Book Review: Melania and Me: The Rise and Fall of My Friendship With the First Lady

Melania and Me is a book by Stephanie Winston Wolkoff, a former friend of the 45th and 47th first lady, that was published in 2020. It is an interesting look behind the curtain of the lead-up to, and the first couple of years of, the 2017-2021 presidential administration from the perspective of someone who was a senior advisor/special advisor/friend of the former first lady. Wolkoff details how she met and became friends with the former first lady (she met her when she was working in the fashion industry, helping to plan and organize events like the Met Gala), and how that transitioned to working on the inauguration planning and trying to set up the staff for the first lady once the former president was in the White House. 

The book details a lot of the infighting and backbiting between the West Wing of the White House and the East Wing (i.e., the president's staff vs the first lady's staff; aka Ivanka vs. Melania), and how the former was doing everything the undermine the latter (at least from Wolkoff's point of view). The book definitely gives the impression that Ivanka and Melania have a chilly (at best) relationship, or outright hate each other. The book goes on to detail how, as the finances of the inauguration came to light, Wolkoff was thrown under the bus for the overcharges and missing money and was painted as a friend of Melania who got 26 million dollars for planning a handful of events. The Author's version is that she only made $400k (roughly) and put out so much of her own money between the inauguration, her time in the White House, and attorney fees for various things, that she ended up a million dollars in the hole.  

The author is a bit of a contradiction. She admits up front that she was apolitical and never voted in her life before the 2016 election, and felt it was better not to vote because she could not tell you the difference between the economic policies of Obama and Romney, yet voted for t***p solely because she was friends with his wife, and although she disagreed with most of his policies. Wolkoff spends about 2/3 of the book fangirling over Melania, then ends up saying she wishes she never met her. It is clear that Wolkoff felt more and more betrayed by Melania over time and, even though Wolkoff thought she was different because she had a "real" friendship with Melania, when it came down to it, she discovered that she was expendable just like all the other people she had seen thrown under the bus and cast to the side by the trump family. The book does not talk much about the former and current (as of this writing) president. However, Wolkoff takes some shots at the things he said during the first administration. She also paints Ivanka as a spoiled princess, and intimates that Jared is basically worthless and that nobody knew why he had any responsibility in the administration. 

The hardcover version of the book has just under 350 pages of substantive text. It is an interesting and fairly quick read. If you are a fast reader, you can get through it in a few days (or less), but it is not what I would call a page-turner that most people would read in one sitting because it is hard to put down. It portrays pretty much everyone in that White House as petty (including the author) and most of the group out for themselves. The author is definitely more sympathetic than some of the other people detailed in the book. It does seem that Wolkoff was trying to make Melania look as good as possible (despite Ivanka and Melania fued and Melania's "why should I give a shit about anything" attitude about damn near everything), and even put her health in jeopardy by overworking herself for Melania's benefit. Even so, it is hard to feel extremely sorry for her because she had certainly seen enough before she was thrown under the bus to know what was likely coming her way, which, in the long run, makes it different from a lot of the other tell-all books out there about trump. Ultimately, I would call this an interesting read, but not necessarily a must-read.