What Melania Trump Allegedly Told Donald Ahead of Presidency Revealed

Melania Trump's former friend and aide has let slip exactly what the former first lady told her husband Donald when he was weighing up whether to run for president.

Stephanie Winston Wolkoff was Melania's first hire after Donald Trump's 2016 election victory, but their relationship soured when it was reported the former benefitted financially from contracts for his inauguration.

Since then, Winston Wolkoff has been very outspoken about the former first couple. She has shared anecdotes such as the latest where she said Melania revealed what she told Trump before running for president. Winston Wolkoff posted her take on the exchange on X, formerly Twitter.

"Melania Trump told me, 'I told Donald that if he ran for president, he be ready for everything to be opened up & exposed'. I asked, 'Are you ready for everything about to come out?' She made one of her favorite gestures, a 'That's that! If it happens, it happens.' She meant it when she said, 'He knows he better be ready'."

In the post, Winston Wolkoff also included a screenshot from a Forbes article speculating which people could be called as witnesses in Trump's hush-money trial. The words "Melania Trump" had been photoshopped on to look like red crayon. Newsweek contacted Trump's spokesperson by email for comment on Saturday.

Trump is on trial in Manhattan, New York City, over 34 felony counts for falsifying business records. These are in relation to "hush money" the Republican arranged for his former lawyer Michael Cohen to pay adult film star Stormy Daniels to keep secret an alleged affair she had with Trump in the run-up to the 2016 election.

Trump has pled not guilty to all the charges and has repeatedly said the case is part of a political witch hunt aimed at derailing his bid for another term in the White House. He has admitted reimbursing the $130,000 to Cohen but denied having the affair with Daniels.

One legal expert said Trump would struggle to use the defence that the reason he had paid the money to keep the alleged affair a secret was simply to protect his marriage to Melania.

Andrew Weissmann, attorney and former FBI general counsel, made the comments on MSNBC, while discussing how the jury in his criminal trial will likely hear about Trump's alleged extramarital affairs and how he made attempts to stop them coming out in "gruesome" detail.

"One of the key pieces of evidence for the DA [district attorney] seems to be to refute the idea that he wanted to do this just to keep it from Melania is Donald Trump saying, 'Well, let's see if we can do this later, because we may not have to pay if it's later; and if lose the election, who cares whether it comes out, because I'm not doing this to keep it for my wife, I'm doing this to keep it from the electorate," Weissmann said.

However, legal experts have added that Trump's wife will not be called upon to testify against the former president due to spousal privilege, but also because of her lack of involvement in the allegations.

"In fact, she's the putative victim in the illicit sex part of the story," former federal prosecutor Michael McAuliffe told Newsweek.

"Any government attempt to force her to be present as a potential witness would just feed Trump's preferred narrative that the case is about airing salacious rumors instead of holding Trump accountable for crimes."