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Donald Trump indicated during a rally on Wednesday night that he has not read Melania Trump’s new memoir even as he pushed his followers to buy it.
“People love our First Lady. Go out and get a book. She just wrote a book. I hope she said good things about... I don’t know. I didn’t... so busy,” Trump said at the Nassau Coliseum in Uniondale, New York on Long Island.
He added: “She just wrote a book called Melania. Go out and buy it, and if she says bad things about me, I’ll call you all up and I’ll say, don’t buy it.”
Earlier this month, in a video promoting her book, the former first lady asked for the “truth” behind the first assassination attempt against her husband on July 13 when a gunman, 20-year-old Thomas Matthew Crooks, opened fire during a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania. Trump was grazed by a bullet and one attendee was killed and two others were injured.
“The attempt to end my husband’s life was a horrible, distressing experience,” she said in a video shared on X on September 10. “Now the silence around it feels heavy. I can’t help but wonder why didn’t law enforcement officials arrest the shooter before the speech. There is definitely more to this story, and we need to uncover the truth.”
Since then, a second would-be assassin, 58-year-old Ryan Wesley Routh, has been detained after his rifle was spotted by a Secret Service agent in the bushes at a Trump golf course in Florida as the former president was golfing on Sunday. On Wednesday night, Trump praised the woman who took a picture of his license plate, enabling the authorities to pull him over and detain him.
The former first lady hasn’t been seen on the campaign trail and while she did attend the Republican National Convention, she didn’t make a speech, as is customary for the spouse of the nominee. Melania also stayed away from her husband’s five-week-long hush-money trial over a payment to adult actor Stormy Daniels for her silence about an alleged 2006 affair, which the former president denies. He was convicted on all 34 felony counts of falsifying business records, but sentencing has been delayed until after the election in November.
The former first lady’s new memoir, Melania, is set to be released on September 24.
“Writing this memoir has been a deeply personal and reflective journey for me,” she said in a video shared on September 5. “As a private person who has often been the subject of public scrutiny and misrepresentation, I feel a responsibility to clarify the facts. I believe it is important to share my perspective — the truth.”
Donald Trump is not thought to be a big reader, unlike his bookworm predecessor, Barack Obama. In 2016 Trump revealed his two favorite books were two of his own – The Art of the Deal, from 1987, and Surviving at the Top, from 1990. He is also believed to have read Erich Maria Remarque’s World War I drama All Quiet on the Western Front. When asked to mention a favorite passage from the Bible in a 2015 interview he famously demurred, insisting that it was too personal for him.
In his controversial book about Trump, Fire and Fury, the journalist Michael Wolff wrote: “He didn’t process information in any conventional sense. He didn’t read. He didn’t really even skim. Some believed that for all practical purposes he was no more than semi-literate.”
During the rally on Wednesday night, Trump also doubled down on his rhetoric against Haitian migrants in Springfield, Ohio, accused the Biden administration of working with Iran over the hacking of his campaign, and yet again railed against immigration and blamed Vice President Kamala Harris for unlawful crossings of the southern border.
