Secretly Recorded Tapes of Melania Trump Reveal Her Frustration At Criticism Over Immigration Policies

On Thursday night, CNN’s Anderson Cooper 360 exclusively aired a tape of Melania Trump secretly recorded by Stephanie Winston Wolkoff, a former friend and senior advisor to the First Lady. Winston Wolkoff was in the news over the summer after publishing Melania and Me, a tell-all book about her friendship with Melania and its eventual devolution.

In the tape, which was recorded during summer 2018 after Winston Wolkoff had been fired by the First Lady, Melania complains about having to coordinate the White House Christmas decorations, and expresses frustration at receiving criticism over her husband’s horrific policy of forcibly separating migrant children from their parents.

“I’m working … my ass off on the Christmas stuff, that you know, who gives a fuck about the Christmas stuff and decorations? But I need to do it, right?”

She continued, “OK, and then I do it and I say that I’m working on Christmas and planning for the Christmas and they said, ‘Oh, what about the children that they were separated?’ Give me a fucking break. Where they were saying anything when Obama did that? I can not go, I was trying get the kid reunited with the mom. I didn’t have a chance — needs to go through the process and through the law.”

God, it must be so INCONVENIENT to have to deal with comments about your husband’s violent human rights violations against undocumented immigrants when you’re just trying to choose some fucking Christmas decorations!!!! Despite clearly working her “ass off on the Christmas stuff,” Melania’s holiday decoration choices have been tacky at best and desperately ugly at worst. Better luck this year Melania!!!!! Hopefully her husband’s monstrous mistreatment of marginalized people doesn’t get in the way this time.

CNN reports that in a second recording, Melania Trump attempts to defend the inhumane treatment of migrant children at ICE detention centers, and alleges that immigrant families fabricate accounts of fleeing danger in their home countries in order to gain entry to the United States—you know, because immigrants are notably treated so very well in this country!

“The kids, they say, ‘Wow I will have my own bed? I will sleep on the bed? I will have a cabinet for my clothes?’ It’s so sad to hear it but they didn’t have that in their own countries, they sleep on the floor,” Melania Trump says on the tape. “They are taken care of nicely there. But you know, yeah, they are not with parents, it’s sad. But when they come here alone or with coyotes or illegally, you know, you need to do something.”

“A lot of like moms and kids they are teached how to do it. They go over and they say like, ‘Oh, we will be killed by a gang member, we will be, you know, it’s so dangerous,’ “ Trump said, mimicking a dramatic voice. “So they are allowed to stay here.”

“It’s not true that they would, you know what I mean,” Trump said, adding that “they’re not professional but they are teached by other people what to say to come over and to you know let them go to stay here. Because they could easily stay in Mexico but they don’t want to stay in Mexico because Mexico doesn’t take care of them the same as America does.”

The idea that migrants who are leaving their home countries and being forcibly separated from their families and detained in barbaric conditions are actually being “taken care of nicely” is pure delusion.

For those who haven’t gotten it through their heads yet—Melania Trump is not a victim, existing in a world where she is oblivious to the awfulness of her husband. In fact, she is actually walking the path of many white women, cast as the eternal victim despite being actively complicit in her husband’s violence against the most marginalized and vulnerable among us.