A California Democrat whose district and constituents have been targeted by ICE raids took a shot at first lady Melania Trump after President Donald Trump said that ICE should continue its aggressive policies, The Daily Beast reports Monday.
Rep. Jimmy Gomez (D-CA), who represents the Golden State's 34th District, wrote this on X:
"Haven't gone far enough?? Any further and ICE will be deporting Melania..."
Gomez was responding to Trump's comments about his cruel immigration policies — and how he thinks they could be harsher — in a "60 Minutes" interview Sunday.
Melania Trump was born in Slovenia and moved to the United States in 1996. She became a citizen in 2006, just a year after marrying Donald Trump. The 55-year-old first lady cannot be deported; however, her husband has suggested that he could fly American citizens to prisons abroad, including ones in El Salvador.
"Americans have been watching videos of ICE tackling a young mother, tear gas being used in a Chicago residential neighborhood, and the smashing of car windows. Have some of these raids gone too far?” CBS host Norah O'Donnell asked Trump.
“I think they haven’t gone far enough because we’ve been held back by the judges, by the liberal judges that were put in by [former presidents Joe] Biden and by [Barack] Obama," Trump responded.
“A lot of the people that your administration has arrested and deported aren’t violent criminals,” O'Donnell said. “[They are] landscapers, nannies, construction workers, the families of service members.”
The CBS host asked if he intended to deport people who do not have criminal records.
"We have to start off with a policy, and the policy has to be, you came into the country illegally, you’re going to go out. However, you’ve also seen—you’re going to go out. We’re going to work with you, and you’re going to come back into our country legally," Trump said.
A White House historian on Tuesday lamented that President Donald Trump just made her "worst fear come to fruition."
Katherine Jellison, an Ohio University historian and scholar of first ladies, told Politico Magazine that the East Wing destruction will lead to lasting consequences.
“Those of us who do oral histories — interviewing former first ladies, their children, their staff members — a place like the East Wing is a physical structure that can spark those kinds of memories,” Jellison said.
The East Wing has been home to the first lady's office since the 1940s, and its demolition has sparked outrage from Americans at the administration. Now, first lady Melania Trump's office is based in the main building of the White House.
The minute she heard about the president's plans to add the ballroom, it raised concerns for the historian.
“It was my living nightmare last week when I saw those first visual images,” Jellison said.
The area was formerly a terrace that covered an underground bunker during World War II. It was expanded by "the person who still arguably was our most active and activist first lady, Eleanor Roosevelt. She was a dynamo, in part because her husband was paralyzed and in a wheelchair, and things were certainly not accessible. So she needed to be someone who was very active and went places that her husband couldn’t go and would report back to him. But also she was motivated by her own desire to change American society."
The erasure of the space, and what could happen to the artifacts and historical items — although the White House says it will work to preserve them — has raised questions.
"I’m very concerned, and everyone I know who studies first ladies and studies architectural history, people who study the history of the presidency, everyone in my orbit, is very concerned that all of this was done so quickly, without consulting with organizations like the National Trust for Historic Preservation, the National Capital Planning Commission, the Commission of Fine Arts," she said.
Jellison also called the "secretive nature of this project" troubling, with a bulldozer appearing and a sudden teardown happening as a "dark visual that bothers people."
It also seems to upset people across the political spectrum, she explained.
"I think that is why maybe some people on the political right have been upset, because they just see that as a continuation of the deep state. On the political left, it’s a strong metaphor for the way they’ve always characterized both of Trump’s terms: This guy is tearing down all the norms. We now have a visual metaphor for that," Jellison said.
"Before we were even warned, professional historians and others, we saw bulldozers bringing the place down. Was due diligence done to preserve important records, important artifacts, important objects? We really don’t know. It is my worst fear coming to fruition," she added.
As Melania Trump maintains a low profile, nearly disappearing through the destruction, she has sent a message. It also raises questions about what the future first ladies will do in their roles.
