by Kate Bennett
That Ivanka was instrumental in helping shut down the policy, doing anything she could to use her congressional connections to find a legislative solution, was very much just the sort of story that would help reverse the negativity. In news accounts, members of Congress said that Trump had identified Ivanka as the one who helped him see the light, and the urgency, of changing what was happening, not necessarily Melania.
The next day, Trump signed the executive order ostensibly ending the zero-tolerance policy of separating families at the border, but he did so after getting an earful from Melania the evening beforehand, asking him why Ivanka was getting credit for this and not her. As Trump spoke to the media in the Oval Office after signing the order, it was clear he had gotten the message. “Ivanka feels very strongly about it,” but also, next breath, “my wife feels very strongly about it,” said Trump, careful, after the dressing-down he had gotten the night before, to interject Melania.
It still wasn’t enough.
The next day, I was on a plane with Melania, her team, and a handful of other press members. We didn’t know exactly where we were headed, but we were told that we were going to the border—and were unable to report it until we landed, ultimately, in McAllen, Texas. “I’m headed down to Texas” is what Melania told the president, apparently two days before, which is not a time frame that is generally workable to move a political principal around the country. It typically takes at least a week for the Secret Service and an advance team to clear a trip for the first lady, and even that’s very tight. There must be coordination for the actual travel, as well as with local law enforcement. Ingress and egress points need to be dedicated, with backup plans; different motorcade routes must be established; and everyone on the ground who will interact with the first lady needs to be vetted and checked. It’s not an easy or fast undertaking. Forty-eight hours of notice wasn’t common, nor was it easy to accommodate.
But this wasn’t an ask—she was going. Initially, Trump tried to talk her out of it, saying it wasn’t the right time to keep this story top of the headlines, but he got onboard as soon as he saw how determined she was about it. Fighting with Melania when she wanted something never got him anywhere. She said that whether or not he signed the executive order (this was the night before he did), she was going to go. “This was one hundred percent her idea,” Grisham told me.
Melania was the first and, for quite some time, only Trump family member or senior administration figure to actually visit the border facilities and tour them. Unfortunately, much of her trip was overshadowed by the jacket. You know, THE jacket. That army-green parka with the words “I really don’t care do u?” printed on the back in bold white lettering. Because of that ridiculous statement jacket she decided to wear onto the plane at Andrews Air Force Base on her way to McAllen, the entire trip was negated. No one wanted to talk about Melania’s well-intentioned reasoning for going, what she saw while she was there, what she learned about the border patrol’s family-intake process or the facility where many of the children were taken when they were separated.
None of that mattered because Melania had worn that $39 jacket from Zara—coincidentally, or not, the fast-fashion brand favored by Ivanka, who during that period had been wearing lots of pieces from Zara on an almost daily basis. Melania, to my knowledge, hadn’t worn Zara before, and a $39 anything wasn’t ever her price point. I don’t believe coincidences exist when it comes to Melania Trump. Having covered her for as long as I have, each thing she does has meaning to it, even the clothing she wears.
To me, and I was asked about the jacket over and over again—I literally had friends from high school texting me “what did it mean?”—it felt personal. In my Melania-trained brain, I was almost certain the connection was to Ivanka and Zara and the way Ivanka had tried to take credit for getting Trump to soften his stance on immigration policy. I believed, and still do, that the jacket was a facetious jab at Ivanka and her near-constant attempts to attach herself to positive administration talking points.
There are many reporters, myself included, who have been contacted about how Ivanka tried to push for this or was instrumental in accomplishing that. It’s become sort of a running joke in the newsroom that whenever there is a story about Trump’s signing something (or almost signing something), Ivanka must have been behind it. Or if Trump does something controversial and Ivanka tries to stay quiet about it, she typically pops up somehow as being opposed to it once the media has called her out for said quietness. Trump pulled out of the Paris Climate Accord? “An administration official” says Ivanka tried to lobby her father to stay in it. Trump lets a crowd at a rally chant “Send them back!” about four minority congresswomen? “An administration official” says Ivanka spoke with her father the morning after the rally to dissuade him from supporting the rhetoric. There are other examples of “anonymous sources” defending Ivanka’s public silence on hot-button issues. So when “a source close to Ivanka” tried to feed the fire that it was she, the first daughter, and not the first lady who had helped convince her father to sign the executive order to prevent the zero-tolerance child-separation policy, Melania flared.
In all honesty, when we left Andrews Air Force Base, we, the traveling press with Melania that day, didn’t notice the jacket. We only have a couple of minutes to set up under the wing of her plane before she rolls up and steps from her SUV to board. In those moments, the pool TV camera, the three or four photographers from the wire services, and any other reporters, like myself, need to be ready to capture her and report. And then once she walks up the steps to the plane and goes inside, we have seconds to scramble to the back steps, climb up with all our equipment, and get onboard before the plane begins its taxi. Traveling via government airways is nothing like a commercial flight, which might be obvious, but every time I get on Melania’s plane, I am surprised by how little time there is between when I sit and buckle up to when we’re barreling down the runway for takeoff.
