By Francheska Lupo

October 13, 2020

On October 1st, an audio from a phone call between First Lady Melania Trump and her former best friend and advisor in which Melania speaks on topics that range from her Christmas decoration duties to the children held at an immigration detention center was exposed on a CNN interview.

    The conversation was leaked by Stephanie Winston Wolkoff, who had been a good friend to Melania and hired to be her senior advisor. Wolkoff wrote speeches for Melania and helped develop the ‘Be Best’ initiative before publishing the book Melania and Me. The book documents her relationship with the First Lady and how she stopped being friends with her over the years. 

   The phone call appears to be from June 2018, when Melania visited an immigrant detention center in Texas. In the audio, Melania complains about her duties of decorating the White House for Christmas, “OK, and then I do it and I say that I’m working on Christmas and planning for the Christmas and they said, “Oh, what about the children that they were separated?” Give me a…break”, she complains. 

    Melania Trump even spoke on the infamous jacket that she wore while visiting the Mexican border that read “I don’t really care, do you?” on the back, saying that it was a publicity stunt to make more public the fact that she was visiting the border and that she was “driving Liberals crazy for sure … And they deserve it … they’re crazy.”    In a separate recording, Mrs. Trump goes on to state that many people that are being held at the Mexican border lie in order to get there. She claims that “A lot of like moms and kids they are teached [sic] how to do it. They go over and they say like, ‘Oh, we will be killed by a gang member, we will be, you know, it’s so dangerous.’ So they are allowed to stay here.”

   Trump also claims that the children held in these centers are happy to be there and live in better conditions than in their own countries, despite being separated from their families. In the call, she says “The kids, they say, ‘Wow I will have my own bed? I will sleep on the bed? I will have a cabinet for my clothes?’ It’s so sad to hear it but they didn’t have that in their own countries, they sleep on the floor. They are taken care of nicely there. But you know, yeah, they are not with parents, it’s sad. But when they come here alone or with coyotes or illegally, you know, you need to do something.” 

    Wolkoff released all of this in a CNN interview, where she expressed her criticism of Melania’s position regarding the children, as well as the decision to wear an attention grabbing jacket to garner the press’s attention while doing a good deed. However, Wolkoff is also under fire for secretly taping the First Lady’s phone call and then using it to bolster sales on her book. On CBS news, the First Lady’s chief of staff Stephanie Grisham defended Mrs Trump by addressing this and claiming that the audio clips could have been edited.