"If we’re talking about metaphors, the fact that there’s not a first lady’s office in the now-absent East Wing sort of speaks to Melania Trump’s current role as first lady, which is largely unseen and unheard," Jellison said.
As MSNBC’s Hayes Brown wrote on Friday morning, Donald Trump has been out selling the idea that the East Wing was not needed and considered disposable so he could build his garish $350 billion ballroom that would be used intermittently.
According to Brown, the abrupt destruction of the structure, will little advance notice, has forced the first lady’s staff to be dispersed to other locations in the White House with no permanent home for them being announced.
More importantly, he wrote, has been Melania's disappearing act as her working space was dismantled.
”Her silence only highlights her approach to much of her husband’s second term — and how little she likely cares about the ways her husband’s unnecessary vanity project will affect her potential successors,” he wrote before pointing out, “former staffers of Melania Trump’s predecessors told East Wing Magazine that seeing their former offices demolished was ‘jarring,’ ‘a gut punch’ and ‘revolting.’”
Reporting, “as of Thursday evening, it was unclear whether permanent office space for the first lady has been incorporated into the designs for the 90,000-square-foot ballroom set to occupy the former East Wing’s grounds,” he added, “If the move back to the Executive Mansion becomes permanent, it would be a regressive move that literally moves the Office of the First Lady away from the office and back into the home.”
“The lack of comment at all from Melania Trump on that shift underscores that, much like her husband, she has little interest in how her choices affect anyone other than herself,” he wrote.
A historian who has written about former ladies and the White House said that kicking first lady Melania Trump and her staff out of the East Wing to build a ballroom "sends a message" and has a "jarring" impact on Americans watching the destruction.
Kate Andersen Brower, author of "Exploring the White House," told CNN anchor Dana Bash during a panel discussion Thursday about how the East Wing is where the first lady's office has been located, and the demolition has knocked down the public entrance of the building.
"I think that it's jarring for to people to see the demolition take place like this, especially when we were told that it wouldn't happen quite this way, that the entire East Wing wouldn't be knocked down," Andersen Brower said. "And if you just think of the history there, I mean, Martin Luther King visiting Johnson during the Civil Rights Bill, FDR handling World War II. I mean, anybody who's worked in the White House knows that you're standing in this hallowed ground, and it was never meant to be a palace, and I think that's something that is especially concerning about this is just the size of it. I mean, almost two football fields long. It's really unusual."
She added that the White House was meant to be modest and "the People's House."
"Not having the first lady and her aides in the White House itself sends a message about what that role has become," Andersen Brower explained.
First lady Rosalynn Carter was the first to have an office in the White House.
Melania Trump has not commented on the destruction and apparently has spent little time in the office, CNN reports.
Over the years, complaints have been common that the East Wing space was too small to serve large numbers of people during social events.
"It's gonna look a little strange," Andersen Brower added. "And we have to remember when George Washington decided to have Washington be the capital and to build the White House here, the idea was always that it was going to be modest. It was not going to be a palace. This is going to look out of out of synch with the rest of the House... it just will look odd, I think."
Michael Wolff plans to subpoena President Donald Trump, Melania Trump, and convicted child sex trafficker Ghislaine Maxwell in the lawsuit he filed against the first lady on Tuesday, the reporter and Trump biographer said.
A legal threat against him by Melania Trump last week represented “exactly … what a SLAPP suit is,” Wolff said, going on to define “strategic lawsuits against public participation,” or intimidation suits, as weapons wielded by wealthy people saying, “We're suing you so you shut up.”
“That's against the law in New York state, to use the law for such purposes,” Wolff told the former Clinton aide Sidney Blumenthal and Michael Popok, a lawyer and host of the Legal AF podcast, on Wednesday.
“So last night, we went, we sued. We sued in court in New York, asking for a declaratory judgment, a judgment that says, ‘You can't do this.’