So that day, none of us really noticed right away the words on the back of her jacket. I saw some lettering but just assumed it was a “fashion” moment, as when Louis Vuitton launched a line of its iconic bags and clothes graffitied by the artist Stephen Sprouse. I actually asked Stephanie Grisham when I noticed the writing out of the corner of my eye, “What does her jacket say?” But she didn’t answer me, and with the engine of the plane whirring just feet away from us, likely didn’t hear me to begin with.
When we landed back at Andrews Air Force Base later that day, the press, as we normally do, gathered under the wing of the plane to catch a shot of Melania getting off via her front stairs and climbing into her SUV. Then we all loaded into our press vans and the lot of us motorcaded the fifteen-minute drive back to the White House.
On the flight home, once the wire photographers had a chance to edit their photos and send them back to their editors for distribution to awaiting media outlets, the story about the jacket was the hot topic of the moment. How could the first lady of the United States have gone to visit children and families at the border wearing messaging literally signaling she doesn’t care?
The reporters assembling under the wing when we got back were placing odds that Melania would not be wearing the jacket again. It’s important to note that when we landed in Texas, she had changed into a completely different outfit, as she regularly does, and there was no sign of the offending jacket the entire trip. She didn’t wear it on the ground in Texas, which to me was evidence the messaging was not meant for greater public display. I would say fifty percent of the time Melania travels, she will wear something different on the plane from what she wears on the ground—usually, I’m assuming, for comfort. So while the other reporters wondered what she would wear, whether she would keep on what she had in Texas, the “inoffensive” look, or whether she could put back on her travel clothes, with the jacket, I knew better.
I’d been covering the first lady since the week before Inauguration Day, the only full-time reporter dedicated solely to Mela
nia Trump. I was aware of Melania’s stubborn streak, one of the things that binds her to her husband: when she gets attacked, she attacks back. I had a feeling she would be reading the news reports on the plane home in her front cabin the way the rest of us were in the back, and if there’s one thing Melania hates, it’s being tsk-tsked by the press.
She’s Melania; she wasn’t going to cower from a hot news story.
I said out loud, to no one in particular, as my colleagues weighed whether she would or wouldn’t have it on, “Just watch. She’s going to be wearing it.”
The words were no sooner out of my mouth than the door to the plane opened and Melania stepped out and down the stairs, wearing her white jeans, white Stan Smith Adidas sneakers, sunglasses, and, yep, the jacket.
I can’t say with any reportable certainty that she wore that jacket to send a message to Ivanka to quit taking credit, but Melania’s message was surely conveyed loud and clear to the intended receiver. As I’ve said before, there are no coincidences with Melania Trump.
14
The Firing Squad
“You don’t fuck with the first lady.”
—ANONYMOUS WHITE HOUSE STAFFER
The jacket fiasco aside, Melania’s independence has most often served her well. When Grisham, months prior and not too long into Melania’s tenure, first told me in an on-the-record statement that Melania was independent and did what she felt like doing because she thought it right and not because she was helping bolster the West Wing, it was fairly groundbreaking. I can’t even recall what exactly I was asking her about that first time because there were so many instances of Melania’s being radically different in how she behaved—not acting in tandem with the West Wing, as her most immediate predecessor had been. If she is aligned with Trump in practice and theory, she will stick by him—but if she is not, she or Grisham will happily say that she is not.
One of the most glaring examples of Melania’s being, well, Melania would come several months after Jacket Gate, when Melania called for the ouster of one of her husband’s senior staffers—because she, Melania, did not like her, nor did she trust her.
In November 2018, Grisham made a statement on behalf of her boss that was unlike any public statement issued by a first lady before: “It is the position of the Office of the First Lady that (Mira Ricardel) no longer deserves the honor of serving in this White House.” In a swift sentence, Melania, via her spokeswoman, had trod upon staffing decisions in the West Wing, a matter she had never involved herself in before. She was telling not only the president that she didn’t like one of his senior employees but the rest of the world, too.
It was a jaw-dropper.
Ricardel was deputy national security adviser, a position that on its surface had nothing to do with Melania’s East Wing world. But Ricardel did have something to do with Melania’s team—she had a dustup with Grisham before Melania’s Africa trip the month before, and it had spilled out into the open in an extraordinary and unprecedented way with the release of this statement.
I should preface this story by saying none of the several people I spoke to about this incident, many of whom had professional relationships with Ricardel, had anything nice to say about her. Her reputation as a team player was not good, and she was known to backstab. She was technically a member of John Bolton’s national security team, and when Trump hired Bolton as national security adviser in March, he brought Ricardel with him as a top aide shortly thereafter. With Grisham’s statement, her time in the West Wing didn’t last more than six months.
The whole thing began when the first lady was planning her trip to Africa, her first major solo international trip. Seats on Melania’s plane were scarce—there were staff to consider, Secret Service, tactical teams, advance staff, military office personnel, and the press. Melania doesn’t fly on a 747 like her husband typically does for long trips; her plane is a smaller 757, designated a C-32 due to its military status, with fewer seats and a tighter layout for the interior cabins. Ricardel wanted a say as to which members of her own staff were to be on the plane; she didn’t feel that they should fly commercial. While it wasn’t necessarily unusual that someone from the national security team would be on a trip like this, the first lady’s staff at the last minute determined one of Ricardel’s National Security Council staffers’ seats would be pulled to make room for a journalist. Ricardel flipped when she got the news.
