New book details how “incensed” Trump and Melania clashed in the White House

Though always publicly supportive of her husband, former first lady Melania Trump had several spats behind the scenes at the White House with former President Donald Trump, according to a new book released Tuesday. Author Kate Rogers, in “American Woman: The Transformation of the Modern First Lady, from Hillary Clinton to Jill Biden,” describes a slate of the couple’s conflicts, centering on the former president’s attempts to tamp down his wife’s independence and her efforts to challenge that.

In one moment in the early days of Donald Trump’s presidency, as detailed by People, Melania Trump attempted to redecorate the White House residence only for the then-president to replace her choices with his preferences. In another July 2018 instance on Air Force One, the former president became “incensed” upon finding his wife watching her preferred CNN, over Fox News. As a result, he ordered all TVs on the aircraft — and in their hotel suites — be turned to the conservative network moving forward. 

Rogers also wrote of the times when Melania Trump made efforts to separate her messaging from that of her husband, including when, in 2017, Donald Trump said there “were very fine people, on both sides” of the deadly white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. Melania Trump, however, “quickly discouraged violence,” Rogers points out, noting the then-first lady tweeted, “Our country encourages freedom of speech, but let’s communicate w/o hate in our hearts. No good comes from violence.”

“Her tweets were small gestures that amounted to little more than digital ephemera,” Rogers writes. “Still, compared with her husband’s bridge burners, Melania’s missives established her as a rare figure in the Trump administration who seemed more interested in calming a cultural divide than widening it.”