Getty Stephanie Winston Wolkoff secretly taped her former friend Melania Trump dissing husband Donald Trump and stepdaughter Ivanka Trump.
Stephanie Winston Wolkoff, a former longtime friend of Melania Trump, secretly recorded conversations of the first lady making “disparaging remarks” about husband Donald Trump and stepdaughter Ivanka Trump, according to journalist Yashar Ali.
In her tell-all book, Melania and Me: The Rise and Fall of My Friendship With the First Lady, set to be released on September 1, Wolkoff details the crumbling of their 15-year friendship and why she left her role as the first lady’s senior advisor in February 2018. Wolkoff’s book promises to describe Melania Trump’s reaction to the infamous Access Hollywood tape in which her husband bragged he could “just grab” women “by the p****,” as well as the reasoning behind her infamous “I really don’t care, do u?” jacket.
On August 24, Ali tweeted that “most of Mrs. Trump’s disparaging comments about the Trump family were reserved for Ivanka Trump,” the president’s daughter and senior advisor. Wolkoff, a former director of special events at Vogue who first met Melania in 2003, helped plan Trump’s $107 million inauguration ceremony and was in charge of hiring the first lady’s staff, helping create her initiatives and assisting in writing her speeches.
However, Wolkoff’s book description claims that their relationship “all fell apart when she was made the scapegoat for inauguration finance irregularities. Melania could have defended her innocent friend and confidant, but she stood by her man, knowing full well who was really to blame. The betrayal nearly destroyed Wolkoff.”
Ali tweeted August 24, “It’s unclear what Wolkoff says that Mrs. Trump said about her family but I do know that the disparaging remarks are in the book and that Wolkoff taped conversations with Mrs. Trump without her knowing. … Again, multiple sources confirmed to me that Wolkoff taped some of her conversations with the first lady.”
The alleged tension between Melania Trump and Ivanka Trump were also detailed in Mary Jordan’s The Art of Her Deal: The Untold Story of Melania Trump, which was released in June. The book describes Ivanka Trump’s push to rename the “First Lady’s Office” the “First Family Office,” a suggestion Melania Trump quickly shut down, The Washington Post reported.
The description of Melania and Me from publisher Gallery Books, an imprint of Simon & Schuster, reads in part: “In her memoir, Wolkoff chronicles her journey from their friendship that started in New York to her role as the First Lady’s trusted advisor to her abrupt and very public departure, to life after Washington, being an advocate for children’s and women’s causes.”
Wolkoff Revealed She Secretly Recorded Melania Trump Just Days After Tapes of Maryanne Trump Barry Trashing the President Were Released
GettyDonald Trump with his older sister, Maryanne Trump Barry, in Scotland on June 10, 2008.
A recorded conversation between Donald Trump‘s niece Mary Trump and the president’s older sister, Maryanne Trump Barry, was released by The Washington Post on August 22. The conversation was secretly taped by Mary Trump, who recently published The New York Times best-selling tell-all book Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man.
Mary Trump, 55, provided The Post with 15 hours of “face-to-face conversations with Barry in 2018 and 2019,” the paper reported. “She provided The Post with previously unreleased transcripts and audio excerpts, which include exchanges that are not in her book.”
Barry, 83, a retired federal judge and the oldest of the Trump siblings, said of her brother as president, “His goddamned tweet and lying, oh my God. I’m talking too freely, but you know. The change of stories. The lack of preparation. The lying. Holy s***.”
Ladies and gentlemen, Mrs. Maryanne Trump Barry on her brother Donald J. Trump! #legend pic.twitter.com/n5EbzfwZWJ
— Eily Teague (@EilyTeague) August 23, 2020
“All he wants to do is appeal to his base,” Barry continues. “He has no principles. None. None. And his base, I mean my God, if you were a religious person, you want to help people. Not do this.”
Donald Trump’s sister is all of us. pic.twitter.com/5gALpe8KC1
— The Lincoln Project (@ProjectLincoln) August 23, 2020
During another part of the conversation, Barry, who has not publicly spoken critically of her younger brother, says, “It’s the phoniness of it all. It’s the phoniness and this cruelty. Donald is cruel.”
In Mary Trump’s book, she wrote that Barry called her Donald Trump a “clown” during the 2016 election and that her aunt disapproved of how he spoke to the press about their brother Fred Trump Jr., who died from alcohol-related illness in 1981. “He’s using your father’s memory for political purposes and that’s a sin, especially since Freddy should have been the star of the family,” Barry told Mary Trump.
Both Melania & Ivanka Trump Are Scheduled to Speak at the RNC This Week
Getty(L-R) First lady Melania Trump, Vice President Mike Pence, Karen Pence and Ivanka Trump listen to President Donald Trump’s speech at Joint Base Andrews in Maryland on December 20, 2019.
The bombshell news that audio exists of the first lady criticizing the president comes hours before the first day of the 2020 Republican National Convention is set to kick off on August 24. While Donald Trump is scheduled to speak during each night of the RNC, Melania Trump is scheduled to give a speech on Tuesday, August 25.
Ivanka Trump is set to speak on Thursday, August 24. Neither Melania Trump nor Ivanka Trump has yet commented on Wolkoff’s secret recordings.
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