The Opinions - Two Opinion Columnists on Melania Trump’s Memoir

Episode Date: October 15, 2024

Melania Trump promoted her recent memoir, “Melania,” with a series of glossy and cryptic promotional videos stating the desire “to share my perspective: the truth.” But what does the self-titled memoir reveal to us about the often inscrutable former first lady? The bookish Opinion columnists Carlos Lozada and Pamela Paul discuss what they learned — and often, what they did not — from her work.Thoughts? Email us at [e-mail]. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

This is The Opinions, a show that brings you a mix of voices from New York Times Opinion. You've heard the news. Here's what to make of it. Hi, I'm Carlos Lozada. I'm a New York Times opinion columnist and co-host of the Matter of Opinion podcast. I am delighted to be joined by my friend and fellow columnist Pamela Paul. Hey, Carlos. Good to see you, Pamela. Good to be here. So Pamela and I often just sit around and talk about books. So that's what we're going to do today.

In a prior life, I was a book critic at The Washington Post. Pamela used to run the New York Times book review. So this is kind of the thing that we enjoy doing. And we both just read Melania Trump's new memoir. Writing this memoir has been a deeply personal and reflective journey for me. It is just titled Melania. I believe it is important to share my perspective, the truth. And it's this like all black dust jacket, just one word,

Melania and white. And just one blurb on the back from, you guessed it, Donald Trump. It's a pretty conventional memoir in terms of what it covers. It's Melania Trump's childhood, her modeling career, her move to New York, her marriage, Donald Trump, and then a somewhat selective reading of her experiences as a political wife, as the first lady, and watching Donald Trump's career. But Pamela, just what did you make of the book? So it's funny that you say that it's like a lot of memoirs, a conventional memoir, because I felt like it was barely a book. Like, it's a book adjacent object, but it's not actually a book. Like, even the presentation of it, it's with the one blurb and with the bio, which is Melania Trump as a former First Lady of the United States successful business person and former international fashion model. She resides in Palm Beach, Florida, with her family. Like, there's no chance that Melania Trump wrote this, but we have no sign of who the ghostwriter is. I have kind of an idea that it was.

written by someone who worked for a long time in fashion PR or marketing, maybe someone who spent some time, you know, writing captions for like Harper's Bazaar magazine, that it was then read by... That is incredibly specific. Like a Trump loyalist who was like, insert political statement here. And the style, despite all of that, what I think of as like a group effort, is sort of like a fifth or seventh grade girl writing Sidney Sheldon fan fiction. Right. Like, I just thought a lot about the prose of this book, which was kind of remarkable. I know people are interested in the content, but to my mind, it's almost contentless.

When I said it, it feels like a conventional memoir. I meant that it feels like a conventional memoir in terms of the arc of what is ostensibly covered, right? Like childhood, you know, early adulthood, you know, forays into her career, right? Then, you know, meeting Donald and then political life, right? Like, it's sort of, it hits the beats you would imagine it to hit. but it's one of the rare political memoirs, not the only, one of the rare political memoirs where I feel that at the end, I really don't know more about the subject than I knew to begin with. I actually got a sense of who she is as a person, and I think that that is an extremely superficial, politically disengaged human being, like the last kind of person who you would think of as a political wife. Like, you know what she struck me as? Did you see White Lotus the second season?

Yes, I did. I saw them both. Okay. So she was like the Daphne character in season two, you know, portrayed by Megan Fahey, where she's sort of like, I don't really follow politics. Like, I feel like everything's kind of good. That is Melania Trump. Like, she is just, she is really interested in nice cars, in nice clothing. You know, you hear more about what she wore to every political event than you do about the event.

itself. Yeah. I'm struck by how small her world is. Yes. Right? The only people that she seems close to are her parents, her sister, who kind of disappears after the early portions of the book. Then Donald and, of course, their son, Baron, to whom she seems quite devoted. But even when she describes these characters, it is in ways that you really get almost nothing about them. It's like a series of adjectives and descriptions. Her mom, you know, boundless creativity, impeccable to taste and confidence, epitome of elegance, quiet strength, firm devotion, the father, he's confident, industrious, outgoing. Like, these are not people, right? These aren't actual characters. Yeah, it's all subterative adjectives. Yeah. It is all tell and not show. So this is the way she talks about

herself. And I just want to say, I have never heard a single human being describe themselves in this way. I possessed a keen curiosity and diligent work ethic. I had a genuine passion for learning. As a hard worker, I was always striving for the best. My childhood experiences shaped me into a disciplined, ambitious individual who values hard work, dedication, and self-awareness. That last word is like almost comical because there is no self-awareness. And then of her first professional runway show, she says, I felt a sense of calm confidence wash over me. I knew I was destined to do well at the big runway event on Friday night. It's like a memoir on Pinterest, you know.

