Free, Melania

by Kate Bennett

  Yet Melania said she wanted to go it alone if she could, and so Trump said to his team, “Let her.”

  When Trump walked onto the stage to kiss Melania and escort her off, both were glowing, beaming, literally basking in the spotlight. He had let his wife flex her independence in front of a massive audience. She had done the near impossible: made Trump likable and human.

  The Twitter revelation of copied passages had picked up steam. A few dozen of Hill’s mere 1,800 followers retweeted it, then a few hundred, then a few thousand. Melania’s speech was Monday, July 18; by Friday, July 22, the news was everywhere, and Hill was a star. His follower count ballooned, and every media outlet from CNN to The New York Times was crediting him for the biggest scoop of convention week: holy shit, the woman who wants to be first lady just plagiarized a speech from the current first lady. It was headline gold.

  Melania, meanwhile, was devastated. “Beside herself,” as one aide put it to me. Yet there was no slamming of doors, throwing of vases, blind rage, or berating of staff. Instead, she became despondent, racked with guilt. “She felt like she had let the team down,” says someone who worked on the campaign and was involved with Trump messaging. “All she wanted to do was get up there and give a great performance and deliver a big win.” Melania wasn’t calling for a head on a platter—that’s what Trump was doing, wanting to know who had let that happen, why his wife wasn’t given more help, why had she been left out to hang? That’s what they, the handful of overworked, underexperienced aides were there for, Trump said, to make sure these sorts of things never, ever happened.

  The truth was that even if Melania had asked for it, there was no help to give. Trump’s “team” was literally fewer than ten mostly politically unseasoned staffers. Unlike Hillary Clinton, who had a team with years and numerous campaigns under their belt, Trump had basically no one. “We were all running around doing eight million things just to handle him,” said one of Trump’s top campaign advisers, who admits the team was woefully spread thin. “There wasn’t the capacity of staff. We could barely prep our own candidate for the party convention. That’s not an exaggeration.” Melania and her speech had fallen through the cracks. Melania was an afterthought—on the biggest night of her public life.

  Meanwhile, Trump apologized to his wife profusely. “He felt really bad and responsible for what happened,” said the former aide. He was mad, sure, but not at her. He has always wanted Melania to be her best and to feel strong and capable in her capacity as his wife. Whether or not he is successful at achieving this, ask anyone who knows him well and they will tell you he makes time to ensure Melania is as professionally comfortable in her role as she possibly can be.

  As he was groveling to his wife for having put her in a vulnerable position, simply because his team lacked the people or experience needed to bolster her speech, she was wallowing in guilt because she didn’t deliver for him. “He felt genuinely sorry; she felt responsible,” says a former aide. To use a Trumpian metaphor, he had cut the red ribbon on a new skyscraper that looked perfect and shiny on the outside, but the workers had forgotten to build the scaffolding to hold it up, and it crumbled. Imploded, really.

  Perhaps the worst of it was that Melania herself had no idea she was regurgitating Michelle Obama’s speech while she was delivering it. The speech’s primary writer was a woman named Meredith McIver, a small-time in-house writer at the Trump Organization who was a ghostwriter for Trump’s books, including Trump 101, Trump: How to Get Rich, and Trump: Think Like a Billionaire. Trump said he trusted McIver with handling his book writing because she used to sit outside his office, and “my door is always open, so Meredith has heard everything.”

  McIver knew Melania by the simple fact she was the boss’s wife, and McIver was essentially one of Trump’s assistants; she was in the family, so to speak. In the acknowledgments section of Think Like a Billionaire, McIver had even thanked “Melania Knauss” (it was 2005, before the wedding) for her “kind assistance.” Clearly, there was a rapport between the two women.

  Melania also wasn’t interested in sharing her big moment with the campaign team, most of whom she didn’t personally know well and, with the exception of Sean Spicer, didn’t like all that much. The campaign had initially suggested using a speechwriter from RNC circles, and there were early drafts sent to Melania, written by two professional speechwriters. But she didn’t find them to her taste. And, like her husband, she was loath to trust anyone she didn’t personally know. But she knew McIver.

