Photo: Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images
In the back of many books, you’ll see the author thank their spouse for reading an early draft. But it seems safe to say that if Melania Trump thanks her husband on the acknowledgments page of her new book, it won’t be for his assistance with her literary endeavor.
During a September 19 rally on Long Island, Donald Trump revealed that he hasn’t even read his wife’s memoir, Melania, which comes out on October 8.
“People love our First Lady, I’ll tell ya,” Trump said. “Go out and get her book. She just wrote a book. I hope she said good things about [me]. I don’t know, I didn’t — so busy!”
In the next breath, Trump encouraged his supporters to buy the book he hasn’t read because it’s “great.”
“She just wrote a book called Melania,” he said. “Go out and buy it, it’s great. And if she says bad things about me, I’ll call you all up and I’ll say, ‘Don’t buy it, get rid of it.’”
This admission came up in the midst of a four-minute series of loosely connected observations and anecdotes about the media not understanding sarcasm (while most describe this kind of thing as rambling, Trump has tried to rebrand it as a genius rhetorical device he calls “the weave”).
So, here’s the full context. About 30 minutes into his speech, Trump was accusing Kamala Harris of promising to raise taxes. He then declared that he shouldn’t have said that, as the media would edit his words to make it look like he’d promised to raise taxes. “I told our great First Lady I will not be sarcastic anymore!” Trump declared. Then he complained that the press used to accuse him of struggling to find his way offstage when he was actually doing an impression of Joe Biden. Somehow, this segued into Trump relaying how he sometimes asks Melania if she’s impressed with the size of his rally crowd.
Trump plugged his wife’s book, then a few moments later, he was back to crowd size. He proclaimed himself an even bigger draw than Elvis Presley (Trump has previously suggested that he also looks like the “King of Rock and Roll.”)
“I’m the greatest of all time,” Trump said. “Maybe greater than Elvis, because Elvis had a guitar … I don’t have the privilege of a guitar!”
Then Trump circled back to fishing for compliments about his crowd size from Melania:
I’d say, “Baby, who can do it like me? Nobody can do it like me. How great am I?”
… I’d say, “How great was the speech? Not how good, how great was it?” And she’s say, “It was good, but your hair looked terrible tonight.” Or the worst ever: So I said, “How was it, First Lady?” And she’d say, “It was good, but you couldn’t find your way off the stage.” I was imitating Biden, and they said I did it!
Melania seems absolutely savage, so she probably won’t be crushed by her husband’s revelation that he hasn’t read her memoir. Or maybe he has read Melania and this whole riff was sarcastic? But it’s unclear if Donald Trump has even read the three coffee-table books he put out since leaving the White House, so that’s far from a safe bet.