As a result, Ricardel decided to withhold resources from the NSC for Melania’s trip, making it more difficult for operations to run smoothly. It was a petty move and clearly meant as a form of sabotage. Melania’s staff members were denied basic logistical information on the trip, details of which were confidential for security reasons but that only served to emphasize how detrimental Ricardel’s retribution was. The trip lasted six days and included stops in Ghana, Malawi, Kenya, and Egypt, countries that lack the modern infrastructure allowing a high-level dignitary to smoothly get around. Melania’s staff members also weren’t given promised policy documents or helpful communication strategies, which, again, in countries like the ones they were visiting caused headaches and delays. Ricardel was behind it all—just because of a seat on a plane.
When Melania found out about what had happened, she was furious. Her staff works hard for her, and she knows it, which doesn’t go unappreciated. She values what they have given up to work for her (Grisham’s young son lives in Arizona with her ex-husband; Melania’s chief of staff Lindsay Reynolds’s, three children reside in Ohio with her husband, and she flies back most weekends to be with them). Melania adores her staff, and they rely on her not only to be fair with them but also to have their backs. Grisham and the rest of the staff didn’t need to press the issue any further—Melania listened, took it in, and believed them. Ask anyone in the White House, and they will tell you the first lady is ferociously devoted to her team—the ones you ask who work in the West Wing will say it wistfully, in a way that says they wished their boss was the same. “You don’t fuck with the first lady,” someone who works in the White House told me. When Ricardel decided to retaliate, she basically signed her own exit papers from the Trump administration.
Ricardel didn’t stop her vengeance even when she got home, doubling down instead. She spread stories about Melania’s staff’s behavior on the trip to Africa, saying they were partying too hard and making themselves look bad as representatives of the White House. That was the final straw. If there’s something that inflames Melania’s quiet demeanor, it’s rumors about her that aren’t true. Since the days of the campaign, she’s been quite forthright about how she hates people who make things up about her. “Only I have my story,” she once said, “only I know the truth.” Melania’s tight-knit staff is intensely loyal to her, and she has made it clear that loyalty is a two-way deal.
Melania went right to the president, telling him about Ricardel’s behavior, what had happened on the trip, and how she was leaking nasty and untrue rumors about the East Wing. Trump tried to calm her, telling her he would take care of it. However, Ricardel technically fell under Bolton, and Trump wasn’t all that interested in telling his new national security adviser what to do with his staff. The whole thing felt dramatic and uncomfortable. When he told Bolton that Melania wanted him to do something about Ricardel, Bolton responded that she was a trusted aide and he wanted to keep her on. Trump let it go.
But Melania didn’t.
As Ricardel stayed on and the stories and friction continued, Melania again spoke to her husband, insisting he do something about this bad apple in his West Wing. Ricardel was also infuriating others with her leaks to the press about other administration officials she apparently had it in for, ones she crossed paths with on a daily basis, including then–chief of staff John Kelly. A White House official confirmed that Ricardel “liked to pick fights” and that her “personality isn’t for everyone.” Ironically, Ricardel and Melania had never met in person; Melania was acting only on what she had been told. But that was enough for her.
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When Trump once again didn’t move fast enough for the first lady’s liking and Ricardel was clearly still employed, Melania and Grisham crafted the statement, which was released to the public. They didn’t give the West Wing a warning it was coming—even the president was blindsided.
By the following day, Ricardel was packing her office in boxes, essentially fired by the president, who had no other choice. To keep her on would be to publicly ignore this powerful pronouncement from his wife. He couldn’t do that. It was negotiating power that really only Melania had.
“That was something,” one Melania observer said of the whole debacle.
It’s not unusual for a first lady to weigh in on staffers she doesn’t like. Nancy Reagan’s famous distaste for Ronald Reagan’s chief of staff, Don Regan, led to his firing in 1987. Nancy, who always looked out first and foremost for the well-being of her husband, had a frosty relationship with Regan, but it boiled over after a screaming match on the phone about whether the president should participate in a press conference. Nancy thought he should not; Regan believed he should. In the end, as with Melania, the president sided with his wife.
The only big difference between Nancy and Melania was that Nancy carried out her mission behind closed doors; Melania did hers in a very public way. It was the first time that Melania exercised her power as first lady, and people both in the White House and outside it took notice. Most everyone who had taken a surface pass at Melania’s personality deemed her quiet and uninvolved, more interested in her clothes and privacy than matters of state and country. With the Ricardel episode, it was clear they were wrong.
Not only did Melania have power and influence with the president, she perhaps had more of both than anyone else in the entire White House. Melania’s team was small, but it was mighty. And Melania’s go-to mouthpiece, Stephanie Grisham, was as fearless as her boss—and the president was about to take notice.