We can’t go on forever pitting former and currents against each other, as if the world isn’t trying to move on already, but this one is just right there for the scooping up and setting down: Melania Trump has been cooking up a classic beef stew at Mar-a-Lago, allegedly. She sits in the spa and stews over first lady Jill Biden’s treatment in the press while stewing herself in schvitz, per CNN’s anonymous sources.
“She goes to the spa, has lunch, goes to the spa (again) and has dinner with Donald on the patio,” this person said of her in her post–East Wing world. “Rinse and repeat. Every day.”
Another person said that she enjoys the fish in the evenings on Mar-a-Lago’s patio, sometimes with Donald and sometimes with her parents.
While she’s coming down from the last four years in the only way a socialite-model knows how—a militaristic devotion to the spa and omega-3s—some acquaintances have said that her headspace has been less than zen. Namely, she’s thinking a lot about her successor’s media rounds, according to “several people with knowledge of Trump’s conversations of late.”
We’re not even a month into the Biden administration, but Jill and Joe gave their first interview to People, she’s done another with Parents, and she’s made several speeches and appearances, including one livestreamed event with education specialists, which aligned with her own career in education. In four years, on the other hand, Melania did just one major televised interview, a sit-down with ABC while she was touring North Africa.
Melania’s team has said that she turned down many of the opportunities that did come her way, and her former friend and aide Stephanie Winston Wolkoff told CNN this was because they made her nervous, that she preferred privacy (in lieu of interviews, she often released her own scripted, highly produced segments on Twitter). And anyway, “Donald was more upset about Melania not getting magazine covers than Melania was,” Wolkoff told the network.
She allegedly thinks she could have done more, and is blaming her team for not making more press happen. It can be painful to live in the past, and it can be painful to compare oneself to peers. Meanwhile, Jill has planted large hearts that say things like “kindness” and “healing” on the front lawn of the White House. Melania still has time to do that at Mar-a-Lago!
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