The Wildest Things in Melania Trump’s New Book

Former first lady Melania Trump’s self-titled memoir may not divulge political insights from Donald Trump’s White House, but it does offer a glimpse of a woman who once stood beside one of the most powerful men on the planet—and who may soon do so again.

Melania, which was released Tuesday, is a 256-page exploration of the former first lady’s life, from growing up in Cold War–era Yugoslavia to nude modeling in the United States and standing by Trump during his presidency. But some of the most pot-stirring details lie not in what Melania did but rather in what she believes, and how much her own platform differs from that of her MAGA husband.

That includes writing against previous reports from her own aide that she refused to denounce the violence at the U.S. Capitol at the hands of her husband’s supporters on January 6.

“The violence we witnessed was unequivocally unacceptable,” Melania writes in the new book. “While I recognized that many individuals felt the election was mishandled and the vice president should halt the confirmation process, we must never resort to violence.”

But Melania does nothing to dispel the baseless conspiracies her husband has spread that the 2020 election was stolen, either. In fact, she feeds into them, writing, “Many Americans still have doubts about the election to this day. I am not the only person who questions the results.”

Melania also says that she fought her husband on his administration’s family separation policy at the U.S.-Mexico border, telling Trump that “this has to stop.”

“The government should not be taking children away from their parents,” Melania recalled telling the former president shortly before he signed an executive order ending the horrifying policy.

And, perhaps most significantly, Melania revealed that she is staunchly pro-abortion.

“A woman’s fundamental right to individual liberty, to her own life, grants her the authority to terminate her pregnancy,” Melania writes in her book.

That stance was, apparently, totally fine with the aggressively anti-abortion Republican presidential nominee. During an interview with Fox News on Thursday, Trump casually confessed that he had encouraged his wife to “write what you believe” with regard to the new book. Meanwhile, Trump’s campaign, Project 2025, and the Republican Party have worked overtime to tell every other woman in America exactly what they should do with their bodies—whether that’s fighting for a national abortion ban or celebrating the encroaching stateside restrictions on other, adjacent reproductive procedures, such as in vitro fertilization. Trump himself has repeatedly boasted about his role in overturning Roe v. Wade and peeling back abortion rights across the nation.

Notably, Melania has done nothing, either while her husband was in office or in the four years since, to actually advance abortion rights in the U.S.

Throughout the book, Melania was quick to blame the influence of “the media, Big Tech, and the deep state” for a variety of her family’s woes, including supposedly preventing her husband’s second term.

“We are living in a dangerous time when it comes to journalism,” she claims.

Kamala Harris has taken a slim lead over Donald Trump over the past month, according to a new poll from The New York Times and Siena College. And that may be in part thanks to rising support among a critical voter group.

Nine percent of people who describe themselves as Republicans said they plan to vote for Harris in November, compared to just 5 percent who said the same thing in the Times poll last month. Harris also has a narrow lead overall against Trump of 49 to 46 percent, with voters more likely to choose her over the former president as caring about people like them and representing change.

This is the first Times/Siena poll in which Harris has led Trump in the race ever since President Biden withdrew and the vice president succeeded him. Last month’s poll had Trump and Harris deadlocked at 47 percent each after the first presidential debate, which Harris was widely seen as winning.

Harris has also taken her first lead in the question of which candidate represents change in the race, with 46 percent of respondents giving her the edge over 44 percent for Trump. The gap widens among younger voters, with 58 percent choosing her versus 34 percent for Trump. The poll has her in the lead as the more fun candidate, as well—43 percent of likely voters, including 13 percent of Republicans, give her the edge over Trump (with just 35 percent).

Trump still has an 11-point advantage over Harris among male voters, and 42 percent of voters overall said his policies helped them personally, compared to 22 percent for Biden. And he retains trust, with 48 percent of voters saying they trust him to handle the issue they see as most important, as opposed to Harris, with 46 percent.

The poll was conducted from September 29 to October 6 among 3,385 likely voters, with a margin of error of plus or minus 2.4 percent, and shows that the presidential race is incredibly close with the election less than a month away. Harris has made incredible strides to take a narrow lead and is even winning over key voters in battleground states, such as Hispanic voters in Georgia and Arizona.

But there’s still more work to be done to ensure Harris wins key battleground states like Pennsylvania and therefore the presidency. A key group of people to target could be those left out of polls like this: people who didn’t vote in 2020. While 2020 had the highest voter turnout of any election since 1900, one-third of eligible voters didn’t vote, and the Trump campaign is actively courting them. Recent polls show that Harris could gain a major edge with a cease-fire in Gaza and an arms embargo against Israel.

Republican Representative Anna Paulina Luna demanded more FEMA funding for Florida, just weeks after she voted against a bill that provided $20 billion for federal emergency funds.

As Hurricane Milton approaches the Florida coastline, Luna has waded into a growing spat between Vice President Kamala Harris and Florida Governor Ron DeSantis.

