If she were to walk out of this marriage, what does that do? What are the political implications of that? The threat goes to the Epstein of it all. And I certainly read that news conference among the many possibilities as a threat.
And as a threat to him. Yeah. You know, the first thing it was, you're not going to pin this Epstein stuff on me. This Epstein stuff is your problem.
You got us into this. And Congress should talk to the victims. Yes, which to me, read, Congress should investigate you. You, my husband, the president.
Michael. Joanna. So we thought that we might do a deeper dive into the marriage today. Well, it is the topic du jour.
And definitely when. I mean, it's an interesting thing. What do, I mean, everybody's focused on this. And I think everybody senses that there is something to learn here and something amiss here.
Well, and certainly when she came out and she said, I don't know, Jeffrey Epstein, or very trivial. Jeffrey who definitely know Epstein. Pay no attention to Jeffrey Epstein. I mean, when she came out and gave her bizarre speech, and then when in fact she said that the people who are writing about her and talking about her have not respect.
And then you said, that's me. That's me. That's me. We wondered if she's in fact signaling that she wants out of the marriage and that she's really drawing a very clear line between her and her husband.
Well, let's just begin with how bad it might be. Or what does it look like? What does it look like? What do we know?
And we know that they've been married for 21 years at this point. And we know that she does not live in the White House. And we know that. Do we know that she doesn't live in the White House?
Do we absolutely know that? We absolutely know that the overwhelming amount of her time is spent in New York City. And we know, and we knew this in the first administration, that they do not share a bedroom. And that there may be many reasons for that.
Would you want to share a bedroom with Donald Trump? Oh, god. It's with the hamburgers. But it's interesting that apparently they are the only first couple not to share a bedroom since John F.
Kennedy and Jacqueline Kennedy. OK. But that was because he had back issues, right? Well, I think there were other issues there, too.
But yes. But I think the point is here is that there has always been an acknowledgment, almost, bordering on a public acknowledgment that this marriage is not like other marriages in general, but specifically other White House marriages. And I think the message is partly, we don't have to. We don't have to pretend.
What's the pretend about? And then I think the other message is that we're doing things differently. That Melania Trump doesn't want that job. And that's very clear.
Well, I don't think Melania Trump wants age up, does she? Yes. I know. I think she does want a job.
And I think she is now very specifically courting a job. She wants to be Melania. She wants to be the focus of a marketing juggernaut. She wants to be rich.
Well, she wants to be a brand. OK. So she wants to be. I mean, she is building.
She is trying to build a business for herself right now. I think that that's part of what's going on here. But the other thing is, I think she wants to do that to further separate herself from the first lady job, and also from her husband, I suppose. So she's trying to do what Megan Markle wanted to do a little bit when she was in London, got married, thought that she would be able to run a sort of company alongside being a royal.
Now you can't do that in the UK. That's good. That's a very good parallel here. And it's also seen the same value.
I'm a famous person. I'm a super famous person. How do I monetize that? Exactly.
That's exactly what it feels like going on. She is famous. She has a look, and she might be able to capitalize on it. And this is a lost opportunity.
But the problem is, you really can't capitalize on it while you are the first lady in the White House, which was the issue that Megan had. You can't do it if you're also being paid by the royal family. And that's the platform. Right.
So Megan and Harry decided to separate from that. Let's leave that part of the rocket ship behind, and we'll jet off to fame in California. And that's what the Melania thing certainly feels like, which is the White House in that job is something I have to get away from. Well, and it comes with rules.
It comes with protocol. It comes with public performances. I might not want to do. It's got a lot of boring things attached to it.
If you're going to play the role of first lady, you're going to have to spend time with military families. She doesn't want to do that. And she's certainly not going to be helping with children's literacy, because she's barely literate herself. That's gone to Ushavans.
She has now had books, podcasts for children. So what does Melania do all day? And let's go back to the first administration, which should have been a moment, like we should have been having this conversation. Then she didn't move into the White House, or even pretend to move into the White House for six months.
