Melania Trump addressed the time she wore her infamous “I really don’t care, do u?” jacket in her upcoming memoir, which releases on October 8, claiming that her press secretary wouldn’t let her explain the meaning behind the outfit choice at the time.
“I was determined … not to let the media’s false narratives affect my mission to help the children and families at the border,” the former first lady, 54, wrote in the tome, The Guardian reported. “In fact, I decided to let them know that their criticism would never stop me from doing what I feel is right. To make the point, I wore a particular jacket as I boarded the plane, a jacket that quickly became famous.”
At the time, her then-press secretary Stephanie Grisham was “flooded with urgent emails from top-tier media outlets regarding the jacket.”
“It’s a message for the media,’ I said, ‘to let them know I was unconcerned with their opinions of me’ [but] she told me I couldn’t say that. ‘Why not? It is the truth,'” Melania, who wore the controversial Zara jacket to tour a migrant detention center at the U.S.-Mexico border in 2018, recalled telling Grisham.
“I disagreed with her insistence that I couldn’t say that,” Melania claimed. “Ignoring my comments, she told a CNN reporter she was friendly with that it was simply a jacket, a fashion choice with no underlying message.”
In the tome, Melania claimed the spectacle overshadowed the “importance of the children, the border, and the policy change” and was “just another example of the media’s irresponsible behavior.”
Meanwhile, Stephanie shared her side of the story in her book I’ll Take Your Questions Now: What I Saw at the Trump White House, saying Donald Trump wanted to shift the narrative.
“You just tell them you were talking to the f——-press,” Trump allegedly said in a “damage control session” after they got back from Washington, D.C.
“He’s not a crackpot. He’s actually a very smart man. I mean, he was president of the United States. We have to give them a modicum of credit for that,” she told CNN’s Jim Acosta in January.
“But no, he knows he’s lying. He used to tell me when I was press secretary, ‘Go out there and say this.’ And if it was false, he would say, ‘It doesn’t matter, Stephanie. Just say it over and over and over again, people will believe it.’ He knows his base believes in him. He knows he can basically say anything and his base will believe what he’s saying,” she continued.