  Melania’s insistence on writing the speech herself as much as possible made McIver, or so it was thought, something of an asset. If Melania wasn’t going to be comfortable with words from stranger speechwriters, at least she had a “writer” was the general consensus within the Trump campaign team. And that was about as much thought as they gave it.

  McIver knew how to string sentences together, at least in a voice that Trump approved of (i.e., his own), and she was considered by Trump to be capable in the English language. What no one knew at the time, especially Melania, was that McIver would snag pivotal passages from Michelle Obama’s DNC speech.

  There are some who believe, however, that Melania was aware that she was reading plagiarized parts and just assumed she wouldn’t be caught. But those who were present for the incident claim that simply was not the case; Melania was a lamb to the slaughter. “I know she gave specific instructions on what she wanted the speech to be,” a friend of Melania’s who was aware of her thinking at the time tells me. “Unfortunately, someone within the organization put her in a very compromised and uncomfortable position.” Her friend, who has known her for almost two decades, says there’s nothing in Melania’s character that would point to her being a straight-up plagiarizer. There are those who disagree with Melania, many who think her motives are shadier than others might imagine, but in truth she has little of the truth-fudging habits of her husband. The “big” lies she’s been busted for—the campaign’s claim she earned a college degree, for example—are almost commonplace, at least for Washington, where there are senators who have embellished everything from their ethnic makeup to their military service. Not to excuse Melania’s occasional falsehoods, but she’s not ever going to say that noise from windmills causes cancer, or that the president of Russia didn’t know anything about U.S. election meddling.

  The morning after Melania’s RNC speech, Jason Miller, at the time the Trump campaign’s senior communications adviser, released a statement: “In writing her beautiful speech, Melania’s team of writers took notes on her life’s inspirations, and in some instances included fragments that reflected her own thinking. Melania’s immigrant experience and love for America shone through in her speech, which made it such a success.” First of all, there was not a “team of writers.” Phrasing it that way might have made it easier to buy time while the campaign tried to come up with a fall guy, but it only helped fuel the rumors that there wasn’t a team at all. To say there was a team was an invitation for the media to hunt for a team, realize there wasn’t one, and catch the campaign in even more lies.

  That spin, to put it mildly, did not work. Ironically, the Republican National Committee’s attempt to fight back on the speech was a massive crash and burn, too. Sean Spicer, then the RNC’s communications director, put up the truly laughable—and now infamous—My Little Pony defense. Speaking to Wolf Blitzer on CNN, Spicer claimed that only a small portion of Melania’s speech was like Michelle’s. He said that Melania’s words were universal, common phrases. And to prove it, he read off some similar quotes from “others,” including John Legend, Kid Rock and, yes, Twilight Sparkle from My Little Pony. “Twilight Sparkle said, ‘This is your dream. Anything you can do in your dream, you can do now.’ If we want to take a bunch of phrases and run them through Google and say, Who else said them? I can come up with a list in five minutes. And that’s what this is,” an amped-up Spicer said to Blitzer. What it really was? A total head-scratcher. Spicer was trying to push the narr
ative that maybe Hillary Clinton had done it, that her camp had run Melania’s sentences through plagiarism-detection software, which identified the words as Michelle Obama’s. It was a weird and stupid defense. No one bought it. And it had the added consequence of birthing a tangential headline associating the RNC’s lead comms guy with fictitious pastel-colored ponies.

  Trump’s campaign manager at the time, Paul Manafort (who would go on to be sentenced to 7.5 years for a variety of federal crimes, from tax evasion to obstruction of justice), took the bizarre line of defense a step further and wouldn’t even accept the speech was anything like Michelle’s, even though it so clearly was. “The speech was very effective,” said Manafort, after a full two days of everyone not talking about the speech’s effectiveness. “The controversy you’re talking about is not meaningful at all.” But it was, and someone on the team should have shot the growing story down as quickly as possible with a mea culpa and a statement from Melania saying something along the lines of how sorry she was.

  But the campaign, and Trump, kept giving it legs.

