The Daily Beast Podcast - The Daily Beast Podcast On Melania's New Book

Episode Date: October 10, 2024

This week, Joanna Coles and Samantha Bee talk all things Melania and share the latest scoop on Silicon Valley with Jessica Lessin, CEO of The Information. Sam shares her experiences with menopause and Joanna talks celeb sightings at opening night of the new Robert Downey Jr. play on Broadway. Subscribe here https://episodes.fm/1767675909 Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hey, just pop it in to share an excerpt from the newest episode of the Daily Beast podcast hosted by our chief creative and content officer Joanna Coles and late night legend Samantha B brought to you by 5-9. Want to hear more? Subscribe to the Daily Beast podcast wherever you're listening to this to catch a new episode every Thursday. So what are you obsessed with Joanna? Well, I can't, I can't top that.

The only book I can top it with is probably Melania by Melania. And by Melania. Just say that very loosely. Yeah. Well, right. Yeah, by Milania, or Melania, how do you say it, Melania AI? Joanna, what are you obsessed with? Well, I think I'm obsessed with the two people we're talking to today, actually.

So I want to get to the download to unpack the biggest beast stories of the week. And finally, our countdown is over. We get to talk about Melania, Melania's book. It's finally here. I read that beast. Oh, my God. Okay, lots to discuss. The former First Lady released her memoir, simply entitled, what else, Melania, on Tuesday.

The former fashion model from Slovenia, Melania became First Lady of the United States in 2017 as the wife of Donald Trump. And throughout her time in the public eye, Melania maintained a highly controlled and private image, and much of her personal life has remained enigmatic. And I think it's fair to point out other Republican First Ladies have written books. Betty Ford wrote a glad awakening about her struggles with alcohol. And of course, Barbara Bush and Millie Bush co-wrote Millie's book about the Bush's family dog. Seriously, Millie takes a writing credit. it on the cover. And it's too bad that Millie wasn't around, I think, to help Melania with this book.

Yes, I agree with that. So to join us for this conversation is the only person who knows Melania as well as Melania knows herself. It's Mary Jordan. Mary is a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist and author of The Art of Her Deal, which is an unauthorized biography of Melania Trump. And currently, Mary serves as the associate editor at The Washington Post. Mary, welcome to our obsession. Deladine. Thank you so much for being here. I read your book on Melania, and it was so much more delicious and interesting than the book she wrote, and I say that in air quotes. When I finished it, my first text to Joanna was this book was written in predictive text by a squirrel

walking across an iPhone. So that is my take. I think it is. Like, I thought there would be something fun in it? But the answer is no. Do we think that she read her own book? Is my first question to you. Well, I know that she took a lot of care in the photographs. There are almost as many photographs as words and as a former model and someone who image is so important, she really laid out those photos. English is not her first language, so you can kind of guess that there was help. there. Yes, based on what I read in the book, she does spend an awful lot of her time curating photos and, in fact, missed much of January 6th because she was busy curating photos and nobody told her what was happening outside. Oh, my God. That was also debunked because other people

said that they did tell her. Oh. But she said, you know, they were leaving the White House pretty soon and she was cataloging and taking photographs of broad recent things. Oh my God. This book is so bland and soulless. It is just a travesty of a waste of paper. And all I could think of when I was reading it was, oh, right, she's a birther, right. She's an election denier. So I really would love to hear your perspective, your perspective on this book. Like you interviewed a hundred people, over 100 people for your book on her. What was it like spending that much time wrestling with her as a subject? You know, I'm not young, and I was a foreign correspondent and worked in three different continents,

and it was the most miserable period of my life. And I have covered very difficult things like wars. The reason was that the Trumps and Melania sue people that write about them. Right. And they tell people not to talk to them. the media. And Melania has so few friends. So while, you know, you're writing about Donald Trump, who likes to sue people too, at least he, you know, there's hundreds of people that had direct interaction. She is pretty much a hermit. So there were very few targets to get real information.

That's why it took so long. She spends a lot of time with her family, though, right? She was living until her mother died with her mother, wasn't she? And obviously she spends time with Barron. We know that she's now living in New York with Baron, who's at NYU. And apparently one of the reasons that the family wanted him to go to NYU was so she could move back to Trump Tower. Right. She loves Trump Tower. She built a spa in there.

She came to America when she was 26 and landed in New York and has loved New York. So I'm not surprised about that. But I guess when they were in the White House, the Secret Service used to tell me that it was Melania, Barron, and her parents who were, you know, eating by themselves, talking by themselves always in Slovenian. Donald Trump didn't know what they were saying. The Secret Service didn't know what they were saying.