Right. Well, she's saying that that was because Byron had to finish school. Well, there's been a lot of other children in the White House. And it's me, people, kids, shift schools.
This is the kind of thing. You become the president of the United States. That's going to be something you're going to have to adjust to. And that clearly didn't happen, because she didn't want it to happen.
And then she got to the White House, and even then she really didn't live in the White House. And she moved her parents down to Maryland, and there was a house. They had a house there. And she basically lived there.
And Barron basically lived there. So before Trump became president the first time, were they living in separate apartments in Trump Tower? I mean, the great value of Trump Tower is they all seem to have their own apartments there. Barron, I think, has his own apartment.
She has their own apartment. Her father has his own apartment there. Yes, that is apparently. I don't know that for a fact.
That's what, in terms of my lawsuit against the First Lady, which we should, of course, talk about, what we, the indications that we have in the evidence that we uncovered is, yes, she has a separate apartment there. So she may not have wanted to move down to the White House, because she didn't want to have to be in the same close living quarters as Donald Trump. She ever comes back. I think that that is obviously part of it, that the marriage that they have is not a conventional marriage.
Now, within the White House, I mean, I once had this, and I've written this, I had a discussion with one of his close aides. And I said, what is really going on here? Just trying to get some indication. And I really thought I would just get a sort of winged nod kind of thing.
And I said, what is going on here? And this person looked at me like I was more on, and then said, she hates his guts. And I think that's the understanding of people around him. And she actually hates him.
Yeah, she doesn't want to be there. She doesn't want to have anything to do with this. This is just a complete arrangement. And this, and yet another person said when I broached this subject, said that when she is around, she's treated like a guest.
So when she turns up at the White House, she's treated as if she's a guest. Exactly. She hates him. And this was also true in Mar-a-Lago.
So when they moved to Mar-a-Lago, also, she really was not there. And she had relocated her parents nearby, and that's where she lived. Which begs the question, why didn't they get divorced when he lost in 2020? They moved to Mar-a-Lago.
She hates him. Why is she still involved in this? What would be it then, or Charad? I'm pausing here, because we don't know.
I mean, in all marriages, have their own, even bad marriages, have their own logic to them. One of the other people in the White House, when I pursued this, said, well, I mean, it may be an incredibly successful marriage on its own terms. So the emphasis should be obviously be on its own terms. I guess.
But she's young enough that she could remarry. Well, she may not want to remarry, number one. She may not need to remarry. The financial arrangement may be to her benefit.
And also, look at what she is trying to accomplish now. She is trying to take this relationship she's had with Donald Trump and with the president of the United States, and turn it into something of her own of considerable value. Well, certainly she got paid. I know she was asking $10 million for her memoir, Melania.
Which most of the first ladies write after they've left office. And she got paid, well, it was $40 million for the Amazon documentary, Melania, Melania the movie. And she got, we think, $28 of that. And then there was an extra $35 million spent in marketing it.
So again, money that normally a first lady, if you think of Hillary, if you think of Laura Bursch, if you think of Michelle Obama, published books which were very successful, but after they left the role of first ladies. So she's actually monetizing it while she's in office. And she may well have looked at Meghan and thought, well, Meghan and Harry got a big Netflix deal. The Amazon documentary is supposedly just the first of a whole series of things that Amazon is going to finance and platform.
Oh, so she could be making products as we speak with Amazon. Yeah, no, and she's assembled a full team. I mean, she now has her own separate spokesperson, who has been the front person on trying to explain what that bizarre press conference that she had week before last. There's an enormous amount of decorum that's extended to presidential marriages and families, even this one, which seems glaringly to be different from all others.
But so the question is, why does it matter? And why should we care? Well, and also what's interesting about it is we see it again. It's hiding in plain sight, has swishing his hand away, her face after the first inauguration where she's smiling at him and then she just looks utterly depressed.
