loves her. He admires her. He confides in her. They laugh together all the time. During the debate, whenever Donald’s eyes met Melania’s, you could see that he was at ease. Smart, sophisticated, and beautiful, and with a strong sense of family, she will prove to be a great First Lady.
Once Donald Trump became president I wondered if our friendship would change. It hasn’t, because he hasn’t. Of course, now I call him Mr. President and his shoulders do carry the weight of the office he holds. But the Donald Trump I’ve known for all these years is still very much the same. He makes me laugh. His priorities remain his family and his country, and I suspect he sleeps even less than before.
There is a video that has been circling the Internet for a while now. It’s of an interview Donald Trump gave to the gossip columnist Rona Barrett in 1980. If you get the chance, look it up. The clip is fantastic. Not only does the thirty-four-year-old Donald Trump look like a movie star, but he also talks about his love for his country with such passion, it stirs the emotion in you. The things he says to Barrett are the same policies he campaigned on and is implementing from the Oval Office. Toward the end of the interview, Barret
t tries to get him to say he would run for president. The young, unassuming Donald shrugs off the question, but he does talk about the need for a president who is outside politics as usual.
“One proper president could turn the country around,” he says. “I firmly believe that.”
So do I.
He’s in the Oval Office now.
The Inner Circle
The Trump family is the president’s inner circle. President Trump thrives on loyalty, and who could possibly be more loyal than his own family? Who better to trust? And when each family member is blessed with a first-rate education, intellectual acumen, and unique pride of country, who better to look to for support?
Eric Trump perhaps said it best:
“No one has ever done what we did as a family. The first rule of politics is normally, ‘keep the family away from the spotlight.’ Most of the time, family ends up being an impediment versus being an asset. Our family has always fought together and the notion that we would sit on the sideline was almost unthinkable to us. I was on the road in ‘swing states’ for eighteen months straight, not because I had to be, but because I believed in my father and wanted to fight on his behalf. When you do that, you subject yourself to a tremendous amount of scrutiny but to all of us, it was worth it. Everything we’ve ever done we’ve done together as a family. Whether it’s build our company, grow our company, or sit by our father’s side on The Apprentice. We have always fought together—we have always won together.
“Don and Ivanka are two of my best friends in the world and together we worked incredibly hard. Through ups and downs, we stood on the same stage and fought, always as a collective.
“I think that you see a very stark contrast between the way we handled ourselves as a family and that of the other candidates’ families. They weren’t doing three hours of radio every morning, driving tens of thousands of miles in a car from rally to rally and they certainly weren’t living in thirteen swing states. In many cases, they wanted nothing to do with the campaigns and while I understand that, given the viciousness of politics, we were all in this together.
“We always protect each other. That’s what families do.”
President Trump is not the first president to value loyalty. Abraham Lincoln demanded it and returned it. So did Andrew Jackson.
President Trump first learned about loyalty from his father, Fred. Besides being uncommonly brilliant, Fred acquired an education in hard-fisted New York politics. Loyalty was the key to trustworthy business dealings and respect, and no one is closer or more trustworthy than family.
Donald Trump, Jr. attended the Wharton School of Business, earning a bachelor of science degree in economics in 2000. Don Jr., as he is generally known, joined the Trump Organization in 2001 and immediately began managing multimillion-dollar projects, including the successful completions of 40 Wall Street, Trump International Hotel & Tower, and Trump Park Avenue.
Don Jr. worked tirelessly on the campaign alongside the rest of his family. But instead of praising his positive work on the campaign trail, the media have focused on his infamous June 2016 meeting with a Russian lawyer, in which they said he was being offered dirt on Hillary or the Clinton Foundation. So, what? I’ve never heard of a campaign that didn’t do opposition research!
Don Jr. is more brutally honest than Eric about the lost opportunities the Trump Organization has endured because of his father’s election. The Trump Organization faces restrictions on new international transactions. However, Don Jr. has made it clear that the sacrifices were all worth the policies his father’s administration is implementing. America will reap the benefits.
Like her brothers Eric and Don Jr., Ivanka Trump is brilliant; she, too, loves her father, her country and her wonderful family—Jared and her three beautiful children.
Ivanka attended an elite boarding school in Connecticut, was a model at age fourteen, graduated cum laude from the prestigious Wharton School of Business, began her real estate career with the Forest City Ratner organization, and then joined the Trump Organization.
To overcome the fact that she is an offspring of the Trump dynasty she became extremely motivated and worked harder and longer than most. She aptly negotiated large acquisitions for the family business with a unique grace and incisive analysis. In 2009, Ivanka married Jared Kushner.
