Like millions, I watched open-mouthed as Melania Trump delivered her frosty and furious bombshell message out of the blue, declaring: ‘I had no relationship with Jeffrey Epstein.’
‘What was that all about?’, I wondered. And then, more importantly, after Donald Trump declared he’d been ‘blindsided’ and knew nothing about it, why on Earth hadn’t she told her husband what she was doing?
A funny kind of marriage, I thought, where a wife fails to tell her spouse she’s planning something so momentous, let alone sharing with him the text she’s going to read out to the world.
Maybe there’s a perfectly innocent explanation. Who knows what’s going on between the President and the First Lady.
The only thing for certain is that Melania’s surprise statement denying she had any relationship with Epstein raised vastly more questions than answers. Questions we had not even thought to ask before she opened her mouth.
Why did she make the statement at all? And why now? Was she pre-empting something that was about to emerge into the public domain?
Are she and Donald Trump now living such separate lives she cuts him out of such a serious and explosive intervention? Is their marriage in trouble?
Was Melania’s dramatic lone stand symbolic of her relationship with the President? Was she trying to tell us something?
Or is she the devoted wife trying to save her husband’s skin, grabbing the headlines as his popularity sinks in the US over the war with Iran and his behaviour becomes more unhinged and bewildering by the day
How could she have kept it secret from him anyhow, as he claimed she had?
Her speech was delivered in the heart of the White House, for heaven’s sake, possibly the most security-conscious place in the world where every phone-call and footfall is likely to be monitored.
A mouse can’t crawl in there without the place’s epic tough-guys noticing and squashing it.
As a former spin doctor familiar with organising political broadcast events, albeit on a less grand scale, I know they take weeks if not months in the planning – lighting checks, sound checks, rehearsals.
Yet sources claim noone other than a couple of her inner circle of advisers knew she was even delivering her speech in the White House.
As I say, none of these questions would now be being asked were it not for Melania decision to go public on Epstein.
Apart from a few predictable weirdos on social media, noone had ever questioned the First Lady’s integrity over her dealings with him. Yet now she has lit a fire under her relationship with her husband and shone a spotlight on any association she did or did not have with one of the world’s most heinous paedophiles.
I’m still haunted by the image of her alone at the lectern delivering her speech, then defiantly striding off into the distance alone. What was Melania trying to tell us? Only time will tell.
Although given the firestorm her speech has unleashed, maybe she should have checked it with the Donald first.