I mean, the moments when they're together, she never seems to be laughing very much. The big-brimmed hats, the very clear body language between the two of them, which makes it feel like she wants to be distant when he leans in for a kiss. She leans back, even her dress, which I know we've commented on before, but the second inauguration, it was a white ball dress and it looked like she'd redacted her body. And it must be with those black zigzags on it.
But also very difficult to be married to a man who's been so publicly accused of sexual abuse, publicly accused of rape, publicly accused of grabbing them by the pussy and enjoying it and saying they love it. And also the Stormy Daniels, in correct number. And also the Epstein of it all. And of course the Epstein of it all.
Which we should return to. But let's establish, because there is this thing. Why are we talking? Everybody is, even presidents deserve some privacy, their personal life, their marriages.
Why does it matter? So I think the answer is, because one's marriage is important. If that's a pressure in your life, which certainly, maybe it isn't, maybe they do have this perfect arrangement in which they're married only as part of a construct. But the other aspect of it is it not?
That it probably, Donald Trump is a, what does he do? If you have no one to turn to. A lonely guy. Well, we know what he does.
He posts on Truth Social and he calls his friends. He calls connections. Yeah, no, exactly. And then there's the other issue of, is this a sham?
I mean, voters. Do they think that we are all fooled by it? Yeah, voters in the American public. We sort of deserve to know this.
Well, also he's just as we discussed last week, sequestered a plane from the Department of Homeland Security for Melania. It cost, I think, about $108 million. So there's also the grift of it. Yeah, no.
He's a Trump family trait. Right, and clearly, I mean, one of the things that it seems evident is Melania is saying, well, what about me? Everybody else in the family is making money off of this. This is not going to last forever.
I would like to make money at all. That sounded Swedish. That wasn't very good. It's not very Slovenia.
But of course, she wants to be in on the money. And also, the interesting thing about Melania's modeling career is that she wasn't a very successful model. So she did catalogs. She did sort of, you know, slightly soft, horny things for GQ, but she wasn't a supermodel at all.
And so I wonder if now she's trying to make up for that. No, I think she is. No, she is. Now she is a supermodel.
Right. And, you know, in the Melania movie, which is now on Amazon, is now streaming and which I have now seen, is one of the most bizarre things I have ever seen. I mean, it's certainly one of the most bizarre things ever to come out of a White House. I mean, it is, first thing, it's content-free.
It's just a promotional film. It has zero consequence, zero meaning, zero point, except as a promotion. And you would think that this would be a kind of monumental red flag in terms of the country's civic life. And I think I said at the time, because I immediately went to see it.
I couldn't wait to see it. That I thought it was unintentionally revealing precisely because it's content-free, because there are no friends mentioned in it, because everybody she talks to is on the payroll, because she claims that she's involved in the event planning and the dinner planning and the menus and stuff. But in fact, what you saw was David Momm, the well-known event planner explaining to her exactly what they were going to do. And she wasn't even looking to her for acknowledgment or approval.
He was explaining to her what they were going to do. So it's as if there's an entire staff doing everything that the first lady would do, and she comes along and they just tell her what they've done. No. And the projection here is really just like the worst person in the world.
The shallowess, the most person who has certainly no regard for her position, for the White House, for her husband's position. I mean, she makes Meghan Markle look kind of saintly. She makes Meghan Markle look saintly. She does seem, however, to have protected Baron.
She wouldn't let Baron be a delegate during the election, even though the White House had actually come out and said, Baron's going to be a delegate. And then she said, oh, no, he's not. She has actually protected Baron from a press that's largely left him alone. Let me, I think that this is true.
But just to the delegate point, because I have a moment there. And so in the convention, in the 2024 convention, she, there was a thing. She had a big speaking part. And they regarded that the president's staff regarded this as important.
