Melania Trump is fully on board with her husband’s 2020 election denial, her new memoir reveals.
The famously taciturn wife of former President Donald Trump rarely opines about politics. But in her book, Melania, scheduled to be released Tuesday, the former first lady suggests the 2020 election was stolen.
Looking back on her husband’s last presidential campaign, Melania writes that she was optimistic about his chances, “but the media, Big Tech, and the deep state were all determined to prevent Donald’s re-election, by any means necessary.”
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“With all these enemies aligned, I worried the election would be unfair,” she recalls.
On election night, she writes, she and her son Barron watched returns roll in from her room in the White House. Her husband would pop in between phone calls. Things seemed to be going well—until Fox News projected that Joe Biden would win Arizona.
“I couldn’t believe it,” Melania writes. “How could they call it so early before all the votes were counted? It was another sign that this was not a normal election.”
That call enflamed the right, with Trump’s team insisting it was grossly premature. Fox expressed confidence in its projection, which turned out to be correct.
But that wasn’t the only news that raised red flags for the first lady, according to her book, a copy of which was reviewed by the Daily Beast ahead of publication.
“Soon, the media reported that due to the way different states counted mail-in ballots and the various mail-in deadlines, the results would not be clear for several days,” she recounts. “At this point, everything was called into question for me.”
The former first lady’s comments show her loyalty to her husband’s political ambitions as he—and perhaps she, too—seeks to retake the White House.
Her views expressed in the book are in line with the MAGA mantra that a combination of voter fraud, rigged voting machines and Democratic malfeasance stole a presidential term that was rightfully his. These claims have been repeatedly disproven.
But not to Melania. She sides with Trump supporters who don’t buy that clear evidence.
“Many Americans still have doubts about the election to this day,” she writes. “I am not the only person who questions the results.”
She recalls the tumultuous days after the election “with suspicious voting activity being reported all across the country.” While it’s true that there were some potential cases of voter fraud in battleground states, those numbered just a few hundred, according to an AP News review—too few to actually swing the election.
That didn’t stop thousands of people convinced the results were illegitimate from storming the Capitol months later. On that day, Melania writes that she was busy doing archival work in the historic rooms of the White House. It wasn’t until after 2 p.m. that she got a text from her press secretary asking if she wanted to “denounce the violence.”
The first lady had no idea what she was talking about.
"Pro-Trump protesters storm into the U.S. Capitol to protest the 2020 election results, Jan. 6, 2021. REUTERS/Shannon Stapleton"
REUTERSShe blames a staffer for keeping her in the dark about the unrest, writing in her memoir, “Traditionally, the First Lady’s chief of staff provides detailed briefings surrounding our nation’s important issues. My second White House chief of staff failed to do so.”
Had she known sooner, she writes, she would have said something. She addresses the incident in her memoir without mentioning her husband's federal indictment for his efforts to try to overturn the 2020 election.
“While I recognized that many individuals felt the election was mishandled and that the vice president should halt the confirmation process, we must never resort to violence,” Melania writes.