It's, I mean, the one place where I thought you got a hint of personality was how angry she was when first her skincare line, her caviar-infused skincare line, like, didn't get off the ground. And no specificity, but it was clearly not her fault. Melania Caviar Complex C-6, please, okay? And she has these, you know, these slights that. still stick with her, like gigs that they got after the 2020 election and set up, and then nobody wanted to associate with their brand anymore. And so I think when you try to understand, which I've tried, and I'd love to hear your theories, why she wrote this book. Like, part of it, I think of, is a branding exercise, right? She is trying to resurrect, create her own brand,

and whether that means she wants a brand in case Donald Trump loses. in case they get divorced. That I don't know. The other possibilities that I could think of, I thought, is this a fundraising thing for the campaign? Like, we know that she likes to create branded products. Like, was this an effort to sort of soften and round out Trump's image before the election? Why did she wait until this moment to release this book?

I mean, maybe they just got it done, right? Like, I don't, you know, there's, we can think that there's like a deep, dark, you know, plan. and a very sophisticated rollout, you know, decision why early October is the moment. And if that's the case, I would think of two things. First, the main news that's coming out of it, because there's precious little news in anything else that's in the book, is about Melania's views on abortion. Individual freedom is a fundamental principle that I safeguard.

Without a doubt, there is no room for compromise when it comes to this essential right that all women possess from birth. And you may be right that it could be an effort to sort of soften Donald Trump's position on this, especially since people already think that, you know, he's not really one of these like hardcore, you know, pro-life, anti-abortion politicians.

But I think, you know, Occam's razor. I think that if Donald Trump loses in November, there's a lot less interest in Melania, a lot of people buying the book, buying her line of jewelry, or whatever she says. selling on her website. And so this is the moment to strike, you know, while while there's still a lot of focus on Donald Trump. But the thing about memoirs, and, you know, maybe this book will do really well. I haven't seen sort of early figures. It was number two on Amazon, like the weekend

before it came out. People look into political memoirs in part for kind of those big revelation moments or we want to know like what was ex-person thinking during this really controversial or difficult or complex or dangerous moment. Right. But she skips over so many of those moments, right? Like if you go back and read Hillary Clinton's memoirs, whether you buy them or not, she addresses the Monica Lewinsky moment when she was in the White House and like what she felt like and how she couldn't breathe and she was yelling and, you know, and there's no mention of

access Hollywood, of stormy Daniels, of any sort of, like, here's what I was actually thinking when this happened. Even when, even to say that she thought it was all nonsense, right? You know, she just skips, it's an incredibly selective reading. So like, birtherism, right? You know, is kind of part of how Trump made his political name. She dabbled in that as well. You know, it's just not there. Yeah. It's just, you know, none of this is there. And so in that sense, Not that, like, I wanted to be a blow-blow of scandal, right? But I want some grappling with what we all know. She really does not care a lot about politics.

I imagine her, you know, sitting around, she is scrolling online, she is watching assorted TV shows, looking at home decor magazines. We get more about the redecoration of the White House than we do about anything that actually took place there. In fact, there's a great moment, and that is on January 6th. Because what was she doing on January 6th? She had a team at the White House taking photographs of all the renovation projects they had done. And so she claims that she was so focused on that that she had no idea what was happening at the Capitol that Donald is off doing whatever he was doing. And she had no idea.

Her aide reaches out by text and says, do you want to condemn the violence publicly? Like, as it's going on. And that's Stephanie Grisham, who goes unnamed in the memoir, but who writes about this extensively in her memoir about this. and what Grisham writes in her memoir is that Melania just says one word, no, right? And how Grisham was really sort of shocked and troubled by this and then resigned. What Melania says in her memoir

is that she had no idea what Christian was talking about. It's like, what violence? You know, I always condemn violence if there's violence, you know? And so she has something very similar to what she said about the family separation policy. She was like, no one briefing what was going on. Right. It wasn't my fault.

