Melania Trump on Thursday used her first interview in years to speak about the apparent attempts on her husband’s life, saying she didn’t see the first one in real time and learned about the second from television.
The former first lady spoke about her experience with the attempts to kill her husband, Donald Trump, in a Fox & Friends interview to promote her forthcoming memoir. “I ran to the TV and I rewinded and I watched it,” she said referring to the attack on her husband on July 13 at his rally in Butler, Pennsylvania. “I was only a few minutes behind.”
“I didn’t really see [it] live live, but maybe, you know, three minutes, few minutes later,” Melania Trump continued. She said at the time “nobody really knew yet” what had unfolded: “Because when you see him on the floor, and you don’t know—you don’t know what really happened.”
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In the interview with Fox & Friends co-host Ainsley Earhardt, Melania also spoke about the second apparent attempt on her husband’s life which occurred earlier this month at his golf course in West Palm Beach, Florida.
“I was in New York City actually,” Melania said. “And I saw it on the television. And as soon as I saw it on television, I called again, and he was OK, because Secret Service were great, the guys that they were with him, they were fantastic.”
“I think both of the events, they were really miracles,” she added. “If you really think about it, July 13 was a miracle. That much,” she said, making a small gap between her thumb and index finger to indicate the tiny margin by which the bullet apparently missed his brain, “and he could not be with us.”
“I think something was watching over him,” Melania Trump said. “It’s almost like [the] country really needs him.”
Introducing the interview, which is being broadcast throughout Thursday morning’s Fox & Friends, Earhardt said she’d also asked the former first lady about her son, Barron, going to college.
“We talked about Barron going off to college, and I said: ‘How does it feel to be an empty-nester?’” Earhardt told her co-hosts. “And she said: ‘I’m not an empty-nester.’ I think she’s very involved in Barron’s life. She said she put no pressure on him telling him where to go to college—she let him decide.”
Co-host Steve Doocy pointed out that Barron, at NYU, is still “in the same town” as his mom. “Yes but that didn’t influence his decision, she said,” Earhardt replied. “And she wanted him to make up his own mind and be autonomous and stand on his own two feet.”
“I asked her if she and Donald talked about having more children,” Earhardt continued. “She said he talked about it, he wanted to at one point, but I was fine with one.”
The interview comes ahead of the October 8 release of Melania Trump’s memoir, Melania. The Fox News appearance caps a flurry of recent promotional activities for the book which have seen Trump variously addressing her nude modeling work and claiming “the truth” still needs to be uncovered about the first attempt on her husband’s life.
“I believe that it was the time I tell my story and the truth,” Melania said in the Fox News interview Thursday, adding that there are “a lot of misinformation and falsehoods” written about her. “I want to put the record straight, and people can learn some things that, they were never discussed, and I hope they enjoy the book.”
