Melania claim by Mitt Romney prompts furious response from Trump team

Donald Trump's team lashed out at Sen. Mitt Romney (R-UT) over a claim he made about the former president and his wife Melania in a new biography.

Romney told biographer McCay Coppins that he attended a New England Patriots game with his son and Trump before the former president married Melania – who was also present – and Trump boasted that he had the most desirable girlfriend in New York, according to excerpts published by Rolling Stone on Wednesday.

"Trump sidled up to Romney’s son Josh and pointed at a leggy brunette across the room. ‘Have you seen my girlfriend, Melania?’ he asked, smirking. ‘When I drop her, the phone is gonna ring off the hook. Every guy in New York wants to go out with her,’” Coppins wrote in the forthcoming book, Romney: A Reckoning.

The biography recounts multiple encounters between Romney and Trump before Trump's presidency, including their first meeting at Mar-a-Lago in the mid-1990s.

The ex-president's team issued an insulting response to the retiring senator's claims.

“Mittens is a loser who is ‘retiring’ because he knows he doesn’t have a snowball’s chance in hell of surviving another campaign,” wrote a Trump spokesperson in response to a request for comment from Rolling Stone. “He should stop lying and creating fake stories in order to stay relevant. The fact is that he dropped the ball when he ran against Barack Obama and is partially responsible for the mess America is in.”

POLL: Should Trump be allowed to run for office?

Romney felt during their first meeting, in January 1995, that Trump “wasn’t really a ‘businessman’ at all," but accepted the celebrity real estate developer's invitation with an expectation of a “memorable, low-stakes, and deeply weird” experience, Rolling Stone reported.

"[He was] not above gawking at famous people,” Coppins wrote.

READ MORE: RFK Jr's switch to run as an Independent is already hurting Trump: report

Romney wasn't disappointed, and found what Coppins described as a "surreal scene" at Mar-a-Lago, where staffers lined up in uniform to greet him and Trump behaved like a “cartoon character” who strutted around the estate “like an English lord" and boasted that the family who sold the resort to him had left behind a drawer full of “gold-colored silverware.”

"[The] silverware is worth more than I paid for the house," Trump told Romney, according to the book. “I’m gonna make a fortune on this place."