I had no idea. I was looking at the renovation projects at the White House. Obviously, if I had known, I would have condemned the violence. And so it's a remarkable way to sort of dispense with January 6th. She doesn't at all pass any kind of judgment or even allusion to Donald Trump's potential role in this event. And instead just says, I didn't know. One me. Yeah.

There's this remarkable kind of sense of detachment you get throughout the book. I think what I gleaned from this book most of all is that Melania is very intentional about the way she comes across, that though she's very private, everything that she puts out into the public eye must be impeccable, unique, and sophisticated. And that is why the book is packaged this way. That's why the language is the way it is. So she does not acknowledge any sort of rough spots in any detail, any disagreements that she has with Donald. There's no, you know, sense that you get of what her marriage is like, what is her parenting like, what was her childhood really like? Because it is all portrayed, not through rose-tinted glasses, but like through like rhinestone platinum glasses. You know, it's everything is perfect. Everything is perfect and everything at the same time feels very opaque as a result.

Yes. There's a flatness to this book. So her relationship with Donald Trump in this book suffers from the same issues that all of her relationships do. You know, she lists a series of qualities rather than giving you anything tangible to hold on to. The one moment that he does something specific is something that kind of freaked me out a little bit. She says this is how concerned he is of her. He will often call her private doctor to check on her health. I thought that was so creepy.

I thought that was really odd. I was like, you know, it's one thing if you are, you know, an aging couple and you want to make sure that, you know, your wife got the medication, you know, and you would go together to the appointment. But, yeah, that was really. If I have sort of one takeaway is that they're kind of similar, right? And that they're all about appearances. They're all about how they come across. When Trump talks about what he's done, it was like the greatest economy in the world, you know, the likes of which we've never seen.

Yes. You know, everything, everything he does is the, you know, he was the biggest builder in New York. Like, everything is the biggest is the best. And they live in this kind of self-described world of superlatives, which may be, you know, part of why this marriage keeps on trucking. Right. I think actually that's exactly it.

Like, she had a nice time in the White House. Yeah. You know, she has remade sort of the expectations people hold for the office of the first lady for good or for ill. Maybe the last thing I want to ask you about the book, I read a lot of political books for my job. And I've always felt that even when ghostwritten books are, you know, pretty wretched, you know, maybe poorly written, that they still reveal something useful about the person, in part because they at least reveal how that person wishes to be perceived. Right? So, In what sense are you glad this book exists?

Wow. If there is a sense in which you are glad it exists. I guess that it confirms, it basically blows away any of the wishcasting that was going on with Melania that, like, secretly, she was some deep and interesting person who, you know, thought about, you know, abortion, you know, a lot and or maybe had an abortion.

Like, there's no dark story. there in the abortion reveal. I think that it obliterates those theories and it shows Melania to be exactly what you expected her to be, which is a fashion model who is only nominally engaged with politics or with the world

of her husband, Donald Trump. So people have said that the cover looks like a Chanel number five ad and I was thinking it could be like, Melania, the scent of indifference. Right? She just doesn't really care. She really doesn't care. That was the perfect coat.

She's wearing it every day. Pamela, this was fun. Let's read another book together. Let's read a better book next time. Be best with your books. That's right. Thanks, Carlos. If you like this show,

follow it on Spotify, Apple, or wherever you get your podcasts. This show is produced by Derek Arthur, Sophia Alvarez Boyd, Bischakad, Fiby Lett, Christina Samuoski, and Jillian Weinberger.

It's edited by Kari Pitkin, Allison Bruzek, and Annie Rose Strasser. Engineering, mixing, and original music by Isaac Jones, Sonia Herrero, Pat McCusker, Carol Saburo, and Afim Shapiro. Additional music by Amin Sohota. The fact check team is Kate Sinclair, Mary Marge Locker, and Michelle Harris. Audience Strategy by Shannon Busta, Christina Samuelski, and Adrian Rivera. The executive producer of Times Opinion Audio is Annie Rose Dresser.