“And this process will give us now the right to call witnesses, subpoena power, and those witnesses might very well, will very well include Melania Trump and Donald Trump, and therefore afford me the opportunity to really have an in-depth discussion with them, under oath before a court reporter, about their relationship with … Jeffrey Epstein.”
Melania Trump’s threat to sue Wolff arose from comments he made on his Daily Beast podcast, Inside Trump’s Head, about how the first lady met her husband.
Pictures showing both Trumps with Epstein, the late financier and sex offender whose crimes and ties to powerful men are the subject of renewed and fierce attention, have long been discussed.
Wolff has spoken widely about interviews he conducted with Epstein in which Epstein’s long friendship with Donald Trump and their acrimonious falling out were discussed in depth.
Wolff has said Epstein showed him pictures of Trump in potentially embarrassing poses with young women. He also said he presumes the FBI now possesses such photos.
Epstein died in prison in 2019, when Trump was first in the White House. Authorities said the death was a suicide.
Six years on, intense speculation over the so-called “Epstein files” continues, stoked by the emergence of documents prominently including a suggestive 50th birthday poem and drawing from Trump, and by the publication of the autobiography of Virginia Giuffre, an Epstein victim who killed herself earlier this year.
“Donald Trump and Jeffrey Epstein had this long, long, long friendship,” Wolff told Blumenthal and Popok. “Really a joined-by-the-hip friendship. So there will be a lot of questions” in court.
Blumenthal asked: “And there may be other witnesses called as well?”
Wolff said: “Yes … anyone who might have information about their relationship, Donald Trump's relationship with Jeffrey Epstein, Melania Trump's relationship with Jeffrey Epstein and his circle.”
Referring to Epstein’s long-time partner, Blumenthal said: “You could call Ghislaine Maxwell, couldn’t you?”
“Oh, we certainly could,” Wolff said.
Maxwell's involvement in Epstein's affairs and links to men such as Britain's Prince Andrew are a major focus of Giuffre's memoir.
Recently, Maxwell was moved to a relatively comfortable federal facility after a controversial jailhouse interview with Todd Blanche, the deputy attorney general who was previously Donald Trump’s lawyer.
Donald and Melania Trump vehemently deny wrongdoing in relation to Epstein. In August, the Beast withdrew a story about the Trumps and Epstein that was based on comments by Wolff.
“I'm very fond of The Daily Beast,” Wolff said, “… a young person in the office wrote an article based on the podcast that I did. And in fact incorrectly said that I said that Jeffrey Epstein introduced Melania to Donald Trump … I didn’t say it and I don’t know … that he made the direct introduction.”
A spokesman for the first lady, Nick Clemens, recently said: “First Lady Melania Trump’s attorneys are actively ensuring immediate retractions and apologies by those who spread malicious, defamatory falsehoods. The true account of how the First Lady met President Trump is in her best-selling book, ‘Melania.’”
In that book, Melania Trump says she met Donald Trump at the Kit Kat Club in New York City in September 1998. Trump was with another woman but asked Melania out anyway, she writes.
On the Legal AF podcast, Blumenthal quoted recent remarks in which Donald Trump appeared to say he was behind his wife’s legal threats, saying he said he had “done pretty well on these lawsuits lately” and had told Melania to “go forward” because “Jeffrey Epstein has nothing to do with Melania and I introducing but they do that. They make up stories.”
Wolff said suing Melania was “not about defamation. This is about the effort, on the part of the Trumps, to shut people up. And it's an extraordinary effort.
“I don't know of any instance in the modern age where the President of the United States or the First Lady, in this instance basically they are one and the same, have sued the media … and they have done it now repeatedly, over and over and over again and … it has worked. It has chilled everybody's sense of safety in our business.
“… This is the White House in all its power, acting against the media and me … I'm hardly the media. I'm just a single writer.”
Though Wolff said “frankly, it is frightening” to take on the Trumps, he said he felt he did not have any alternative.
