The Washington Post set out to find whether first lady Melania Trump would divorce President Trump once he leaves office, likely disappointing critics with its findings.
“Bookies started taking bets on Election Day as gamblers considered a question on many people’s minds,” the newspaper reported. “Will Melania Trump dump her husband when he is no longer president?”
“Maybe Melania is similar to America,” authors Mary Jordan and Jada Yuan wrote. “A big part of her admires Donald Trump, even if another part of her is appalled by him.”
They found little evidence that the first lady is “appalled” by her husband, however, with multiple sources insisting that divorce wasn’t in the cards for the Trumps.
“Melania Trump keeps a small inner circle, but two people close to her spoke to The Washington Post and said that she has shown no sign of leaving her husband, at least not any time soon,” the authors found.
Other sources who have spent time with the Trumps were more willing to go on the record, but none of them believed there was any truth to the thought that the first lady was considering divorce.
“I don’t think Melania leaves Donald. She’s very willingly complicit in his schemes and holds his beliefs as her own,” said Michael Cohen, President Trump’s former attorney. “Those two deserve each other.”
“A lot of people want her to leave him as some kind of a payback, but I don’t see Melania Trump to be that type of a person,” added Elizabeth Natalle, a University of North Carolina at Greensboro professor who has authored books about former first ladies Jacqueline Kennedy and Michelle Obama.
“She’s consistently said in her interviews that she’s a big girl,” Natalle said. “She knows what she’s doing.”
The authors note that gamblers at offshore betting sites seem bullish on a Trump split, pointing out that the payout on a $10, “Yes, she will divorce” bet has moved from $65 on Election Day to $26 on Monday.
But the Trumps were married for two decades before the president took office, and former friend and aide Stephanie Winston Wolkoff doesn’t believe there is any reason to think things will change now.
“It’s part of the show,” Wolkoff, who authored a book highly critical of the first lady, said. “She’s always been the quiet. He’s been the loud. She’s been the soft. He’s been the hard. They play off one another. It’s part of the relationship that makes it work.”
Still, the authors say that “many anti-Trumpers” would love to see “him humiliated by his 24-years-younger wife leaving him, especially when he’s already down.” However, they were left to wonder if the idea was “just another fantasy” that the first lady could be “looking forward to being rid of” the president, much like “tens of millions” of other people.
When asked by the Washington Post about the speculation surrounding a possible Trump divorce, the first lady’s chief of staff called the question “pathetic,” in perhaps the strongest rebuke of the story.
“This question is pathetic and exactly why people no longer trust the mainstream media,” Stephanie Grisham said. “No legitimate journalist would ask this.”