  Trump attempted to laugh it off, also a bizarre tactic. He tweeted, “Good news is Melania’s speech got more publicity than any in the history of politics especially if you believe all press is good press!”

  The story held the news cycle until it became clear someone had to do more to mitigate the damage. Trump, finally having realized his team was incapable of doing anything other than pointing fingers and talking about magical ponies, called for someone to step up and take the blame, because he couldn’t stand watching Melania get hammered. She was getting eviscerated.

  At best, she was accused of being too detached to have read her own speech and unaware where the content was from; at worst, she was a thieving trophy wife, assuming that the general public would not remember Michelle Obama’s speech from eight years ago. “Make Plagiarism Great Again!” was one headline; “Thanks, (Mrs.) Obama!” was another.

  After almost two full days of trying to bat it away, Trump finally realized that it wasn’t going to happen. Michelle Obama was too beloved, plagiarism was too strong a charge, and Melania didn’t have a deep bench of skilled supporters (see Spicer passage above) to successfully spike it. The pivot came in the form of a letter on Trump Organization letterhead, not Trump Campaign letterhead, from McIver. By not linking it to the presidential campaign, the letter distanced Trump’s team from the stench of the whole thing and made it easier, they hoped, for the public to believe it was some corporate pencil pusher who goofed and not, say, the “seasoned” folks behind team Trump.

  McIver said it was she who helped Melania Trump put her speech sentiments on paper and craft the final draft. “A person she has always liked is Michelle Obama,” said McIver in her letter. “Over the phone [Melania] read me some passages from Mrs. Obama’s speech as examples. I wrote them down and later included some of the phrasing in the draft that ultimately became the final speech. I did not check Mrs. Obama’s speeches. This was my mistake, and I feel terrible for the chaos I have caused Melania and the Trumps, as well as to Mrs. Obama. No harm was meant.”

  The letter was … strange. And, if it is to be believed, exposes the unprecedented and haphazard method by which the campaign had set up crafting Melania’s most important speech.

  McIver went on to write that the public statement was her idea. But no one believed that. She got to keep her job with the organization, though she said she offered her resignation. “Mr. Trump,” wrote McIver, “told me that people make innocent mistakes and that we learn and grow from these experiences.” The letter also revealed that McIver, in her sixties at the time of the RNC speech incident, was not a particularly gifted wordsmith and was somewhat rudimentary in her communication efforts. McIver liked to write, sure, but was she capable of crafting prose that expresses the deep thoughts and intense feelings of someone else, of “marinating” in them to ensure a powerful and important public speaking achievement? Nope.

  It was widely assumed the dealmaker had struck one with McIver, who turned down several interview requests about the incident. Trump probably told her that if she came forward, explained, and took the blame, yeah, she’d be a professional pariah, but he wouldn’t fire her or publicly trash her.

  Sadly, it wasn’t the first time Trump threw McIver under the bus. In 2006, Trump sued Timothy O’Brien, author of the Trump biography TrumpNation, for libel. As part of the suit, Trump was deposed in 2007 by O’Brien’s legal team, who asked whether in his books Trump had knowingly inflated his net worth by billions of dollars, something TrumpNation discussed. Trump called the financial exaggeration a mistake, but not his. “[It was] probably Meredith McIver,” said Trump in the deposition. (Trump would go on to lose his case against O’Brien.)

  Though she remains a mysterious—and mysteriously silent—character in Melania’s most embarrassing public reveal, McIver is, at the time of writing, still employed by the Trump Organization.

  The RNC speech, which Melania, like so many candidate spouses before her, had practiced delivering over and over and over again—more than she’d rehearsed anything in her life—turned out to be her worst nightmare come true. “She fell victim to an inexperienced political team,” says an insider. “Needless to say, it’s a situation none of us would want to find ourselves in.” Suffering humiliation and degradation, giving people a reason to stereotype her, and being the focus of a country’s ire and laughter—all of the things Melania had sought to avoid through lean participation in her husband’s campaign came flooding her way.

  The speech debacle drove Melania deeper into hiding. She essentially became the Greta Garbo of the campaign, just wanting to be left alone. But that was not an option.

