Is Melania Trump paid to appear next to her husband?

Across the Atlantic, the presidential election is on everyone’s lips. But aside from the clash between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris, another person has been making headlines in recent days. And she is none other than… Melania Trump, the former first lady of the United States, who will publish her soberly titled memoir on October 8. Melania.

Donald Trump’s prudent wife spares no expense in promoting this upcoming book. On her social networks, she has posted a series of videos in which she returns to many recent events: the July assassination attempt on her husband, the 2020 anti-racist demonstrations in Washington, the publication of nude photos of herself by American tabloids in 2016, which she says she is “proud of ” or the FBI raid on his Florida home in August 2022. But above all, Melania Trump is back in the spotlight, attending several of her husband’s meetings at home. The length of his race for the White House.

$237,000 for the conference

However, CNN did not miss a detail, which found out that the former model of Slovenian origin will be paid to invest in Donald Trump’s election campaign. According to the former US president’s financial declaration form, cited by the magazine, Melania Trump received $237,000 for a “conference” organized in April in connection with a fundraiser organized by the Log Cabin Republicans (a Republican organization that protects the rights of LGBTQ+ conservatives). ).

Despite the considerable fee received by the former first lady of the United States, the president of the organization, Charles Moran, still wanted to clarify that the money did not come from his NGO. The origin of this payment therefore remains a mystery as the declaration form does not provide further details on the subject.

“I want to get paid”

This is not the first time Melania Trump monetizes her public speeches. By December 2021, she had already received $155,000 for speaking at an event in Palm Beach organized by her husband’s political action committee (PAC). And this, long before he was officially a candidate for the 2024 presidential elections.

However, appearances by the former first lady remain rare and calculated. And until recently, she was conspicuous by her husband’s absence in the presidential campaign. Stephanie Grisham, Melania Trump’s former spokeswoman and then White House communications director, herself testified about this to CNN. “He was so disconnected from this campaign and so absent that I could hear him saying, “If I have to spend time on it. , I’d like to be paid for it.” Now critical of Donald Trump, Stephanie Grisham exposes her former boss’s infidelity without giving exact numbers. “Even when we were in the White House, he was always concerned that people were making money off him, because he thought it was money he had to make.”

Monetization, political practice

This trend of monetizing public speaking is not limited to Trump. Other influential politicians have also generated substantial income through paid speaking engagements or speaking engagements. According to CNN, Bill and Hillary Clinton, for example, received more than $153 million for speaking engagements between 2001 and 2016, before the former secretary of state’s presidential campaign began. Barack Obama, for his part, sparked controversy by receiving $400,000 for a 2017 health conference on Wall Street. By Biden, same story. Between 2016 and 2018, after stepping down as vice president, Joe and Jill Biden notably earned more than $15 million through book deals and speaking engagements.

That said, none of them did it on the eve of the presidential elections. Spokespersons for former first ladies such as Jill Biden, Michelle Obama and Laura Bush claim they were never paid to fundraise during political campaigns, unlike Melania Trump.

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