Who is Stephanie Winston Wolkoff and why is she throwing Melania Trump under the bus?

In some circles, Melania Trump is considered a victim. The Slovenian immigrant has been portrayed as a helpless afterthought of her boorish husband, and her constant absences from his events are often provided as evidence for this. In a sense, she is the person who has best managed to live off the Trump brand without being tainted by its Cheeto-orange poison.

However, anybody who has been paying attention will know that she is far from an innocent bystander. In fact, she is further proof that anybody who is intimately involved in the Trump circle is, for lack of a better term, a pretty terrible person. Whether it’s her callously wearing a jacket emblazoned with the phrase “I Really Don’t Care, Do U?” while visiting literal detained migrant children, or her more recent scandal that showed her one word response to being asked to speak to the American people during the attempted insurrection at the Capitol (it was a “no”), Melania has proven again and again she very much belongs in the grim, amoral world of her detestable sugar daddy.

Thankfully, more and more people are beginning to take notice of her disgraceful behavior. And, through her former advisor Stephanie Winston Wolkoff, the receipts are also beginning to pile up.

Wolkoff is a former PR manager and event organiser who once worked as the fashion director for New York Fashion Week. She met Melania Trump (then Knauss) back in 2003 while working for Vogue, and their relationship grew to the point that Wolkoff created a company to organize the Donald Trump’s sparsely attended inauguration in 2017.

From there, she maneuvered herself into a role as an unpaid senior advisor to Melania, but the honeymoon didn’t last. In 2018, the Slovenian Trump axed Wolkoff after questions were raised about the cost of Trump’s inauguration. Wolkoff complained that she had been scapegoated, and that the vast majority of the exorbitant cost went towards paying vendors, but it was to no avail. Her name was tainted, and she was assumed to be just as much of a financial criminal as Donald and co.

Like most insiders (and many journalists) who should have been raising the alarm about the sheer insanity of Trump’s presidency, she instead decided to try and profit off her time in the Oval Office by releasing a book in 2020, entitled Melania and Me. The book famously contained a multitude of long, damaging direct quotes from Melania, which Wolkoff said she attained as she began recording all her conversations with the former First Lady after their relationship had gone south.

When Melania’s true nature was revealed in the book, the Trumps attempted to sue Wolkoff for a breach of her non-disclosure agreement. This lawsuit was quashed by the Biden administration later that year, which we can imagine went down very well in the Trump household.

Wolkoff went on the talk show circuit after her acrimonious departure from the White House, giving tell all interviews to big names like Rachel Maddow. She was also happy to admit that she’d recorded the former First Lady for her own safety.

Wolkoff has spent the intervening years raising the alarm about Melania (after selling her book, of course), even going so far as to post some of the conversations between the two on Twitter. As expected, this has led to an outpouring of vitriol from angry bots, paid Russians, and deranged MAGA-lovers on her timeline.

One of Wolkoff’s most recent posts contains a snippet of a conversation that she had with the former First Lady in the wake of the former’s firing. In it, Melania dismisses the reputational damage done to Wolkoff as a result of the accusations of financial impropriety that the former event planner faced. Melania’s language and tone is uncaring, to say the least.

It’s not quite as shockingly callous as taunting detained migrant children, but it’s still pretty telling how easily she threw a friend of nearly two decades under the bus. It’s also quite likely that the Trumps managed to profit off that event, which (if true) is actually one of the few impressive things we can attribute to them, considering how empty it was.

Donald Trump faces a tough week as his criminal trial in New York begins, but Melania has once again mostly avoided the spotlight. If there’s any justice in the world, she’ll soon be under the same scrutiny as her husband, as she has also profited off the back of his disastrous and damaging presidency. If her life is negatively affected, then we guess the only thing to say is “I Really Don’t Care, Do U?”