The era of Donald Trump has been bad for everyone and everything, mostly, apart from the superrich and their tax bills, the real estate developers and their tax breaks, and the white supremacists, who seem to have been granted permission from the top to say the quiet part out loud. And apart from the cottage industry of Trump–themed books—all the fire and fury that’s been fit to print, dominate cable-news coverage, and hover on bestsellers lists. The successful books of this genre have often followed a form: Reporters teasing the juiciest, scariest, most revealing accounts from people who know Trump or worked with him or served under him, the “adults in the room” who whispered anonymously about the horrible things they witnessed, but who did nothing about them beyond said whispering. I say this with both affection for and intimate knowledge of the genre because I myself contributed to it.
Three variations on the form are hitting the market this summer: books from Mary Trump, the president’s niece; Michael Cohen, his longtime fixer; and now Stephanie Winston Wolkoff, a former close friend and adviser of first lady Melania Trump—three accounts from the most inside insiders of Trumpworld. What has struck me most about these books is not what salacious stories they have to share, though the stories are delicious and damning as advertised. It’s that some of the people closest to the Trumps have felt so jilted by them, so burned, so wrung out, that they’re willing to spill their guts about their own family or closest friends. The only reason these books exist is because the Trumps created a climate of backbiting and mistrust that subsumed everyone around them—a climate in which things like recording run-of-the-mill conversations to cover their hides or protect themselves from criminal investigations became the norm. For three different sets of reasons, Mary Trump, Cohen, and Wolkoff had the same knee-jerk response. They felt like it was the only way. And an even wilder notion: they were right.
That simple fact is more revealing than any leaked anecdote in any of these stories. Wolkoff’s book, Melania and Me: The Rise and Fall of My Friendship With the First Lady, out September 1, is the height of this revelation, the ceiling of the floor. Ultimately, it’s an illuminating story of the dissolution of a female friendship, with drama both high and low, slights overt and subtle, and visceral pain. It just so happens that the two friends are the first lady of the United States and the Vogue alum with event-producing bonafides who helped plan the presidential inauguration and joined the East Wing staff before their relationship came publicly unglued in the midst of questions over inaugural spending and security clearances in the White House. In February of 2019, I reported on the fallout—that the White House tried to throw Wolkoff under the bus by making it appear that she had taken millions of dollars from the inaugural funds to line her own gilded pockets. This portrayal fit right into the grifter narrative so many in Trumpworld had perpetuated by actually grifting that most people believed it without hesitation. The truth, as Wolkoff lays out, was that there wasn’t a grift on her part, and she was told privately that her firing from the White House had nothing to do with inaugural spending, despite reports to the contrary. Melania did nothing to defend her at the time, and after more than a year of feeling like there was something amiss with the way the inaugural funds were spent and the events were planned, Wolkoff started to protect herself. Since then, she has participated in investigations into inaugural spending.
Wolkoff, who’s around a stunning six feet tall and who looks like Melania’s sister, or first cousin, or at least a client of her hairstylist, saved everything. And there was plenty to hold onto because they had all communicated so much, through Signal messages and texts, emails, contracts, phone calls. Her Park Avenue apartment started to look like the set of Criminal Minds. She wanted to get to the bottom of what had happened and why her reputation had been sullied and her name dragged through the mud, all because the woman she thought was one of her closest friends had turned her back on her. If humiliation was the wound, the betrayal was the salt, and the way Wolkoff wanted to wash it all away was with proof.