You know, it was very different. You know, we never had that first lady who grew up speaking another language. And not like Spanish, where lots of people would be able to understand it. Slovenians are small, you know, small country, small language. How fascinating that. And also the perfect way to live in the White House with Donald Trump, that you have your own secret language. The Secret Service thought it was remarkable because they didn't know what they were doing or saying.

But they're very tight. I mean, so you're right. Her family was everything. Everything. So Melania speaks Slovenia with her family in the White House and Donald Trump has no idea what they're talking about. She says she speaks other languages. Five other languages. Donald Trump and she have said that over and over.

I spent two and a half years zero evidence of this. I went to Milan where she worked. talk to people who were at dinner with who spoke Italian, no Italian, German, no, I mean, it's just made up. And there's a video of Jackie Kennedy speaking French from the 60s. Everyone has a phone. If she were speaking one of these languages, why is there not a clip? I ask her on the White House so many times, please give me evidence. Zero. There is a streak of exaggeration among the Trumps, both her and her husband. You know, she wasn't a supermodel. She was a supermodel. She was was a runway model. I mean, I'm not knocking her. It's just why exaggerate everything.

She's a fabulous. He's a fabulous. They're cut from the same cloth. She did come into the country on an Einstein, what they call the Einstein visa, though, for extraordinary talent. And her husband is an anti-immigration guy, and he's married to an immigrant. I mean, they are an unusual pair. She is so separate. Like, her level of privacy really reminds me of a story we were talking about last week about Putin's secret family who was just like hidden away behind these walls and they're just living their lives in a totally sequestered environment just driving around within the property. You just never see her. She's never anywhere. I talked to some of the housekeepers, you know, because I was trying to like, who sees her? What is she doing all day?

Right. And so they said that she is super content. She spends a lot of time online. She was reading, you know, what's been written about her. She's not happy with a lot of the things that have been posted about her, which is, I think, why she wanted to put that book out, except, of course, it's the money, really, that the book. It's really all about that, because she will make money on it. And she has asked, if you, you know, normally if you're on a book tour, you give interviews, but she asked CNN for $250,000 for an interview. And so it's clearly a moneymaker. But in addition to that I think she spends a lot of time by herself online. She likes to look at fashion magazines. She spends time with her son. And she's deeply content, the housekeepers say, though they thought

it was weird, too. Like they said she spends a huge amount of time by herself. I mean, obviously it's a cash grab. I mean, it makes me so sad that there are going to be parts of the country where people are like, she really does care about this. And it's going to end up being curriculum in somebody's school. I mean, that's awful, but you feel, you know, you feel the cash grab. There is a section, oh my God, there is a section at the end of this book where she describes her involvement with blockchain technologies and the development of two blockchain verticals to provide exceptional service for fans of her jewelry and memorabilia collections. And there's pictures of all the memorabilia that she sells on her websites. It's such a clear plug written by

God knows who. It is actually astonishing, just the most heartwarming stuff. There's nothing personal. Every chapter trails off. It's just like, you know, I believe in a woman's choice for what she should do with her own body. Anyway, I don't really know what happened on January 6th, but I deplore violence. Any Hoosers? I imagine she spends a ton of time in a sheet mask and probably because she always looks fabulous. So I think she's lying around the white house, well, no longer at the White House, but she's lying around Trump Tower in sheet mask. She probably has a full body sheet mask. Because whenever you do see her, on the rare glimpses we get of her, she does look fabulous. then clearly that's very important to Donald Trump.

He's always talking about central casting. She is in many ways central casting for a kind of spy novel in a sense, a first lady who speaks a completely separate language to her husband and who nevertheless looks fabulous. Well, can you imagine what it's like to be married to Donald Trump? Not really. Not really. I love the fact that she used to go shopping in Bergdorf-Gubborn,

which is, of course, where he was. accused of assaulting E. Jean Carroll in the changing rooms at Bergdorf-Germann. So they have a connection there. You know, I think in the past, I think when they were in the White House for hopefully the first and only time, a lot of people projected onto her this belief that she was trapped and held there against her will. Why do you think that we have such a tendency to project onto First Ladies, when it's very clear from your book that she is totally politically aligned with him, that, again, she's absolutely a birther, absolutely a conspiracy theorist. Why do people want to believe that she's something other than what she isn't? You know, I think part of it is she looks so

uncomfortable the moments you see her in public with him. You know, photographers have caught scowls, And there's some famous photo where she sees other people and she smiles. And then she looks at her husband. And, you know, so you can kind of write captions about, I'm really with this guy. Part of it is that. But, you know, she came to this country. She didn't have much.

