Melanie Trump has revealed why she swatted her husband Donald Trump’s hand away during a red-carpet walk, playing it down as ‘a minor, innocent gesture’ after a media frenzy.
The incident which occurred at Tel Aviv’s Ben Gurion airport in May 2017 sparked wild media speculation.
The video showed Melania bat Trump’s hand away while walking just behind him and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his wife Sara.
But now the former First Lady has now revealed that the red carpet simply wasn’t wide enough for all four of them.
‘The red carpet simply could not accommodate four of us abreast,’ she writes in her upcoming book in an excerpt obtained by the New York Times. ‘It was a minor innocent gesture, nothing more.’
She addresses the incident in her upcoming memoir ‘Melania’ which is due to be released on October 8.
Melania told Fox News that the writing process was ‘incredibly rewarding’ but ‘daunting at times.’
Donald Trump his wife’s book at his rallies while running for re-election, but he admitted that he had not read it.
In her book, Melania says that the message was intended to be a barb at the media, who she accuses of twisting narratives.
She claims that she personally lobbied her husband to end his policy of splitting up migrant families at the US-Mexico border.
‘The government should not be taking children away from their parents,’ she recalls telling him. ‘This has to stop.’
One of the biggest revelations was her support for abortion rights, which stands in contrast to her husband’s conservative stance on the issue.
‘A woman’s fundamental right of individual liberty, to her own life, grants her the authority to terminate her pregnancy if she wishes,’ she writes.
‘Restricting a woman’s right to choose whether to terminate an unwanted pregnancy is the same as denying her control over her own body.’
But on most other issues she appears to hold similar views to her husband’s including questioning the validity of the 2020 election result.’
‘You can’t continue to count votes for days, which is what they did,’ she writes, seeming to explain her lack of condemnation for the January 6 storming of the Capitol.’
It comes after CNN reported that the publisher of the Melania memoir tried to charge $250,000 for an interview with her.
Get in touch with our news team by emailing us at webnews@metro.co.uk.
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