A bombshell new book makes some startling new revelations about Donald Trump’s bizarre marriage to Melania.
“She f---ing hates him,” a “Mar-a-Lago patio confidant” of Trump and his family told Michael Wolff.
The best-selling author writes that his source was “bewildered that this needed saying.”
In his upcoming book All or Nothing: How Trump Recaptured America, Wolff chronicles the legal tribulations and campaign challenges Trump faced on the 2024 election trail—and Melania’s conspicuous absence from her husband’s side.
The book, a copy of which was obtained by the Daily Beast, is the first to delve into Trump’s campaign. Wolff is the best-selling author of Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House, which created shockwaves in 2018 when it lifted the lid on the infighting and dysfunction in Trump’s first White House.
All or Nothing sparked the ire of a group of Trump aides in November when rumors first surfaced that Wolff was writing a book. In a statement, a series of campaign figures including co-chairs Susie Wiles—now the president’s chief-of-staff—and Chris LaCivita, declared: “A number of us have received inquiries from the disgraced author Michael Wolff, whose previous work can only be described as fiction. He is a known peddler of fake news who routinely concocts situations, conversations, and conclusions that never happened. As a group, we have decided not to respond to his bad faith inquiries, and we encourage others to completely disregard whatever nonsense he eventually publishes. Consider this our blanket response to whatever he writes.”
The book does not name sources and contains lengthy accounts of both Wiles’ and LaCivita’s time in the campaign.
But the focus on Melania is likely to raise most eyebrows in the White House. Wolff writes that during the campaign Trump never acknowledged that, “the most public marriage in the nation was breaking down,” even though it appeared to be doing so in public.
Wolff claims that Trump’s staff didn’t even know where Melania lived.
He writes that the former and future first lady didn’t make one campaign appearance in the 18 months before the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee in July 2024 and “flatly refused” to make a planned “showstopper” speech at the event.
Wearing a red dress, she joined her husband on stage after his acceptance speech as the GOP’s presidential candidate and held his hands as balloons rained down on the crowd, but she did not relent and speak herself.
“Whatever was going on—and no one had any idea what was going on, at least no more than what was plainly obvious—it had certainly not been helped by the Stormy trial,” Wolff writes, referring to the criminal trial that resulted in Trump being convicted of 34 felony charges for making a hush money payment to porn star Stormy Daniels.
Melania did not appear by her husband’s side in court.
“But that seemed hardly the only thing to explain the colder and colder winter,” Wolff adds.
Already, claims Wolff, the campaign had put out the idea that the role of first lady would be “adjusted” in a second Trump White House. The term “part-time First Lady” emerged and the idea that Melania would spend time at Trump Tower in Manhattan to be close to son Barron at New York University.
Wolff tells how as Trump headed for a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, in October—the scene of the July 13, 2024, attempted assassination that came within inches of succeeding—campaign staff were again wondering whether Melania would show up.
“Even in the ever-downward spiral of diminishing expectations, every day was “will she, won’t she?” he writes.
Wolff writes that inside the campaign, the fact that “the most public marriage in the nation” might be in terminal jeopardy was never on the agenda. And curiously, he continues, “the world at large did not yet acknowledge it either.”
The book also recounts a surprise September 2023 interview Trump gave with Megyn Kelly, despite feuding with her after his first Republican debate in 2015. All was going well until Kelly went on the offensive, and one of the questions she asked was about Melania.
That’s when Wolff says the interview got “seriously weird.”
“In some sense, this is the darkest Trump hole,” he writes. “Nobody knows the answer to the what-about-Melania question. Not even the people closest to him. What is the nature of the marriage. Nobody can tell you.
“Nobody can tell you where Melania even actually lives. It may be, on its own peculiar terms, the most successful marriage in America. Or, it may be ready to blow up at any moment.”
When campaign staffers asked Melania to accompany her husband to his first indictment in New York, Wolff writes that she laughed and said, “Nice try.”
Wolff expresses surprise Melania’s continued absence wasn’t picked up more by the media, as far back as the 2017-2021 White House years.
“She was randomly at the White House and only occasionally at Mar-a-Lago,” Wolff quotes an “inner-circle member” as saying.
Wolff suggests that Trump avoided making a personal appearance on the second day of his fraud trial in December 2023 because he was wary of being asked under oath: “Where exactly does your wife live?”
The trial involved, in part, the size of Trump’s personal holdings in Trump Tower, and Wolff quotes those in his inner circle speculating that Melania had a separate apartment in the building.
“That arrangement, an American marriage on a coolly transactional basis, might be difficult to explain in open court and to ‘family values’ America,” he writes.
“She’s like a special guest or something when they’re seen out in public together for dinner or whatever the case might be,” a “Mar-a-Lago intimate” told Wolff.
Wolff writes that the publication of Melania’s own book, Melania, in October 2024 came as a surprise to her husband’s campaign. He adds it was unclear whether the release was “a diss or a kiss (of course from afar)” to Trump. (The book itself was positive about Trump and, perhaps equally importantly, offered no anecdotes which could be used against him. One intriguing insight to their lives was what she described as her husband’s “thoughtful” habit of checking on her health in regular phone calls to her doctor.)
The day before the infamous Oct. 27 rally at Madison Square Gardens in New York, Melania offered to introduce Trump, which was a surprise and in Wolff’s words, either a “pity move” or a “clear olive branch.”
But when it came to the night of her husband’s election result, Melania “sent word that she would not appear with him unless it was an outright win,” which of course it turned out to be—meaning she was at his side on stage celebrating victory.
The White House replied on Friday to a request for comment made on Thursday evening with a statement from White House Communications Director Steven Cheung. He said: “Michael Wolff is a lying sack of s*** and has been proven to be a fraud. He routinely fabricates stories originating from his sick and warped imagination, only possible because he has a severe and debilitating case of Trump Derangement Syndrome that has rotted his peanut-sized brain.”
