Melania Trump, the former US first lady, said she blamed “opposition party leaders and the mainstream media” for creating the conditions that led to the two assassination attempts on former President Donald Trump.
In an interview with Fox News’s Ainsley Earhardt that aired Thursday morning — the press-averse former first lady’s first media appearance in more than two years — she echoed what her husband has said about the attacks, without the kind of harsh language he has used.
Melania Trump, who is promoting a memoir , is a very private person. Even as first lady, her public appearances were sporadic and she led a life that kept her largely away from outside scrutiny. Her life after the White House has been similarly insular, a reality that was on full display in the interview.
She has been largely absent from the campaign trail and was not near her husband during the two recent attempts on his life. After a gunman was detained while her husband was golfing at his Florida club on Sept. 15, Melania Trump, who was in New York, called to make sure her husband was safe “as soon as I saw it on TV.”
She also said a second Trump presidency would not be disruptive beyond his social media presence. “Maybe some, you know, strong tweets. But everything else would be great for this country,” he said at one point.
While she defended Trump’s record, she was vague and selective on the details
Asked for her reaction to Vice President Kamala Harris replacing President Joe Biden as the Democratic presidential nominee, she said her husband’s record spoke for itself.
“My husband, as commander in chief, led the country through peace, through strength,” Melania Trump said, speaking vaguely and without elaborating on what her husband’s administration had accomplished. Instead, she said, “the country is suffering” under Biden. “People are not able to meet the normal needs of families.”
She argued that under Donald Trump, the United States had prospered and “had no wars,” echoing several of her husband’s assertions, notably about the relative absence of military conflicts abroad during his presidency.
By the end of Trump’s term, there were nearly 13,000 U.S. troops in Afghanistan . Records show that at least 65 active-duty soldiers were killed in hostile actions during his presidency, partly as a result of the Trump administration’s efforts to combat the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria.
The former first lady also made a glaring omission in her account of her husband’s years in office: She did not discuss the coronavirus pandemic that devastated the U.S. economy and led to hundreds of thousands of deaths before Trump lost the 2020 election.
She also made clear what he thinks of Trump’s decision to run for another term: “I support him.”
Like her husband, she blames others for political conflicts
Melania Trump rarely speaks publicly, but when she does, she almost always defends her husband’s incendiary approach to political issues, claiming, as she did Thursday, that his behavior represents “strong” leadership.
In the interview, she condemned the attempts on the former president’s life and said she was not watching television when a gunman opened fire at a rally on July 13, but that she eventually reached her husband by phone and was assured by the Secret Service that he would survive. “I think something was watching over him,” she said. “It’s almost like the country really needed him.”
She said he had written a “beautiful letter” calling for an end to the violence after that incident: “Let’s come together. Now,” he wrote at the time. He also explained that he had declined to speak at the Republican National Convention because “in a way, the letter was my speech.”
But in the interview, Melania Trump blamed who she believed was the source of the disputes.
“Is it shocking that all this heinous violence is directed at my husband, especially that we hear the opposition party leaders and the mainstream media calling him a threat to democracy, calling him vile names?” she asked. “They only fuel a toxic atmosphere and empower all these people who want to harm him. This has to stop. This has to end. The country needs to come together.”
A tour without many details of the book
The book, titled Melania , is likely to be packed with details, including about what she saw after Mar-a-Lago, the Palm Beach, Florida, residence she shares with her husband, was searched by FBI agents. The book may reveal her thoughts on the wives of the many world leaders she met during her tenure as first lady. It could also tell readers more about what Trump is like in private.
But when Earhardt posed those questions in the interview, the former first lady opted to remain circumspect rather than hint at what she might actually share in the book.
When asked to reveal what he saw after the FBI searched his home, he gave a general response and called it an invasion of privacy.
“I saw some nasty stuff that nobody wants to see,” she said. “And you get angry because, you know, nobody should have to put up with that kind of stuff. Some people — I don’t even know who or how many people — went through my stuff.”
And she said people who don’t like her husband don’t understand that Trump is a “family man” who likes to listen to music. “He likes to be the DJ.”
But he did not elaborate on the examples.