At the moment, the top two entries on Amazon’s best-seller list are Trump tell-all books, and considering Mary Trump’s and John Bolton’s ability to infuriate the White House — and stir up publicity — it’s no surprise that publishers want to put out more books in this genre. And there’s already another in the pipeline: Stephanie Winston Wolkoff, a former adviser to the First Lady, is expected to release Melania & Me on September 1.
Winston Wolkoff — a former PR manager for Vogue who once produced the Met Gala — first became friends with Melania Trump 15 years ago, the year that the Slovenian model married the current president. Despite this long relationship, the Daily Beast reports that “people with knowledge of the project say the content of the book is largely negative and that the manuscript heavily trashes the first lady.”
Toward the beginning of the relationship, the pair had a close working relationship: As an unofficial adviser to the first lady, Winston Wolkoff reportedly was able to share her dissenting opinion on ideas like the Be Best initiative (too clunky) and her decision to sport an aggressively callous jacket. But Winston Wolkoff was forced out following a February 2018 report from the New York Times detailing how her company was paid $26 million by Trump’s inauguration committee, which was accused of “fiscal mismanagement at its worst” by the government watchdog Public Citizen.
As Winston Wolkoff became a face of the scandal, the White House ended her arrangement with the first lady. “I am sorry that the professional part of our relationship has come to an end, but I am comforted in the fact that our [friendship] far outweigh[s] politics,” Melania wrote to Wolkoff on the day of her ouster. “Thank you Again! Much love.” The year after she was “thrown under the bus,” Winston Wolkoff cooperated with prosecutors from the Southern District of New York as they investigated the inaugural committee — which raised twice as much cash as any previous inauguration and was riddled with overpayments, including some at Trump properties.
