6 Takeaways From Melania Trump's Unauthorized Biography

[question everything]

Where the first lady, Melania Trump, is concerned, theories abound.

From morning-show hosts to Twitter pundits to protest poster artists, everyone has an opinion: Mrs. Trump is a prisoner in her own home. Mrs. Trump rules the roost. Mrs. Trump is complicit, clueless, estranged from her husband, advises her husband, loves Washington, hates Washington, just wants to be left alone. If the current administration is a Rorschach test, the first lady is a splash of ink across the White House.

A member of the White House press corps focused on the first lady and the Trump family, the CNN reporter Kate Bennett may be uniquely qualified to weigh in. Now she shares her own theories in an unauthorized biography, “Free, Melania,” which comes out this week.

The book does not include an explanation of the comma in its title, nor any discussion of the Trumps’ 13-year-old son, Barron, except as a factor in his mother’s decision-making. (In an author’s note, Bennett writes, “I don’t believe being born to public figures should render a child fair game for public scrutiny.”) But “Free, Melania” does provide insight into the first lady’s life, opinions and relationships (she is well liked by her staffers, with Bennett describing the East Wing as “the White House’s tightest ship”). Here are six of Bennett’s revelations.

(snip)

The first lady has a room of her own at the White House

While the president sleeps in the master bedroom on the second level of the White House residence — he requested a lock for his door — Mrs. Trump stays on the third floor, in the two-room space formerly occupied by Michelle Obama’s mother, Marian Robinson, Bennett reports. Mrs. Trump also has a “glam room,” where she does her hair and makeup, and a private gym with a Pilates machine.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/02/books/melania-trump-first-lady-unauthorized-biography.html

[question everything]

1. Free, Melania review: Trump book skips the birther question

Kate Bennett’s Free, Melania is a book at war with itself. It is flattering, salacious and gap-filled all at once. Beyond that, the comma in the book’s title lurks needlessly like the exclamation attached to “Jeb!” What either punctation mark was meant to convey, if anything, remains a mystery.

Bennett, a CNN reporter who covers Melania and a former gossip columnist at the Las Vegas Sun, is generally admiring of the first lady’s fashion sense and persona, and draws a strong contrast between her and Donald Trump’s first two wives. In children’s book terms, Melania Trump is the Goldilocks of the trio, neither needy nor spotlight-seeking but just right. For now, anyway.

(snip)

On the other hand, as Bennett writes, the couple keep separate bedrooms, Melania Trump knew what she was getting into, and her parents were also living at the White House. Multiple safety valves were built in to the Trumpian arrangement. Free, Melania plumbs but not too deeply. Bennett describes how she obtained her green card in 2001 after sponsoring herself as a model of “extraordinary ability”, then in turn sponsored her Slovenian parents for US citizenship.

According to Bennett, the first lady and her parents thus used a visa process the Trump administration is “trying to repeal”, namely “chain migration”. What Trump branded “harmful” to US was “OK for his in-laws”. Just a year ago, he tweeted: “CHAIN MIGRATION must end now! Some people come in, and they bring their whole family with them, who can be truly evil. NOT ACCEPTABLE!”

(snip)

Free, Melania also airbrushes the first lady’s politics, portraying her as more of a compassionate conservative than the president but omitting her public embrace of birtherism. Left unsaid was a 2011 television appearance in which she went full birther. “It’s not only Donald who wants to see [Barack Obama’s birth certificate],” Melania Trump told the camera. “It’s American people who voted for him and who didn’t vote for him. They want to see that.” Bennett’s book will most likely be remembered for tying Roger Stone to the nude photos https://nypost.com/2016/07/30/melania-trump-like-youve-never-seen-her-before/ of Melania Trump that graced Rupert Murdoch’s New York Post in the heat of the 2016 campaign, and the White House’s rebuke of Bennett as the president was en route to the Nato summit.

More..

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/dec/07/free-melania-review-trump-book-birther-immigration-nude-photographs-roger-stone

[sprinkleeninow]

2. Title wrote by her so-called husband...

""fWeeW; maLLaM-yA./?"

[lunatica]

3. Well that was vapid reading.

It’s kind of impressive how unimpressively flat it was. Like cheap Champaign or the dregs of old wine stinking up the room on the morning after the party.

Like a dull hangover.

Without even knowing her we all knew her pretty well. What a bore that family is when it comes to anything interesting.

[underpants]

6. Funny. My take too. It just....ended

You painted the picture well. Much better than the article's writer. Why so many quotes parenthetically? Reading this was like drive on a stick in a car that doesn't have second gear.

I really couldn't imagine reading a book ABOUT Melania or by Melania or by Jr or by Brian Kilmeade (Fox & Friends) who was in town last weekend for a book signing.

[lunasun]

4. Free toilet paper Steal this book and throw it in a trash can

[Permanut]

5. Makes sense to mentiion Barron only peripherally..

Melanoma tweeted on December 4, "A minor child deserves privacy and should be kept out of politics.,,"

An old and revered policy followed religiously all through history by the Republicans; for example in 1992 when Rush LImbaugh was ostracized by the right wing politicians and religious leaders and dropped by all of the TV and radio stations in the country after he referred to 12-year-old Chelsea Clinton as a dog.

Oh, wait, that didn't happen.