  2

  The Reluctant Campaigner

  “The politics, well, it’s a tough business and you need to have a very thick skin.”

  —MELANIA TRUMP

  It was more than a year before the RNC speech debacle, June 16, 2015, to be exact, that Donald Trump stood at the top of an escalator on the mezzanine level of Trump Tower in midtown Manhattan, put his two thumbs up in the air, and directed his wife to get on, going so far as to give her a slight push at the small of her back before she stepped on for the ride down. As Neil Young’s voice blared over a sound system, reminding people to keep on rocking in a free world, Melania Trump, dressed in a two-piece white strapless outfit, got on the escalator that took her to the area where her husband would deliver the speech announcing his official candidacy for president of the United States.

  The escalator ride should have told us everything we needed to know about Melania. That she was calm, stoic, and reserved—and that she never, ever faked a smile. She could have been taking the escalator down a level from the shoe department at Saks Fifth Avenue for all that her expression revealed.

  Just before the entrance, Trump’s undisputed favorite child, daughter Ivanka, had warmed up the relatively small crowd assembled in the lobby of Trump Tower. “Welllllcome, everybody,” said Ivanka from the podium in her deep, breathy voice. “Today I have the honor of introducing a man who needs no introduction.” She talked about him being a legend, about his power, about his success—“I can tell you, there’s no better person to have in your corner.”

  Trump’s other kids were there, too: Donny, Eric, Tiffany, even Barron, who was nine at the time. Melania stood off to the side of the elevated stage, carpeted a royal blue. Trump spoke for forty-six minutes, mostly about how badly America was doing compared with the rest of the world. “When was the last time you saw a Chevrolet in Tokyo?” he asked the group of assembled supporters, many of whom, it would later be revealed, were the product of a talent company the campaign had hired to cast most of the attendees, offering them fifty bucks to wear Trump T-shirts and carry Trump signs. “Wow, that is some group of people. Thousands,” Trump had said when he first took the podium. There were maybe 150.

  It goes without saying that it’s likely none of those in attendance had ever seen a Chevy
on the streets of Japan—not that it mattered to Trump. He also talked about ISIS having “the oil” that “we should have taken.” And about the wall, saying he would make Mexico pay for it, soon to be a familiar refrain. He went on and on about business and trade and how Obama had basically ruined everything, getting madder and madder with each example, a buildup of white saliva forming in the right-hand corner of his mouth, a bright distraction on his deeply red-orange face. “It’s so nice to say I’m running as opposed to ‘if I run, if I run’—I’m running,” Trump said in between screeds on Yemen, building tariffs, Saudi Arabia, fracking, and what a nice person he is, goddammit. When he was done, closing with how he would make America great again (just seconds after literally saying, “Sadly, the American dream is dead!”), the Trump family hit the stage from the side, one by one, lining up to hug him. Tiffany went first, then Ivanka, then a handshake to Don Jr., a kiss for Don’s then wife, Vanessa, pats on the head for a couple of their kids; then it was Barron’s turn, and Melania, who gave him a stiff and awkward hug, took her turn as he kissed her cheek. Jared followed, and Lara and Eric Trump brought up the rear. Melania stood there, hovering near Barron, as cameras flashed. She smiled at first and then stopped.

  Maintaining a smile merely for effect was not a Melania thing to do. She was not a faker—not then, not during the campaign, and not as first lady. The number of times people to this day ask me, “What’s wrong with her? Why does she look so angry?” when they see her unsmiling, standing next to Trump as he stops to talk to the press on his way to the helicopter is a lot. What most people don’t understand is Melania’s heritage and the country in which she was born. In Slovenia, smiling a nongenuine smile isn’t really a thing. Admittedly, it’s a tad disconcerting when shopping in an outdoor market, making eye contact with a vendor, asking a hotel bellhop if they mind carrying a heavy bag, or soliciting a waiter about what he suggests from the menu. “We just don’t always feel like we have to pretend to be when we aren’t,” one of Melania’s old high school classmates from Slovenia told me.