Stephanie Winston Wolkoff, the one-time senior adviser to former first lady Melania Trump, predicted she would not attend former President Trump’s ongoing hush money trial for the sake of preventing negative coverage.
“I don’t think we’re going to see Melania Trump accompany Donald to court,” Wolkoff said Tuesday in an interview on CNN, adding later, “I do not see her supporting him in this way because she is not someone … I think that you can feel that humiliation without having to put yourself in front of the cameras.”
“Everything Melania does is staged and everything is articulated in a way for her before she does her interviews. So, everything, as I said, is very strategically planned. She is not going to put herself in a position where she’s given anyone the opportunity to say anything negative about her,” she added.
Trump’s hush money trial is ongoing in Manhattan, where he faces 34 counts of falsifying business records in connection to reimbursements made to his ex-fixer, Michael Cohen, for a payment made to porn actor Stormy Daniels.
Trump’s son Eric Trump has regularly showed up at court in recent weeks, and Eric Trump’s wife, Lara Trump, joined Tuesday. Neither Melania Trump nor former President Trump’s other children have yet to make an appearance.
The former first lady has been largely absent from the campaign trail with her husband, and those close to her predict it will stay that way because she is a private person who dislikes campaigning.
Some have suggested Melania Trump is likely not happy with the details coming to light in the trial regarding the affairs former President Trump allegedly had with Daniels and former Playboy model Karen McDougal in the first years of their marriage. Trump has denied the affair allegations.
Asked over concerns Trump might have had over his wife’s reaction to the alleged allegations, Wolkoff said she believes the couple has a “transactional marriage.”
“There is a strength within her that is unlike any other individual I’ve ever met. She does not care what others feel about her, nor does she feel she ever had to really explain anything to the American people,” Wolkoff said.
“I do believe it is a transactional marriage in so many ways, that, that they both garnered so much out of their relationship, and you know, by marrying Donald, Melania really did get to the Vogue cover model that she’s always wanted to be, that supermodel,” she continued. “And by marrying Melania, Donald was legitimized as trying to get away from that whole Playboy mentality that everyone wanted to characterize him as.”
During testimony Monday, Cohen said on the witness stand that he became aware of the tape on which Trump describes inappropriately grabbing women seemingly without their consent when 2016 campaign press secretary Hope Hicks called him about it.
Cohen, who spoke with Trump and other campaign staff shortly after finding out about the tape, claimed it was Melania Trump who came up with the “locker room talk” defense to put a “spin” on the coverage of the tape.
In an October 2016 interview after the “Access Hollywood” tape was first published, Melania Trump told CNN in an interview that the language on the recording surprised her.
“I heard many different stuff — boys talk,” she said at the time. “The boys, the way they talk when they grow up and they want to sometimes show each other, ‘Oh, this and that,’ and talking about the girls. But yes, I was surprised, of course.”
When asked about Cohen’s testimony, Wolkoff said, “Well, Melania is very strategic and plays a very large role in what is going with Donald as far as the dog being in the room.”
“She comes up with ways to make people accept the situations that are going on around her, and it does not surprise me that would be she who came up with it,” Wolkoff said. “She did not tell me that, she just forcefully, at that lunch, explained to me that that is all that it is. That is the way that her messaging was and no big deal. For her, it was always, ‘It’s no big deal.'”
“She has said to me over and over, I know who I married. I’m to be nothing like his other two wives. And she accepted what that role was,” she added.