She grew up. Her mom was worked in a clothing factory. Dad was a chauffeur. All of a sudden, at 28, she sees, you know, Donald Trump. And she's got a jet, a private jet. She's got houses in different places. I think that she may not know what her real politics were when she first lined up with him, but she's been grateful for him.

And I think that lost opportunity in that book is she has a pretty remarkable immigrant story to tell. I mean, honestly, America is all about that, right? Your mom was worked in a factory and you came to this country, and now you have gold toilets, like in Trump Tower. So I don't know why she doesn't do that. Lost opportunity there. But people close to her told me that she never looks back. She wants people to think she always was like this, like a Fifth Avenue gal. Apparently, she still writes letters to King Charles. Please, somebody, please explain what their correspondence is comprised of. I wondered if that was true, though. I mean, she does talk about meeting him and then, as you say, writing him letters. And I was like, really? Really? That's alarming, although the British monarchy's done crazy of things. And Prince Charles himself was very upset when Trump pulled out of the Paris Climate Accords.

I mean, there's no mind sync there on the environment or many things. I mean, perhaps she sent a note, thank you for this. He sent one back. Thank you for this. It could be like that. Merry Christmas. The war on Christmas is over. We can finally say it again. We know that the queen really didn't like Donald Trump at all, thought he was very rude when he came to visit on the state visit and he was late and kept her waiting and no one keeps the queen waiting. But there was something in the book I thought was interesting where she discusses or she puts to rest the idea that Barron has autism. This is something that's gone on online. Rosie O'Donnell raised it and Melania revisits it to say he doesn't have autism, which I thought was an interesting.

way of bringing her child into the book. There's also only one mention of Ivanka and Donald's children from an earlier marriage. Mary, do they get on? Oh my gosh. It was war when they were in the White House. Melania was delayed in moving in, if you remember, she stayed up in New York, and people told me she was renegotiating her pre-up during that time because suddenly she had leverage. It would look bad for him if she didn't come. Ivanka took her. the opportunity when she wasn't there to steal some of the resources, to say she was going to have a family office. So it was like office space in the East Wing personnel. So Melania, I mean, it was not a pretty picture with the two of them at all. How many renegotiations has that

pre-nup been through? You know, Donald Trump famously has written about how tough a negotiator he is. Sure. And how anybody would be stupid if they didn't have a pre-tip, right? And the lawyer for his second wife, Marla Maples, said he felt bad for Marla, how little she got. The people that I talked to at length said that when Melania had married him, she really just wanted a nice wedding and a baby because he had already had kids from the first two. So she didn't have much. And so she had a ringside seat to how to negotiate. And the number one thing is when you have leverage, use it. So she didn't have it when he wasn't in politics. But the minute he moved. in. She did. So all I know is that she negotiated, she said, I didn't sign up for this and you want me

to come to Washington. You've got to do better. And you've got to give specifically more to Barron because she felt that he ignored the youngest child from his third marriage. Do you think if, and I say, God forbid, if they end up in the White House, I can't even say the words without trying, you know, just quaking. That is another renegotiation. It gets put through. I think she's very smart. I think that I wouldn't be surprised. I just don't have the reporting on the, you know, if there were. But I'm telling you the main thing people don't get is she's smart. Maybe because she doesn't say that much and she's with Donald Trump or she was a model. But for whatever reason, people think, oh, a do-go or something. And, you know, she's not like anyone. When I know, she's super antisocial. I talk to people who say they're at dinners with her, and she doesn't say a word the whole night. Really? So she's extremely quiet.

She's not invited to the dinner party. Well, she's definitely not invited to the podcast. But she's smart. That's what she wants. But also, I wonder if that's because she's just used to being looked at, and she knows that she does have this sort of fabulosity to her. and that if she starts speaking, it spoils it. Though I'm impressed that she's managed to read the audio book, which I haven't listened to yet.

Though, Sam, I am going to ask you to read something around the blockchain. I do think we need your impression. She doesn't mention it in the book. But Mary, what would be your insight into how she dealt with the whole Stormy Daniels trial? Because she was very noticeably absent, didn't turn up to support him. Furious. She was furious when she originally found. out because of course she was right after she had Barron. That's and also there was another

woman McDougal. Remember she was playboy funny. Several people I talked to said just furious and really furious because image matters to her like she didn't like people thinking her husband cheat on her. It's interesting she's quite like her husband in many ways like they really are obsessed by image and how they look and neither of them really trust other people and neither of them need other people, not even themselves. I mean, there are obvious differences between them. She's as quiet as he is loud, but they are really quite alike. And maybe that's why they stay together all this time.