“We have a category 5 hurricane headed right to Pinellas, and @KamalaHarris is taking this time to attack @GovRonDeSantis?” Luna wrote Monday in a post on X.

“Cut the crap. We need FEMA DOLLARS FREE’D UP. ALL ASSETS. STOP ATTACKING RON AND DO YOUR JOB! @VP” she added.

But just last month, as Hurricane Helene approached the United States, Luna voted to shut down the federal government, vetoing a measure to extend FEMA funding by $20 billion. Luna was among 82 House Republicans who voted against the deal and one of 11 Florida lawmakers who cast dissenting votes.

Now, as Florida prepares to face a massive Category 5 storm that has prompted massive evacuations across the state, Luna is vying to get every cent she can.

When Luna failed to support FEMA funding, she faced strong criticism from Democratic candidate Whitney Fox, who is running to unseat her.

“As the worst storm in our lifetime was hours away, Luna couldn’t set aside her partisan games for even a moment,” Fox said. “She voted to delay critical FEMA aid and emergency support when we would need it most. This isn’t leadership—it’s a catastrophic failure.”

At the time, the White House warned that the stopgap bill, while necessary to pass, did not provide adequate funding to help communities recover from natural disasters.

Donald Trump’s campaign team is lashing out against a journalist following news that the former president secretly kept in touch with Russian President Vladimir Putin after leaving the Oval Office.

A statement put out by Trump’s communications director, Steven Cheung, is rife with ad hominem attacks against journalist Bob Woodward, calling him a “total sleazebag,” “an angry, little man,” “a truly demented and deranged man,” and also “a boring person with no personality.”

In his new book, War, which Trump’s campaign says “belongs in the bargain bin of the fiction section of a discount bookstore,” Woodward writes that Trump has made at least seven calls to the Russian leader since leaving office. Trump also allegedly secretly gave Putin Covid-19 testing equipment during the early days of the pandemic.

“Please don’t tell anybody you sent these to me,” Putin told Trump, according to the author, out of concern for the backlash Trump would undoubtedly face. “I don’t care,” said Trump. “Fine.”

Woodward also says that in one incident at Mar-a-Lago earlier this year, Trump told a senior aide to leave so he could have “a private phone call with Russian President Vladimir Putin.”

Accusing the investigative journalist of having “Trump Derangement Syndrome,” Trump’s team has denied his close relationship with Putin, stating that none of what Woodward writes is true, without any real rebuttal.

Following the news, Trump posted an edited clip of Robert Mueller on Truth Social, calling the investigation the “RUSSIA HOAX!”

Republicans have launched a host of lies and disinformation throughout the 2024 hurricane season. So far, conservative leaders in heavily affected regions, including Florida and Georgia, have accused the Biden administration of diverting funds from FEMA to assist undocumented immigrants entering the country (a charge that FEMA has fervently rejected), claimed that working with the White House to expedite disaster relief “seemed political,” and have conspiratorially suggested that the hurricanes are a government manipulation.

But the depth and depravity of the Donald Trump–swirled fiction stretches even further, even to the point of harming one of the MAGA leader’s strongest voting blocs.

By Tuesday, it became clear to federal officials that the lie that FEMA was out of money had stopped people from actually requesting their aid in the wake of Hurricane Helene, which devastated large swaths of North Carolina and Georgia.

Speaking with CNN, former Republican communications strategist Douglas Heye lamented how Trump’s own supporters were bearing the brunt of the misinformation.

“The area of North Carolina that was hit is overwhelmingly Republican,” Heye, a North Carolinian, told the network. “By spreading this misinformation, you’re hurting your own voters first. And we know Donald Trump takes his people sort of as a special case, he’s damaging them for his own political goods. That’s malicious.”

But the magnitude of disaster caused by the bold-faced lies will only come to light after the full hurricane season has passed. On the immediate horizon swirls another massive superstorm, Category 5 Hurricane Milton, which is scheduled to slam the west side of Florida by Wednesday evening. Central Floridian leaders have repeatedly warned Milton’s arrival at the Sunshine State’s shores will be a catastrophic event that will claim lives and demolish the region, with forecasted 10-to-15-foot storm surges that Tampa Mayor Jane Castor has described as “not survivable.”

“I can say without any dramatization whatsoever: If you choose to stay in one of those evacuation areas, you’re going to die,” Castor told CNN on Monday, a warning she said she has never issued before.

Speaking with MSNBC on Monday night, Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas said he had “not seen” weather emergency–related inaccuracies “ever before at this level.”

“You and I both remember a time when an extreme weather event, a natural disaster, actually brought people together,” Mayorkas told host and former White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki. “Now, unfortunately, tragically, quite frankly, it is politicized. And what happens is, the people who are victimized by the natural disaster are the ones who will suffer.”

“It sows distrust in their government, and therefore they don’t seek the help that they truly need,” Mayorkas continued. “We have funds to put in their pockets to be able to help them address immediate needs. These individuals are not seeking that relief because of the disinformation, the intentionally false information, they are receiving.”