She has a lot of issues there. And we had just been through the Stormy Daniels trial. This was important that the wife come out and say he's a great guy. And very notably, she didn't come to the trial.
She was completely absent. Exactly. Another point that she had been absent through the entire campaign never showed up for one of his courtroom appearances. They needed her.
They felt they needed her there. And they didn't, the spot was, they had selected the spot for her. She was going to be one of the headliners. And they could not get her to commit.
Could not get her to commit. And then she wouldn't do it. And they had to, they had to cajole her to actually even appear. And then her terms for appearing.
She sat in the VIP box on the last date, where she would only come out into the box after Trump had left. She would not sit next to him. So interesting. So she came, but she did come out and embrace him when he was on the stage.
And he looked incredulous to see her. Everybody remarked on it. He was kind of like, oh, she's here. He looks like he is intimidated by her.
Well, that's this other thing which I think we should discuss. And I think it's a fair topic. Is she a threat to him? You know, there's a...
You mean, what does she know? Well, what does she know? What can she do? What kind of leverage does she have?
I mean, she is sort of the mentoring and wife, potentially. Interesting. I mean, she's kind of one of the unexploded land mines in this presidency. An unexploded land mine in the presidency.
That's interesting. And how does she get on with the grown kids? I don't think she gets on with them at all. I mean, I think she's, I think they've stiff-armed her and she stiff-arms them.
I mean, these are separate worlds here. I mean, the first thing, the Jared and Ivanka world, I don't think much interacts with the Don Jr. world. And the Melania world doesn't interact with either the Jared and Ivanka world or the Don Jr.
world. And Trump still looks very impressed by her. I mean, she's elegant. She dresses well.
She's got fabulous hair. He seems still to, at least with appearances, look very smitten by her as if he can't believe that he's landed her. Is that fair? Well, I think Trump has landed a lot of models.
So I would think that's special. I mean, it may work just fine for him. She's there. She shows up.
She's dressed as well. She's not demanding. She looks the part. They have this arrangement.
And that's it. And he has, I mean, after I've said that, well, maybe it's in his mind, his marriage is falling apart and maybe he's suffering, that probably gives him more credit than he deserves. He probably doesn't, another variation on this is he doesn't care at all. I mean, this works, it's clearly transactional.
They both get, he gets what he wants. And so that's fine. She comes out, she looks the part, she looks good. And the part, yes, the part is that he wants, he wants a wife that people will say, oh, my God, I wish I had that wife.
And people in the white. I have a hot wife. That is the, that is the message that he wants to send. Right.
I have a hot wife, which is what he said about you. Exactly. You had a hot wife and you do have a hot wife. I would like a hot wife.
And you've said that people in the white house tell you that he's post sex. Yeah. You know, from the beginning, this is now almost 10 years. People in the white house have been, have wondered about this.
I mean, it's an issue for them because what if, you know, I mean, everybody knows Donald Trump's reputation. And so what if he were caught, what if something came out, what if, how far away are they from scandal? Now, this seems a reasonable question when you're dealing with Donald Trump. And most of the people I have known in the white house around him who have had a pretty clear view of what's going on have always said nothing.
There's nothing there. He doesn't, you know, he goes to bed at night with the hamburger. And they have said, well, he's, you know, he's not a young guy. He's kind of, you know, they've said he's post sex and he's big fat guy.
It's not that would not be unusual, certainly. And it's the foremost for many of the people who know his reputation, then the only explanation for why he's in bed with a hamburger at night. Hmm. And she's had enough of him.
Well, I mean, it's certainly, it's certainly, well, what I mean by that is she's probably not post sex. So, but it seems like she's post sex with him as far as we know. I don't want to say that because we've no insight into it except that she doesn't stay there and very much at the end of the documentary. And we've discussed this before.
It's very clear they are going their own separate ways. And she is saying that very clearly on the documentary, you know, both subversively and it's pretty obvious. He says, good night then wanders off one way. She goes off another way.
