While writing his 2018 bestselling book Fire and Fury, author Michael Wolff spent seven months observing the goings-on at the White House, where he was given “carte blanche” access to President Donald Trump and many of his key staffers.
It was during this time that Wolff noticed that a lot of the president’s staffers were women, and they mostly all fit a similar mold: long hair worn down, skirts above the knee, high boots, and, in Wolff’s estimation, not always qualified for the roles they had secured.
Yet it wasn’t just that the women all looked similar to each other. “They look like Melania,” Wolff stated of female staffers past and present, pointing to Hope Hicks, Alina Habba, Natalie Harp, and Margo Martin as examples.
In a new edition of The Daily Beast Podcast, Wolff tells host Joanna Coles how the role of the women (and some of the men) who work for Trump is essentially to be at his “beck and call” and “to anticipate his needs.” In doing so, they have created a kind of “comfort blanket system” for the president.
Whereas a president surrounding himself with attractive women could easily be perceived to have an overtly sexual connotation, that’s not the case with Trump, says Wolff. “There’s a view… in the White House,” he says, “that Trump is, and this is the term they use: ‘post-sexual.’”
With the days of New York Post headlines touting Trump as “the best sex” Marla Maples ever had long behind him (for her part, Maples denied ever saying this), Trump, 79, now seems content to simply “populate his world with women who he, I suppose in another life—or at another stage of life—might have been involved with,” says Wolff. “They look like Melania, in fact. So they’re a kind of sexual surrogacy” for the role that Melania seems to have largely vacated.
“Melania is absent,” says Wolff. “The time she spends with the president… [is] reduced to the absolute minimum necessary to sustain the illusion of a marriage.” Which might be why the president has so many Melania doppelgängers at the ready.
Of course, being surrounded by attractive women is all in a day’s work for Trump.
For nearly two decades, Trump co-owned the Miss Universe organization and reportedly enjoyed circulating among the young contestants backstage. And his eye-poppingly sexual remarks about his own daughter, Ivanka, are well-documented.
As for the women who work for Trump, they often find themselves in a vicious circle, Wolff says: “They hate each other. It’s a competition. He is always pitting them against one another, always choosing one over the other, and you have to fight for his… attention. And the one who gives him what he most wants is the one who is closest to him.”
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