“Thinking this through, ‘How do I get this to go away,’ I just couldn't figure out a way, and also, I felt, well, you know, damn it. You know, there's a responsibility here. You got to do it now.”
Faced with the expense of mounting the suit, Wolff said he would probably ask for financial support from the public.
Wolff also noted that in 2018, Donald Trump tried to stop the publication of Fire and Fury, the first of Wolff’s four books on the president. When the publisher refused to blink, Wolff noted, Trump backed down.
First lady Melania Trump has pledged to get Ukrainian children returned from Russian captivity, but her mission is fraught with high-stakes risks.
President Donald Trump's wife last week hailed the return of eight Ukrainian children to their families, and while advocates celebrated the reunions, they also raised concerns about the first lady's passive-voice characterization of how they ended up in Russia, reported CNN.
“Everyone is moving very carefully, but everyone is clear on the point that the first lady’s office needs to hear: Thank you — but it is 35,000 kids, not seven or eight,” said Nathaniel Raymond, executive director of the Yale Humanitarian Research Lab.
The research lab operates the Ukraine Conflict Observatory through private donations after the Trump administration cut its funding, and Raymond worried that Melania Trump was understating the gravity of the situation.
“It is kids who were taken as a war crime and kids who are being militarized and were abducted by a state — not lost in the war," Raymond said. "Language matters."
The Yale lab reported last month that children had been taken to at least 210 locations to be re-educated in alignment with Russian values and narratives, and in some cases trained for combat against Ukraine, and some advocates expressed concern that Putin might try to manipulate the first lady through her direct involvement.
“Every returned child is wonderful for that family and that child, so that is good," said Bill Taylor, a former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine. "But there are more than 19,000 of these, and I do think that Putin is cynically using this in an attempt to make the Trumps more sympathetic to him."
"I think the first lady is genuinely interested in getting the Ukrainian children home," Taylor added. "But the fact is that Putin is not. He could return all of these kids and end the war tomorrow if he wanted."
The president himself blurred the numbers after a two-hour phone call with Putin, saying the number of children could be anywhere between 20,000 and 300, and a Republican congressional aide revealed some skepticism around Melania Trump’s direct line with Putin, but so far no one on Capitol Hill wants to challenge the White House on the issue.
“If there needs to be conversations with the White House on this, there will be, but I have no indication that Melania believes what Putin says,” the aide said.
A decision by First Lady Melania Trump on a gift for King Charles III contributed to the resignation of the director of the Dwight D. Eisenhower Presidential Library, Museum and Boyhood Home, reports CBS News.
For their visit to the U.K. weeks ago, the first lady was handed a list of possible gifts by aides to bestow upon the monarch and her choice of a sword from the museum's collection caused a furor with Todd Arrington, a career historian, who balked at giving away the artifact from the collection.
According to the report, “Arrington's departure came after he resisted taking an original Eisenhower sword out of the library's collection,” adding, “Eisenhower possessed several swords, including a Sword of Honor given to him in 1947 by the city of London for his role as allied supreme commander during World War II, an honor saber gifted to him by the Netherlands in 1947, and his West Point officer saber.”
Despite Arrington’s suggestion that a replica could be found to use as a gift, the president’s wife held firm, which reportedly led to his departure.
The report notes, “Ultimately, West Point provided a faux version of Eisenhower's sword from the military academy,” but there was already tension between Arrington and the administration with CBS reporting, “One administration official said Arrington was believed to have spoken critically about the president and the administration.”
In video captured by Sky News, Donald Trump was filmed having what appeared to be a heated conversation with his wife, Melania, while Marine One was landing late Tuesday night.
According to a report from People, the first lady can be seen speaking before the president leans forward and wags his finger at her as she sat silently, shaking her head.
The report notes the presidential couple was “seated across from one another on the president's helicopter as they touched down on the White House South Lawn after their Sept. 23 visit to the United Nations General Assembly in New York City.”