Yeah, I mean, there's, there's no, there's not another scenario if you think about it to say, okay, this is a, this is a, this is a marriage that has that in which, in which on some level, on some level or other, each spouse is supportive of the other that this, that that a spouse fills a need for the other. I mean, it just doesn't all of the, all of the measures of any kind of, of, of measures of a conventional marriage are just not there. And they don't appear to have much intimacy. I mean, no, no, they, they certainly not.
But get back to the idea of, of the, of the threat because that becomes, I mean, it's a weird thing. It almost becomes a kind of a national security issue. It's always, it's always, you know, your subject, I mean, in security terms, it's always, are you blackmailable? Is there information out there that your enemies could use?
What if your enemy is your wife? If your wife is saying, that's so interesting. And if she's saying, I'm going to, you're going to do the following. What if your enemy is your wife?
And you said she could be a potential landmine. What are the things that are going to trigger her? She could say, I mean, what happens to if, if she were to walk out of this marriage, what does that do? What are the political implications of that?
You know, I mean, the Trump construct is, is, is, you know, holds together all of this, this, these conservative, religiously conservative evangelicals. But, but they put up with the fact he's been married three times. They, they have, but do they have a, do they have a limit here? And they've put up with the Stormy Daniels trial.
But what if partly I think that they have because he has this marriage? This, well, I think they partly have because he gave them the Supreme Court and they got what they wanted, which was well, there's, there's, there's the leadership of these, the political leadership of the evangelicals. And then there's ordinary, ordinary America, which actually is, I believe, convinced that he has a good, that's a good, strong family life. My, my Trump in-laws actually believe this.
You're Trump in-laws. Yes, I have Trump in-laws. So they're Trumpers. You're in-laws are Trumpers.
And they believe that Melania and Donald are intact as a couple. Yeah. Right. And I think that's you.
What do they make of you? They're a little confused by that. But that's another episode. That's another special episode.
But they, they're convinced that the Trump marriage is a real marriage. It's not a sham. It's not an arrangement and that she is fulfilling the duties of First Lady. Exactly.
But let's get to this threat because I think the threat then goes to the news conference of the week before last. The threat goes to the Epstein of it all. And I certainly read that news conference among the many possibilities of which there's endless speculation about. I read it as a, as a threat.
And as a threat to him. Yeah. You know, the first thing it was, it was, you're not going to pin this Epstein stuff on me. This Epstein stuff is your problem.
You got us into this. And Congress should talk to the victims. Yes, which to me read Congress should investigate you. You, my husband, the president.
And it also was a kind of thing. She opened up the one area that I think that Donald Trump is exquisitely vulnerable on, which is that period in the 1990s, early 2000s, you know, a period of, you know, I mean, lots of, I mean, girls, models, his whole connection to the modeling industry, Jean-Luc Brinell, and then we call those empoli who's in the middle of all this. Sheryl Upmarie. This is, this is an, and, and then we come back always to the question, why would she do this?
Why would she call attention to this particular moment in time? And she met Donald Trump in either 1997 or 1998. They get married in 2005. He stops being friendly with Jeffrey Epstein around 2004, 2005, which we've discussed.
She says that she wasn't involved with Jeffrey Epstein, barely knew Jeffrey Epstein. And yet she, we know that Donald Trump and Jeffrey Epstein were incredibly close friends through that whole period. Exactly. So, so what is that?
What is she exactly saying? As I said, I think that she's saying that's your problem. And don't put it on me. You better protect me in this.
And what do we know of the prenup? We don't know anything about the prenup. Okay. So we went back.
I know about Murdoch's prenups. I don't know about Donald Trump's prenup. So where is your lawsuit with Melania Trump? Okay.
Well, just to quickly recap, Melania Trump threatened me with a billion dollar lawsuit because I, I talked about her connection with Jeffrey Epstein. Right. And I'm not the only one she's threatened. She threatens almost on an industrial scale.
