A bestselling chronicler of the Trump White House is raising alarms about the one figure no one — including the president — can predict or control: First Lady Melania Trump. According to Michael Wolff, author of “Fire and Fury” and a longtime observer of the administration, West Wing aides are gripped by constant anxiety over what she might do next, and their inability to rule out the possibility that she could break ranks is what keeps them awake at night.
In a new column titled “Melania: The Wild Card,” published on his Substack newsletter, HOWL, Wolff describes the first lady not as a behind-the-scenes player but as the administration’s biggest unknown. He writes that staffers privately wonder whether she might turn on the president, and the fact that they can’t dismiss the scenario entirely is what troubles them most deeply.
White House personnel fear her potential influence if she chooses to wield it, Wolff said. Most believe she won’t use that power against the administration outright, he noted, but no one can be completely certain.
Part of that unease, Wolff contends, stems from her public statement on Jeffrey Epstein, in which she denied any connection to the disgraced financier.
Alarm Over Her Business Moves
Wolff points to professional concerns humming through the West Wing as well: worry over First Lady Melania Trump’s next commercial ventures, which he says register as a bigger concern than the business dealings of President Donald Trump’s children. What most unsettles staffers, according to Wolff, isn’t the financial gain but the attention she attracts — a pattern he believes could lead to direct conflict with the president. Within the Trump family, Wolff suggests, earning money is generally acceptable; becoming the center of attention is not.
Those worries have a paper trail. On June 30, the U.S. Office of Government Ethics released a 927-page financial disclosure document that shed light on the first lady’s income — and the numbers tell a curious story. Her documentary, “Melania,” flopped at the box office, yet the project still proved lucrative for the family.
Amazon MGM Studios, owned by Jeff Bezos, spent about $75 million on the documentary. The film followed the first lady during the 20 days before her husband’s second inauguration. Ticket sales landed at just $16.7 million worldwide. Even so, according to the ethics disclosure, the Trumps received $10.71 million from the licensing deal. First Lady Melania Trump also earned a reported $521,000 from her 2024 memoir, likewise titled “Melania.”
A Marriage at a Low Point
The relationship between President Donald Trump and First Lady Melania Trump has cooled to its chilliest since the Stormy Daniels trial — a stretch Wolff describes as extraordinarily tense. He claims the couple barely speaks and that there is hardly even the pretense that she lives at the White House, echoing earlier reporting that the first lady appears to spend most of her time in New York City rather than full time in Washington with her husband.
“Every appearance is a negotiated one,” Wolff added. In his account, First Lady Melania Trump has grown more independent — freer, he says, and more distant from the president than at any earlier point in their marriage. That independence, rather than any single grievance, is what he casts as the true wild card.
The unpredictability, Wolff argues, extends to the smallest details of scheduling and appearances. Almost no one close to the president, he writes — including the president himself — knows what the first lady will do until she does it.
The White House Pushes Back
The administration was not gentle in its response. Reached for comment, White House spokesman Davis Ingle dismissed Wolff as “a lying piece of s–t.” It’s a rebuttal Wolff’s critics have heard before, and one that stops well short of engaging with the column’s specifics.
Wolff closes his piece by placing the first lady in a wider portrait of a president he describes as insulated. Trump’s political vulnerabilities, he writes, sit in plain view — his dealings, questions about his associates, and speculation about his health — yet aides, lawyers, doctors, congressional leaders, and billionaires have, in his words, cooperated in a sweeping effort to keep those questions at bay. His wife, Wolff concludes, is the one variable outside that machinery: a wild card the president can’t seem to control or game.
As with much of Wolff’s Trump-era reporting, the claims are sourced to unnamed insiders and framed through his own interpretation, and the White House has flatly rejected them. What’s clear is that the journalist has once again trained his lens on the one member of the Trump orbit who tends to say the least publicly — and, by his account, keeps everyone around her guessing.
