Melania Trump has a message for Americans: She does stand up to husband Donald Trump, but there’s no guarantee he listens to her.
In a Monday interview with Fox News morning chat show Fox & Friends to tee up her return to the White House, the incoming first lady said she felt that “people didn’t accept me” during her first term.
“Maybe they didn’t understand me the way maybe they do now, and I didn’t have much support,” she told the show’s co-host Ainsley Earhardt.
“Some people, they see me as just the wife of the president, but I’m standing on my own two feet, independent. I have my own thoughts, I have my own yes and no, I don’t always agree with what my husband is saying or doing, and that’s OK.”
Asked if she is able to tell her notoriously combative husband about her political disagreements, she replied: “I give him my advice, and sometimes he listens, sometimes he doesn’t.”
Trump made clear in her memoir Melania that she holds radically different views from the president-elect and his Republican Party on abortion rights, adding there is “no room for negotiation” on a woman’s right to access reproductive healthcare.
She also said in the book that she was the one who made him drop a hardline immigration policy that entailed separating the children of migrants from their parents in 2018.
Asked by Earhardt to explain what would exactly be “different” this time in office, Trump didn’t offer any additional policy specifics.
Instead, she said—this time—she knows about the home she is moving into.
“The difference is I know where I will be going, I know the rooms where we will be living. I know the process, the first time was challenging... But this time I have everything... I already packed, I already selected the the furniture that needs to go in. So it’s, it’s very different.”
Trump’s interview comes a week before she is set to take up the role of first lady for the second time, amid a concerted effort to situate her as a more defined personality than during her husband’s first term.
She is slated to be the subject of a documentary distributed by Amazon, which she said was an idea that came out of the success of her memoir—the book’s reception, she said, made her realize “my fans and people would love to hear more from me.”
“I told my agent, ‘You know, I have this idea, so please go out and make a deal for me,’” she said of the film project, which is slated to be directed by the disgraced former Hollywood director Brett Ratner.
Amazon is set to pay $40 million for the licensing rights to the documentary.
Tipping Ratner’s production as MAGA through the prism of Frederick Wiseman, Trump said the documentary—which started shooting in November—will cover the minutiae of her everyday life, from transition team meetings and staff recruitment to packing up and moving to the White House.
She also gave a nod to a key Trump family member who could be hanging around the White House: her college-aged son Barron.
The past and future first lady said the youngest child of the president-elect will “come and visit” and, if he wants, bring friends: “whatever he would like to do.”