Anybody who makes this connection. She, so she, I received a letter. If you don't retract, we're going to sue you for a billion dollars. This was ridiculous.
First thing nothing that I said was could be remotely construed as libelous. That's number one, number two, never before in the history of the American presidency as a first lady and her husband sued journalists for saying, for saying anything, not to mention, perfectly reasonable things. So I turned around in consultation with my lawyers. I have a long time, a long time relationship with First Amendment lawyers because I've been doing this for a long time.
And their view was that this was, she was actually in violation of the law herself in New York state. You can't, you can't use libel laws as a means to intimidate perfectly legal speech. So we sued her. And, and this is now in court proceeding along.
Is before a federal judge, there's a lot of complicated procedural issues here, but a federal judge will rule shortly on their motion to dismiss or move the case to Florida, which would be more advantageous to them, or our motion to remand the case to where we think it belongs, which is in the state of New York. And we think it belongs there because I live in the state of New York and Melania Trump lives in the state of New York. And one of the, one of the things that we are asking the, the, the judge to do is to authorize discovery. We can prove that she lives in the state of New York.
And that would involve, among other things, getting access to the Melania Trump and Donald Trump prenuptial agreement. So interesting. And of course it's been supported by many, many, many people, many of you out there, who are listening and watching this. More than more than more than 25,000 people have made small dollar contributions to this law.
So we've raised almost a million dollars. It gives us the wherewithal to pursue this suit and to get Melania Trump, and she would have to have to testify. She would have to give a deposition under oath. All of her, all of her friends, associates would have to give a deposition.
And we would specifically focus on that one period, the late 1990s, early 2000s, the one period in which, in which the, she, the, her news conference was basically paying no attention to those years. Right. It was the most bizarre press conference. And the president himself seemed to try and distance himself from it.
He was like, oh, well, she talked to me about it for two minutes and I said, well, maybe I would do that. Maybe I wouldn't do that. And then he kept changing his mind. Which was, she didn't speak to me at all about this.
And she just sprung this on all of us. And nobody really knows what to do. So Melania may turn out to be the most intriguing person, intermittently in the White House. You know, I think it's a really central part of this story, the mystery of Donald Trump, how he became the president, why he became the president, again, what is this whole mysterious construct in which some people in the country see him as a completely transparent and corrupt, unserious, unfit person.
And another part of the country sees him as some, as some ideal, even an ideal family man. And she may prove to be the biggest threat to his presidency. Yeah. I mean, I don't think we have seen the end of this.
Do you think there's anything about her conversations with Putin, which emerged last year because she was trying to get children from the Ukraine back from Russia? And obviously she comes from Slovenia, Eastern Europe. Do you think there's any possibility she could be a red sparrow? She's not in it for for Vladimir Putin's account.
She's in it for her own account. I think it's just what she gets out of this now. It's how to I want mine. It's monetizing the East Wing.
I want mine. It's monetizing the First Lady Rail. Yes. monetizing the East Wing, which they have taken from her.
Right. And she may well have studied Meghan and realized, oh, I have to do this now. Ask for forgiveness later. Get on with it.
If you have been, thank you for joining us. I like these conversations on one theme sometimes. I mean, goodness knows there's enough news going on, but it's interesting to do a deep dive and just remind people how incredibly odd their marriage is. Anyway, please subscribe to the Daily Beast if you haven't been trained to get to 700,000 almost there.
And it's how we can bring you these conversations because we are independent media. Yeah, no, because the regular media won't tell you about this. Nobody. I mean, they're scrupulous about not going there.
Even though she's invited them in with her press conference saying she knows nothing about Jeffrey Epstein. And even though everyone has known that they fundamentally don't live together. And even though there are pictures of her with Jeffrey Epstein and pictures of her with Gillen Maxwell, and there are emails between her and Gillen. Well, so you have to depend on us for this story.
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