Ivanka was active in the Trump campaign from the beginning. She introduced her father when he announced his candidacy for President of the United States, and again at the Republican National Convention where he accepted the party’s nomination.
As a member of the administration, she has helped secure the diplomatic relations with the Japanese prime minister Shinzo Abe and the Chinese delegation. Ivanka often served as an elegant, charming liaison for her father.
Jared attended the Frisch School, a modern Orthodox Yeshiva High School. His six-foot, three-inch frame made him a natural in basketball and other sports. He enrolled at Harvard University where he graduated in 2003 with a degree in government. After Harvard, Jared graduated NYU with a dual JD/MBA degree and later become an assistant district attorney in Manhattan.
Fast-forward a few years, Jared became CEO of the Kushner Companies, a diversified real estate organization in 2008. He piloted the company through the recession.
Jared’s purchase of the New York Observer and his subsequent immersion in the news media came in handy later during the presidential campaign.
If you know Jared Kushner, you know he is thoughtful, soft-spoken, and locked in tight on helping the president achieve his goal to make America great again.
Like Ivanka, Eric, and Don Jr., Jared learned about campaign primaries with on-the-job training. With initially no real help from the RNC and no field organization to speak of, Jared did what he does best—study the terrain, plan, and execute. He called friends near and far and implemented an online campaign. Using the president’s charm, charisma, and natural oratory skills, he set in motion a series of stadium-filled speaking engagements the likes of which have never been seen before and hammered home candidate Trump’s agenda across the Internet.
As a young man from a successful real estate family where loyalty was also prized, he became like another son to the president—a young visionary who could be trusted.
Jared has been rewarded with one of the most powerful positions in the White Houseand works closely with the president. In fact, his office at the White House is right next door to the Oval Office. He has been entrusted with the president’s greatest goal—peace in the Middle East.
He planned the president’s first foreign trip with the first stop being Saudi Arabia, where the king convened 54 leaders from the Muslim and Arab world in a historic summit to affirm their commitment to join the US in fighting terrorism in the region and around the world. During the visit, he orchestrated the sale of $100 billion in arms to Saudi Arabia.
In addition, Jared opened and headed the White House Office of Innovation. Through this program Jared has worked diligently on modernizing information-technology in the government.
During my interview with Jared in April 2018, I learned of yet another mission: prison reform. Jared believes those who have paid their debt to society should have the opportunity to rejoin it as participants and contributors. “The best solution to recidivism is a job and I am committed to ensure ex-convicts get the training and support they need to begin contributing to society again,” he said.
Eric and Lara Trump are fun-loving and sports oriented. Each is committed to charitable endeavors. Lara is a huge animal lover who rescues abandoned, neglected, and often abused animals and raises money for them. She told me, “I’ve always loved animals. It’s been my passion since I was a kid. They need our help to survive. We will never buy another dog. My dog Ben knows he’s a rescue and he thanks me every day.”
I can attest to that. Ben comes to my house and plays with my standard poodle, Sir Lancelot. They’re happy campers.
Eric’s charity, the Eric Trump Foundation, has been
renamed Curetivity and is being run by cofounder and executive director Paige Scardigli. Eric stepped away from the foundation after his father’s election to avoid any appearance of impropriety. Eric’s interest is in supporting the pediatric cancer unit at St. Jude’s Children’s Research Hospital. He has raised close to $20 million for this cause. Oh, by the way, he started this campaign at age twenty-one!
Eric attended the prestigious New York City Trinity School, boarded at The Hill School in Pennsylvania, and graduated with honors from Georgetown. By 2012, he was receiving recognition as a leader in business.
Lara Trump graduated from North Carolina State University and worked as a producer at Inside Edition and Real News. Also strongly independent and a family loyalist, Lara, an avid equestrian, can often be seen on Instagram with her rescue dogs, Charlie and Ben.
She is a strong supporter of her husband and not afraid to “mix it up” in support of the president. During the campaign, she was on the road for months burnishing her credentials as an engaging, articulate public speaker.
Like Don Jr., Eric worked nonstop on the campaign from the moment his father announced, raising funds, speaking at rallies across the country, and doing whatever was necessary for his father to win the White House. Since the election, both sons have taken over running the Trump organization.
Eric speaks of his father as admiringly as does Don Jr. “He is an amazing man—there is nobody I admire more. I consider him my best friend and could not be prouder of my father.”
Liars, Leakers, and Liberals_The Case Against the Anti-Trump Conspiracy Page 17
