Melania Trump may not have spent a single night at the White House since her husband returned to power, his biographer has alleged.
Michael Wolff claimed in the latest edition of Howl, his Substack, that the 56-year-old first lady is leading a fully separate life far from the White House since Donald Trump returned to Pennsylvania Avenue nearly 600 days ago.
“By the end of the campaign, aides, when queried, were actively seeking new language for the situation: ‘She’ll be more like a part-time first lady,’” Wolff wrote on Monday.
Melania, he claimed, is now “firmly ensconced in New York City, where she’s running a Melania-brand business which last year, she disclosed, had net profits of $17 million.”
When reached for comment, White House spokesperson Davis Ingle called Wolff “a professional scumbag and serial liar whose brain has been completely warped by his severe and incurable disease known as Trump Derangement Syndrome.”
It’s no secret that Melania and the 80-year-old president’s personal lives are largely separate. But this summer, the former model was more absent than usual, disappearing from public view for an entire month, the Daily Beast previously reported. Only when whispers about Trump’s devoted young aide, Natalie Harp, reached a fever pitch earlier this month did Melania resurface.
The first lady herself acknowledged her prolonged absence, quipping, “I heard you missed me. Here I am,” during a long-awaited appearance at the White House on Thursday. “Here I am! Welcome to the White House.”
Wolff, who wrote the 2018 best-seller Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House, alleged that after he pressed Trump’s top aides for an explanation of Melania’s absence on the campaign trail in 2024, he was given a short but succinct response.
“‘She hates his f---ing guts,’ is what a top Trump aide said to me,” Wolff recalled. “In other words, what you see is actually what you get.
Wolff called Melania’s lack of effort in hiding the truth of their arrangement a “particular Trump-style pretense.”
“You pretend so little, and make such a limited effort at it, that everybody knows you’re pretending. Therefore you’re not really pretending,” he said.
Trump, for his part, isn’t much better. On Melania’s birthday in April, the president embarked on a manic Truth Social posting spree, none of which wished his wife a happy birthday. She returned the favor by giving him back the cold shoulder on his 80th birthday in June.
“Melania has managed to achieve something no first lady has ever achieved, not living in the White House—nowhere near it; a separation by any other name—and creating a multi-million-dollar business for herself by monetizing her first lady brand,” Wolff wrote.
“With what leverage did she negotiate this deal? What else has she managed to get?”
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