First Lady Melania Trump’s former best friend Stephanie Winston Wolkoff dropped by The View on Wednesday to talk about the many revelations in her new book, Melania and Me: The Rise and Fall of My Friendship with the First Lady. But first, she had to contend with Meghan McCain.
One day after confronting former White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders for defending President Donald Trump, this time McCain went after Wolkoff for betraying her friend.
McCain began by repeating a charge she previously made against Mary Trump, who released her own bombshell book about her family earlier in the summer. “I don’t like tell-all books like this,” she said. “I think they’re in really bad taste in general. And I think secretly recording your friend and selling its contents for profit certainly ups the ante and seems not only unethical but just gross.”
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Quoting a statement from the first lady’s office that claims Wolkoff is just “out for revenge,” McCain asked, “Can you honestly just sit here and tell me that's not true?” On a “personal level,” she said that if someone wrote a similar book about her mother, Cindy McCain, “It would break my family.” She asked, “Do you understand the implications of this, that it could have on them just as people?”
When McCain was finally done, Wolkoff thanked her for asking the question so that she could clear up what she called the biggest “misconception” about her book. “I did not write this book for money, I did not take any advance for this,” she said. “This was a chance for me to tell the true story and not be anonymous anymore. I’m on the record.”
“All the stories that crushed me, burned me, and the White House propaganda machine made up about me, that made headlines around the world, broke me, my integrity, my life literally went into shatters because of exactly what you are talking about,” she continued, her voice starting to break a bit. “I didn’t press record on a friend. I pressed record after I was accused of a crime and I was thrown under the bus and I was told by my friend, ‘I‘m sorry, this is the way it has to be.’ That’s when I pressed record.”
Wolkoff insisted she “would never record a friend,” making it clear that she and the first lady were no longer friends in her mind when she started taping their conversations.
Unsurprisingly, McCain was not convinced, continuing to defend Melania Trump even after Wolkoff explained that she just wanted to expose the “depth of their corruption, the depth of their deceit, and the depth of their disregard for everyone,” including McCain's father, John McCain.
Meanwhile, Joy Behar told Wolkoff, “Sticking your neck out for this administration in these particular times is not easy to do, so good for you.”
