Melania Trump couldn't hire staff as Ivanka took her first lady funds, says ex-aide: 'She was never respected'
Former First Lady Melania Trump had "no budget" to hire staff as most of the funds allocated for the FLOTUS was taken by Ivanka Trump, a former adviser and friend said.
Stephanie Winston Wolkoff, 50, author of the explosive tell-all book 'Melania and Me,' described how she was forced to give up her salary so that a couple of more staff could be hired to help set up the East Wing for Ivanka and her husband Jared Kushner. Speaking on Mooch FM podcast, Wolkoff said no one cared much about Melania not having access to funds because no one expected Trump's third wife to have the ability to do something impactful.
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"I walked into the White House on January 22 and had dinner with the Trump family the day after the swearing-in," she said. "I was so looking forward after we had toured the East Wing so Melania and I to create this bipartisan group of women that were going to really make a difference to the world. I believed it was possible, and it was."
She added that during a conversation with former President Donald Trump's deputy chief of staff, Katie Walsh, she understood that there "never existed" respect for the then-FLOTUS. "I'm realizing Melania didn't have a budget and didn't really have any staff. It was me interviewing everyone because Ivanka and Jared had used all of the budgets, all of the titles. Melania was left with a handful of titles and salaries that wouldn't enable us to hire anyone with any experiences," she said.
As a result, Wolkoff ended up working as an unpaid adviser to Melania from January 2017 to February 2018. "So I gave up the original salary because I needed to hire two other people in order to be there and to help set up the East Wing. It was so disheartening because it didn't matter to me whether Melania was there, whether they felt Melania had the ability to do something that was going to be impactful," she explained. "It was the fact that no one respected that she was the First Lady of the United States of America and the East Wing represented that to me and I held that in high esteem."
We previously reported that Melania and Ivanka are not on the best of terms with the first lady referring to her stepdaughter as a “snake”. In the book, Wolkoff explores the apparently tense and rather hostile relationship between Melania and Ivanka. Melania allegedly wrote to Wolkoff in a text on Ivanka, "You know how they are snakes."
Wolkoff also claims that Melania launched 'Operation Block Ivanka' to ensure the first daughter was out of camera frame for inauguration day when Donald Trump was sworn in as the POTUS. Also, Melania did not want Ivanka to attend the wreath-laying ceremony at Arlington National Cemetery, so according to Wolkoff, she left it out of her schedule until Ivanka asked her to ask why it wasn't mentioned.
Also, according to a new biography of the first lady titled 'The Art of Her Deal: The Untold Story of Melania Trump,' by The Washington Post reporter Mary Jordan, Ivanka reportedly took advantage of First Lady Melania Trump's delayed move to Washington DC to seize territory in the White House. Ivanka had suggested that the First Lady's Office be renamed the 'First Family's Office.'
The White House, however, has denounced the claim, calling the story "totally false". Deputy press secretary Judd Deere, in a statement to the Daily Mail, said: "This is totally false. The media is once again running untrue information from anonymous sources and not once did anyone fact check this with the White House or Ivanka Trump."