Melania Trump gives intimate portrait of her marriage, slams FBI raid and reveals anguish over assassination attempt in memoir
Melania Trump recalls answering the harrowing phone call from her chief of staff who told her a madman had tried to assassinate former President Donald Trump in her new memoir.“I rushed to the TV and pressed play.I couldn’t believe what I was seeing,” the former First Lady writes in “Melania,” out Tuesday and obtained by The Post.The charity founder was at home in Bedminster, New Jersey, with her 18-year-old son, Barron, on July 13 when the shooting happened.Melania writes that she watched in horror as a bullet grazed her husband’s ear before he crouched below the podium and secret service agents swarmed him at the campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania. “I watched the chaos unfold: the gunfire, Donald instinctively reaching up to his head,” she writes, saying she then watched the Secret Service members leaping into action to protect the president after the gunman, 20-year-old Thomas Matthew Crooks, fired eight bullets in under six seconds at the Republican presidential nominee.
Crooks was then himself killed by a sniper. Melania, at the time, asked her chief of staff, in disbelief, “‘He’s on the ground,’ I called out.‘Are you sure he’s OK?’” She hung up and immediately dialed her husband.
When he didn’t answer she called his Secret Service detail.They were at the hospital. “After what felt like an eternity” they connected her with the former president. “‘I’m OK,’ he assured me.
It was only when I heard his voice that I could finally believe that he really was fine,” she writes of the traumatic ordeal.The former FLOTUS also reveals details about her time after the oval office in her memoir, including the August 2022 raid on Mar-a-Lago when FBI agents swarmed former Trump’s Palm Beach, Florida, residence looking for classified documents.That case landed an indictment against the former president on 37 criminal counts in June 2023 for allegedly retaining more than 100 classified documents.Charges against t...