But I mean, they stay together technically, but they live separate, you know, separate live, separate bedrooms, separate states. I think that's why she wants autonomy over her own body, right? It's why she believes that women should be allowed to choose. The housekeepers said that even the rare times they're in the same house, they're not in the same room. Right. And they're not on the campaign trail together really much. And she's charging appearance fees for her presence.

That's going to go down in history. I mean, the idea that she will not go when her husband's running for president, she's the prime surrogate, unless she's paid. She did it once. She got $250,000 from Log Cabin Republicans. Only time in this cycle so far that she's gone out there. It's really. And, you know, we were talking about other First Lady's write books, but not during a campaign. You don't, you know, it's later. Like, there is an honor to running for the highest office in the land, you know, and being First Lady. I do think that these actions will go down in history as very, very, very different. Well, it does sound like she's building her own divorce fund.

She knows, of all people, how close he's come to bankruptcy on so many occasions. So she's building her own stash. I heard that she was asking, when the book originally went out as an idea, she was asking $10 million for it. And she didn't get that from any of the mainstream publishers. So she's published, Mulani is published by Skyhorse Publishers. which published the Woody Allen book that no one else would publish and also RFK Jr., some of his crackpot theories. So she's with, she's with like-minded people.

All I could think of the whole time I was reading also was poor Michelle Obama having to sit in that car with her and have a lighthearted conversation on the way. I can't remember if it was to the inauguration or from the inauguration. when this woman had been so involved in Trump's birtherism and had meaningfully contributed to that conspiracy. And Michelle Obama wrote in her book that it is the one thing she can never, ever forgive Donald Trump for. Because it put her family in danger, in physical danger, because people said, well, Donald Trump's saying that you weren't born in America. And therefore, you're illegitimate president. and therefore you should be shot. So that wasn't a small thing.

And, you know, Malawi has always backed her husband up. When asked about that, she backed him up. When asked, you know, after the famous Access Hollywood tape where her husband is saying gross things about groping women, she said it's just locker room talk, boys talk. That was very, very helpful in October right before people went to vote when it was the famous Hillary Clinton. Everyone thought Hillary Clinton was going to win.

really, really, really did help. I'm really recommending to people that if they want to learn about Melania, they should buy your book and not her book. And then Joanna and I will just make photocopies of her book because we have one copy that we're passing around. Yeah, we're not going to pay for it. We're not going to pay for it. We'll just send a photocopy of it all over the country.

I do want to give props to our executive editor, Hugh Docherty, who got the book early and then proceeded to fill it like a fishmonger going through it, looking for the fleshy bits. It should be more of an extraordinary story than AI. I mean, Melania managed to write. I'm surprised she hasn't launched her own AI, actually, because Milan-I-A works for her, right? Oh, don't give ideas to this crew of people.

Joanna, you take that back right now or trademark it. Mary, how did you feel at the end of spending all that time with Melania? Did you like her? I mean, it doesn't sound like you liked her. I thought she's interesting, and again, I just think, why not tell this unconventional story? I think people, you know, are you the sins of your husband? No, except when you enable somebody who does destruction on January 6th, and, you know, you come out and say her for abortion rights, except did you stop your husband when he was

packing the court to undo Roe v. Wade? So now she's in knee-deep. Kne-deep. Kne-deep. All right. But she's got good knees. Good knees. I'm going to read one sentence from this, and it's going to be, I'm going to, I'm going to brutalize it.

It's really bad. I, along with a team of experts, developed two blockchain verticals targeted to my audience that provided everything from supply and design to production, marketing, sales, and delivery. MelaniaTrump.com at USA memorabilia.com. The driving force behind working with blockchain technology is autonomy. blockchain provides a solution like i mean like who what is that it's fantastic that's what it is honestly sam this is your next show you should go on the road as monaony i know you have a great show coming up but this is your this is your future i think you should do it in the situation room she

wrote that she was in the situation room so you could do a show about that yes donald inviting her in to watch the assassination of one of americans enemies as if it was a kind of Saturday night special. Yes, this book is a crime. And I'm so glad that you came on here to talk about it with us. Mary, thank you so much. Thank you. Want more great listens?

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