Melania Trump didn’t think Donald Trump would win in 2016

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Melania Trump burst into tears on election night in 2016 after realizing her husband won. He expects Donald Trump to lose. This story and many others are part of Insider’s 2016 oral history of how Trump took the GOP LoadingSomething load.

Former First Lady Melania Trump never expected her husband to win the White House in 2016, former Trump attorney Michael Cohen told Insider.

“Melania played a very limited role during the campaign who didn’t believe Donald would win,” Cohen told Insider for its 2016 oral history of how Trump took over the Republican Party. “However, when Donald was directly asked for his opinion on something, he immediately offered it.”

Read more: The specific oral history of how Trump took over the GOP, as Cruz, Rubio, and 20 other insiders told us

Cohen’s comment suggests other reports that Melania Trump and many others close to the former president were not expected to win Election Night in 2016. Her niece Mary Jordan wrote in her 2020 book that Donald Trump was stunned when he won the election.

In 2018, New York journalist Michael Wolff reported that Melania Trump cried on Election Night in 2016 after realizing her husband had won. The Trump White House denied Wolff’s report at the time. However, Wolff struggled with factual questions about his books about Trump.

Former House Speaker John Boehner speculated in 2018 that Donald Trump promised Melania Trump that they would not win, and therefore would not leave New York and move to Washington.

Just days after the 2016 election, the New York Post reported that Melania Trump and their son Barron Trump will remain in New York until the end of the school semester. They left New York for Washington in mid -June 2017, according to a Politico report at the time.

Within Trumpworld, the former first lady is viewed as one of Donald Trump’s most influential advisers, competing only with the influence of her daughter Ivanka Trump and son-in-law Jared Kushner.

A spokeswoman for the former first lady did not immediately comment for this story.

In a separate anecdote from the oral Insider history project, Melania Trump joins her husband John McCain as “not a war hero,” according to longtime Trump adviser Corey Lewandowski. Melania Trump’s office denied that she made the comment.

To read the full story of Trump’s oral history, click here.

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