Melania, Donald and Stormy — what Trump’s trial has revealed about his marriage
Witnesses in the hush money case suggested the ex-president and his wife live separate lives — yet he values her opinion and may need her on the campaign trail.
On some evenings when Donald Trump was toiling away in the Oval Office as president of the United States, he would tell Madeleine Westerhout, his personal secretary, to call the first lady.
“To let her know that he was running late,” Westerhout said, at Trump’s trial. “Like: ‘Honey, I’m going to be late for dinner.’” It was “just like any other marriage”.
Other witnesses offered a less rapturous vision of a union that has so long been the subject of wonder and speculation. “Don’t worry,” Trump said, according to Michael Cohen, when considering how Melania might react to allegations that he had slept with a porn star a year after they were married. “How long do you think I will be on the market for? Not long.”
The trial at a Manhattan court - which unlike some of Trump’s children, Melania pointedly did not attend - offered a vision of his third marriage from witnesses who were in his inner circle, from people who worked for him, and from a porn star who says she had a one-night stand with him.
It is a picture of a married couple who sleep in separate bedrooms and who appear to live separate lives. But though Trump could sometimes sound callous or transactional about the state of his marriage, he also appeared to trust his wife: to regard her as an ally and to value her opinion.
His feelings for her became a question for the jury charged with deciding whether Trump falsified business records to conceal a so-called hush money payment to the porn star Stormy Daniels on the eve of the 2016 election.
The offence, usually a misdemeanour, is a felony if it is done to conceal another crime. Prosecutors said that other crime was an illegal attempt to influence the outcome of the 2016 election, by concealing Daniels’ story from the electorate. The jury is deliberating whether Trump paid the money purely to stop Melania from finding out and therefore that it had nothing to do with the election.
‘We don’t even sleep in the same room’
Daniels, 45, was one of several prosecution witnesses to cast doubt on the idea that Trump was particularly worried about his wife finding out.
She told the court that after meeting him at a celebrity golf tournament in Lake Tahoe in 2006, she was invited to his hotel suite for dinner.
The suite was large and they seated themselves on either side of a table in a dining room, Daniels said. He showed her a few photographs, one of which was of Melania. “I actually said she is very beautiful. What about your wife? He said: ‘Oh, don’t worry about that. We actually don’t even sleep in the same room.’”
If you believe Daniels’ account, you might still wonder if Trump would be truthful about his domestic arrangements, while talking with another woman in a hotel room. But it aligns with an account from Mary Jordan, one of Melania Trump’s biographers, who reported that the couple kept separate bedrooms in her 2020 book, The Art of Her Deal.
This was true at one of his properties and when they lived at the White House, she wrote, saying that he favoured a darker colour scheme, whereas Melania prefers a lighter one, and that he tends to wake well before her, at 5am, whereupon he “turns on his televisions”. She quoted a former housekeeper who said their rooms were on different floors and that “they spend time in the same place but they don’t interact”.
Did Trump care if he was caught?
At the trial, Daniels said Trump was unbothered by the prospect of Melania finding out about an affair. Years earlier, Trump’s first wife Ivana is said to have responded to rumours that he was seeing a woman named Marla Maples, who seemed to be staying close by in the mountain resort of Aspen, by confronting her on a ski slope.
But in 2006 and in the years afterwards, Trump never asked Daniels to keep their affair secret and never appeared worried about his wife finding out, she said.
David Pecker, the publisher of the National Enquirer, said in his testimony that before Trump began his campaign for the presidency, if a negative story surfaced, he would worry “about Melania” and about what his daughter Ivanka might think. But after he began running for the presidency, Trump’s concern was “basically what would be the impact to the campaign, or election”, Pecker said.
This was sometimes contradicted by other witnesses. Hope Hicks, his former communications director, spoke warmly of him and wept, on the witness stand, not long after delivering a rather damning account of a conversation she said they had about the so-called hush money payment. She also said Trump did appear concerned about Melania learning of another alleged affair.
In early November 2018, the day the Wall Street Journal published an article alleging that a hush money payment had been made to another woman who claimed to have had an affair with Trump, he asked that newspapers not be delivered to their residence, Hicks said. “I don’t think he wanted anyone in his family to be hurt or embarrassed by anything that was happening on the campaign.”
‘He would call her just to check in’
Westerhout, 33, who also cried on the witness stand while recalling how she came to be fired as his assistant over remarks she made at what she thought was an off-the-record dinner, offered a glowing account of the Trump marriage.
“I believe they have a relationship of mutual respect,” she said. “He was my boss, but she was definitely the one in charge... They laughed a lot when she came in to the Oval Office.”
Westerhout said she had a direct view of Trump, at the Resolute Desk, from her own desk just outside the Oval Office and “there were times when I could kind of figure out that he was on the phone with Mrs Trump”. Through a window of the Oval Office he could look across to their living quarters, and “he would say, you know: ‘Honey, come over to the window,’” she said. “And they would kind of wave to each other.”
Westerhout waved from the witness stand, recalling this. “When he was boarding Marine One on the South Lawn, he would call Mrs Trump and say: ‘Honey, I’m about to board,’ which I always found funny,” she said. “Like, of course she knows his schedule. He just wanted to say hi and check in.”
Was Melania behind ‘locker-room talk’ defence?
Cohen, Trump’s former attorney and fixer, offered a far less rosy description of their relationship, in which the prospect that Melania would walk out on him did not appear to bother him in the least. Mitchell Epner, a defence attorney with Kudman Trachten Aloe Posner, who has been following the case, said Cohen’s answer was “absolutely devastating, because it sounded like Trump”. Cohen recalled Trump boasting: “How long do you think I’ll be on the market for? Not long”, which “sounds exactly like something Trump would say”, Epner said.
But Cohen, 57, also in a way bolstered the idea that Trump respected his wife and listened to her opinions. After a recording of Trump emerged in October 2016, in which he could be heard boasting of grabbing women by the genitals, Cohen said Trump called him and said that “we needed to put a spin on this” by saying that it was merely “locker-room talk”.
This defence, which Trump used himself, including in a presidential debate a few days later with Hillary Clinton, had apparently come from an adviser who was very close to home, even if she was not in the same bedroom. It was “something Melania had recommended”, Cohen said. “Or at least, he told me that that’s what Melania thought it was.”
The Times
