Melania Trump was one of the stars of the 2016 Republican convention in Cleveland, Ohio. Her speech was a hit on stage until it was discovered that it was largely a plagiarism of Michelle Obama’s speech at the 2008 Democratic convention. After the pandemic forced the conclave to be held online in 2020, Trump’s wife is expected to return to a physical convention. Melania Trump is expected at the meeting in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, but her role will be discreet.
Trump’s wife broke her silence with a lengthy statement following Saturday’s attack on the former president, although she was not present at the tycoon’s first appearance after the incident, on Monday night. “A monster who recognized my husband as an inhuman political machine tried to nullify Donald’s passion: his laughter, his wit, his love of music and his inspiration,” she said in the text. “The essential facets of my husband’s life – his human side – were buried under the political machine. Donald, the generous and loving man with whom I have been with in the best and worst of times,” she continued. “Let us not forget that divergent opinions, politics and political games are inferior to love,” she also wrote. “Political concepts are simple when compared to us, human beings,” she concluded in her message on Sunday. The current first lady, Jill Biden, called her later, according to the White House.
While Jill Biden has become a prominent political ally of her husband – she accompanies him at crucial moments and is capable of holding up to three rallies in a single day to ask for votes for her spouse – Melania Trump has only had a testimonial presence in the Republican campaign. In the debate on June 27 in Atlanta, Jill Biden accompanied the president, but the Republican candidate went alone. Melania Trump has not participated with her husband in any of the mass rallies he has given throughout the country, she has been absent from the Republican primaries and has not accompanied him in his court appearances.
One of them was particularly hurtful to her. Trump was found guilty of 34 crimes for falsifying checks, invoices and accounting records to conceal payments to silence the scandal of his alleged relationship with porn actress Stormy Daniels and prevent it from influencing the 2016 presidential campaign.
By not accompanying the former president to the trial, Melania Trump was spared from hearing the actress’s detailed account. According to Stormy Daniels, the tycoon received her in his hotel room in silk pajamas, that when she came out of the bathroom after a moment, she found him in bed in his underwear and a T-shirt, that he blocked her way to the exit and that they ended up having sex without a condom. Trump has also been sentenced in a civil trial to pay five million dollars [unos 4,6 millones de euros] for sexual abuse and defamation against the writer E. Jean Carroll, who accused him of having raped her in a fitting room in a luxury department store in Manhattan.
A low-profile figure
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Whether or not those cases have anything to do with it, the fact is that Melania Trump has stayed away from almost all of her husband’s public events. She was at his side when he announced at his Mar-a-Lago mansion in Palm Beach (Florida) in November 2022 that he would run for president this year. She voted in the Florida primaries last March. In addition, she has attended several closed-door fundraisers, The last one was held at his home in New York for conservative members of the LGBT community. She also accompanied her husband to a dinner at Mar-a-Lago for Hungarian leader Viktor Orbán in March.
These are isolated or low-profile events. For whatever reason, Trump’s wife has stayed out of her husband’s schedule. But she is on the list of participants in the Republican National Convention, a decision she had already made before Saturday’s attack. However, she is not on the full list of speakers provided by the Republican Party. Candidates’ spouses typically give speeches describing their spouses’ careers and personal qualities.
Melania Trump gave a speech from the White House held online in 2020, but the one that remains in our memories is the one from Cleveland in 2016. Then, with a thick accent that showed her Slovenian origins, she gave a speech that was partly plagiarized from the one given eight years earlier by Michelle Obama, Barack Obama’s wife, in Denver.
In her speech, Melania Trump then celebrated that her parents had taught her consistent “values”: “Work hard for what you want in life, that your word binds you and that you do what you say and keep your promise, that you treat people with respect.” It was a copy of what Michelle Obama said in 2008: “Barack and I were raised with many of the same values: that you work hard for what you want in life, that your word binds you and that you do what you say you are going to do, that you treat people with respect.” And so on, various fragments of the speech. Her speechwriter resigned when the plagiarism was discovered.
Melania Trump, 54, was born in Novo Mesto, then part of the former Yugoslavia, and now in Slovenia. The former model is Trump’s third wife, whom she met in 1998 in New York at a party hosted by the tycoon. Their relationship became public in 2004 and the couple married on January 22, 2005. They have one child, Barron, born in 2006.
She was the second foreign-born First Lady of the United States (after British-born Louisa Adams, wife of John Quincy Adams, president from 1825 to 1829) and the second to profess the Catholic religion after Jacqueline Kennedy. She was also the first whose native language was not English, the first to have appeared nude in magazines and the first without American ancestry. An immigrant at a convention with immigrants in the spotlight.
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