While her husband, President Donald Trump has a history of making racist comments, two former housekeepers have different recollections of his wife, Melania Trump, and they note that while she was often emotionally distant, she always treated them respectfully and appeared to appreciate the work they did.
That’s what the women, both undocumented, told Mary Jordan, who interviewed them for her book “The Art of Her Deal: The Untold Story of Melania Trump.” Both women were employees at the Trump National Golf Club, in Bedminster, New Jersey, and they described a couple that sleep in separate bedrooms and maintain separate lives.
“It’s a strange marriage,” former housekeeper Victorina Morales, who is from Guatemala, told Jordan. “I never saw them like a normal family, sitting together at a table, eating together, talking. Never, never, never. They spend time in the same place but they never interact.”
The Bedminster golf club is a favorite gathering place for the Trump family, notes Jordan, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist for The Washington Post.
But while the family often spent time there, it’s apparent that each member was alone in all that togetherness, notes The Mercury News. [1]
A typical day at Bedminster would go something like this: Trump would spend his day on the golf course, eating his lunch and dinner at the clubhouse. Then he might join Melania and their son Barron in the residence. Sitting on the couch, the President would prop his feet on the coffee table. Melania would be working at her computer while Barron sat on the floor, watching TV, or playing video games.
And the couple maintained separate bedrooms. Donald Trump’s bedroom was on the second floor and while Melania and Barron also slept on the second floor, each had their own suite, former employees told Jordan. Melania’s suite included a room where she received massages.
Melania liked to have roses, music, and candles and sounds of nature in that room and it was Morales, who worked for the family from 2013 to 2018, prepared the room to make sure she had these things.
Sandra Diaz, who is from Costa Rica, is also a former housekeeper, and both women say Melania often appeared “sad” or burdened.” Diaz noted that the First Lady’s led an “insulated” life at the golf club. She rarely invited friends over for visits and kept to her computer and otherwise spent time with Barron and her parents.
And it wasn’t unusual for Melania, Barron, and her parents to speak Slovenian, which prompted complaints from Trump to complain that he had no idea what they were saying.
But if there’s one thing Donald and Melania Trump agreed on, it was how their personal spaces were kept, noted Diaz, who worked at Bedminster from 2010 to 2013. Something, she noted could at times be a challenge. Servants were instructed to don latex gloves and blue cloth shoe covers.
Melania loved having white and pink roses on her table and wanted the housekeepers “to leave perfect vacuum tracks in her white carpet and not touch the six cinnamon-scented candles she kept near her computer.”
But if there was one challenge for the maids, it was Melania’s bathroom. The First Lady likes to use tanning spray (admittedly she does a better job with that than her tangerine-colored husband) and she uses it whenever she leaves the house. And when the bronzer washes off in the shower, it leaves a giant mess. Which the maids were required to “make sure any traces were removed from the white surfaces in the bathroom.”
While Melania could be demanding, she didn’t play “competitive” games like her stepdaughter Ivanka, the housekeepers told Jordan.
Ivanka and her husband, Jared Kushner, had their own mansion at Bedminster, and when they brought their kids along, the tense relationship between Melania and Ivanka became apparent. Diaz remembered that Ivanka would tell her to come to clean her mansion at exactly the same time as Melania wanted her house cleaned.
“It seemed like a deliberate power play,” Diaz told Jordan.
There have been reports of Ivanka continually attempting to sideline Melania, with perhaps the most famous example of that being when the First Lady stayed in New York City and Ivanka suggested the First Lady’s Office should be renamed “the First Family Office.”
But Morales and Diaz said they preferred working for Melania, “who, despite the language gap and her strict demands, always treated them with more respect.”
Trump’s comments about “bad hombres” and “rapists” crossing the border and separating children from their families and detaining them have apparently been the last straw for the women and they have been speaking out in interviews with The Washington Post and The New York Times in 2018 to “highlight what they considered Trump’s hypocrisy and unfairness to immigrants.”
And while Melania might be more polite than her husband, she’s every bit as complicit in her husband’s racism. She put that on full display with her “I don’t care, do you,” [2] coat, demonstrating a tragic lack of sympathy for others. So while she may seem “sad” and who knows, may divorce her husband when he leaves office, she’s still every inch the hypocrite that he is.