After landing, photographer Saul Loeb of AFP got a shot of Trump waving to onlookers as the first lady looked at the ground.
The incident came hours after Trump and his wife were temporarily stranded on a United Nations escalator that stopped operating, forcing them to walk upstairs.
The president later complained about the escalator malfunction, with the White House demanding an investigation and the firing of anyone involved.
“The robots are here,” she said. “Our future is no longer science fiction. … As leaders and parents, we must manage A.I.’s growth responsibly. During this primitive stage, it is our duty to treat A.I. as we would our own children — empowering, but with watchful guidance.”
The Times reports the first lady was “sitting at the head of a round table that had been set up in the East Room. To her right sat Michael Kratsios, the administration’s tech czar. Also up there was David Sacks, the administration’s go-to guy on crypto and A.I. initiatives; a couple of cabinet secretaries; and the heads of Google and IBM.”
Sam Altman, former fundraiser and donor to president Barack Obama but the chief executive of OpenAI who now praises Trump at dinners, sat in the front row and listened as Melania Trump recited her statement from a binder. The dinner guest list also included Microsoft cofounder Bill Gates, Apple CEO Tim Cook, and Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, alongside more than a dozen other executives from leading AI and tech firms — many former Obama enthusiasts.
What followed on X was a flood of laughter at the idea of Melania Trump talking down to tech heads about the dangers of AI.
Still more critics ragged the first lady for “speaking about AI and not understanding a word she’s saying."
Trump critic Keith Edwards took that moment to post on X Melania’s letter to Russian leader Vladimir Putin, which he claimed both “said a lot of nothing” and “may have been written by A.I.”
The Times noted that Melania Trump has pushed a bill to protect women and children online from the spread of deepfake images and revenge porn and internet catfishing schemes, which creates an interesting contrast to her husband, President Donald Trump, who claimed — against the word of his own aides — that recent images of bags being tossed from White House windows were “probably A.I. generated.”
The windows on that side of the building don’t open easily, he said.
The Times also reports Trump musing aloud before reporters earlier that “If something happens that’s really bad, maybe I’ll just have to blame A.I.,” revealing even more of a contradiction to his wife’s warning.
Melania Trump outsourced the narration of her audiobook to artificial intelligence, and she's using that experience as a springboard to a high-tech role in her husband's administration.
The first lady told the New York Post that she's been tapped to lead the Presidential Artificial Intelligence Challenge, which encourages students as young as kindergartners to “develop, discover and expand” the potential of AI technology, and she's touting her audiobook experience as her qualification for the role, reported The Daily Beast.
“Creating my AI Audiobook opened my eyes to the countless opportunities and risks this new technology brings to American society,” Melania Trump told the Post in a video statement. “In just a few short years, AI will be the engine driving every business sector across our economy. It is poised to deliver great value to our careers, families, and communities.”
“Just as America once led the world into the skies with the Wright Brothers," she added, "we are poised to lead again — this time in the age of AI.”
Melania Trump announced in May that the seven-hour audio version of her self-titled memoir was entirely narrated by an AI-generated replica of her own voice.
“Let the future of publishing begin,” she said at the time.
The president's challenge purportedly aims to make students and educators more comfortable using AI tools to create apps or websites that addresses issues that “are of particular interest to the White House,” such as making schools safer, creating healthy meals plans and developing customized learning plans.
“The Presidential AI Challenge marks our first step in equipping every child with the knowledge base and tools to utilize this emerging technology,” Melania Trump said. “But this is only the beginning. It is essential that every member of our academic community, including our great educators, administrators, and students rise to this historic challenge with on-going curiosity, perseverance, and ingenuity.”
"Students and educators of all backgrounds and expertise are encouraged to participate," according to the challenge website, and the top prize will be $10,000, with a national championship set for next June and a showcase planned in Washington, D.C.
