Former First Lady Melania Trump’s self-titled memoir may not divulge political insights from Donald Trump’s White House, but it does offer a glimpse of a woman who once stood beside one of the most powerful men on the planet—and who may soon do so again.
Melania, which was released Tuesday, is a 256-page exploration of the former first lady’s life, from growing up in Cold War-era Yugoslavia to nude modeling in the U.S. and standing by Trump during his presidency. But some of the most pot-stirring details lie not in what Melania did, but rather in what she believes, and how much her own platform differs from that of her MAGA husband.
That includes writing against previous reports from her own aide that she refused to denounce the violence at the U.S. Capitol by the hands of her husband’s supporters on January 6.
“The violence we witnessed was unequivocally unacceptable,” Melania writes in the new book. “While I recognized that many individuals felt the election was mishandled and the vice president should halt the confirmation process, we must never resort to violence.”
But Melania does nothing to dispel the baseless conspiracies her husband has spread that the 2020 election was stolen, either. In fact, she feeds into them, writing, “Many Americans still have doubts about the election to this day. I am not the only person who questions the results.”
Melania also says that she fought her husband on his administration’s family separation policy at the U.S.-Mexico border, telling Trump that “this has to stop.”
“The government should not be taking children away from their parents,” Melania recalled telling the former president shortly before he signed an executive order ending the horrifying policy.
And, perhaps most significantly, Melania revealed that she is staunchly pro-abortion.
“A woman’s fundamental right to individual liberty, to her own life, grants her the authority to terminate her pregnancy,” Melania writes in her book.
That stance was, apparently, totally fine with the aggressively anti-abortion Republican presidential nominee. During an interview with Fox News on Thursday, Trump casually confessed that he had encouraged his wife to “write what you believe” with regards to the new book. Meanwhile, Trump’s campaign, Project 2025, and the Republican Party have worked overtime to tell every other woman in America exactly what they should do with their bodies—whether that’s fighting for a national abortion ban or celebrating the encroaching stateside restrictions on other, adjacent reproductive procedures, such as IVF. Trump himself has repeatedly boasted about his role in overturning Roe v. Wade and peeling back abortion rights across the nation.
Notably, Melania has done nothing either while her husband was in office or in the four years since to actually advance abortion rights in the U.S.
Throughout the book, Melania was quick to blame the influence of “the media, Big Tech, and the deep state” for a variety of her family’s woes, including supposedly preventing her husband’s second term.
“We are living in a dangerous time when it comes to journalism,” she claims.
