Former Trump aide Omarosa Manigault Newman first landed on the radar of many Americans when she appeared on Donald Trump's show The Apprentice. She met Donald and Melania before they got married and has observed the pair several times throughout the years.
Omarosa recently participated in an interview on the British talk show Lorraine, and she decided to go all in on the notorious twosome.
Donald and Melania Trump have been married since January 2005. The two met back in September 1998, when Donald was divorcing his second wife, Marla Maples, and Melania was a recent arrival to the United States from her native Slovenia. The pairing has always struck many as rather odd, and the two have quite the age difference — Melania was 28 and Donald was 52 when they met.
Plenty of people have speculated about the inner workings of perhaps the most famous Trump marriage, and now Omarosa has offered up her insider's look into how Melania and Donald get along.
While claiming that Melania is often "repulsed" by her husband, Omarosa offered up her personal credentials:
"What I've observed over the last 17 years … Sometimes they like each other and other times she's repulsed by him."
She added, "It's a very strange marriage, and I'm very cautious to comment on the dynamics of people's marriage — you never know the inner-workings — but I've known this couple since they were dating. And in fact, they got married a year after The Apprentice aired."
Numerous sources have studied and scrutinized the marriage of Melania and Donald. Melania certainly has a unique relationship with Donald's older children, and she has described herself as less than a maternal figure:
"I don't see myself as their mother. I am their friend, and I'm here when they need me."
Melania herself has long been a source of fascination and derision for many. Despite being an incredibly famous person, there's still a lot that isn't really known about her.
Author Mary Jordan has written her own book about the pair, and she has definitely noted that they're pretty unusual.
"I don't know any couple that spends as much time apart. They are often in the same building, but nowhere near each other. She rarely goes into the West Wing. She doesn't like to golf. She has her own little spa. She likes to be isolated. She is a loner. He is a loner. They're perfectly happy to be separated."
Despite that distance, the two appear to confide in one another frequently.
"And yet, she's the first call he makes after a speech or a rally, because he trusts her – he doesn't trust many people – and she watches on TV. So they have a very unusual relationship, but there is a bond there: they have a deal, right from the beginning. He loves himself, he loves his job, he's got his own life and he spends a lot of time apart from her. And she's absolutely fine with that."
Mary Jordan has also shared that writing about Melania was one of the hardest things she's tried to do:
"In three decades as a correspondent working all over the world, I have often written about the reluctant and the reclusive, including the head of a Mexican drug cartel and a Japanese princess, but nothing compared to trying to understand Melania."
It also sounds like Mary isn't the only one who struggled to uncover information about Melania:
"She was always in the news, one of the most recognized faces around the world, and I couldn't find basic information about her. A photographer said to me, 'She's like a ghost. Everyone knows her but nobody does.'"
The author even traveled to Slovenia, where Melania was born and raised, and traversed Europe in pursuit of sources and information. Ultimately, she concluded that Melania has been able to essentially erase her past:
"She had a pretty modest upbringing, and when she arrived in New York she was around all these extremely rich people, and it was, a friend said, like she had just taken a big old eraser and there was nothing before."
Once Melania and Trump met, it sounds like they had a pretty straightforward agreement in place:
"This was the age of the supermodel, and if you had money, you hung around, went to parties with all these people. Trump didn't drink, didn't do drugs and didn't demand much. He just wanted a gorgeous woman in the photo so that he could be in the paper, and then he would go literally back to work."
No matter what the future holds for these two, it sounds like one thing we definitely won't be getting is a tell-all from Melania herself.
"They're both very, very hyper-aware of image and appearance. Neither of them, but especially Melania, shows emotion in public. She's not one to show her anger or her temper or yell."
