President Donald Trump is weighing in — again — on rumors that his wife, Melania, was recovering from a facelift during her recent 27-day disappearance from the public eye, rather than a kidney procedure as her office stated.
During a rally in South Carolina for Gov. Henry McMaster on Monday evening, Trump brought up the procedure the first lady had last month to treat a benign kidney condition and said, “She’s fine.”
“But they had all kinds of projections,” Trump said. “They said she got a facelift. No. I would let you know. They couldn’t hide that one for long.”
“They said she left me and moved to New York,” he added. “The only thing they wouldn’t say is what happened. And she’s private. She doesn’t want to talk about things.”
Trump previously attacked the “Fake News Media” for its “vicious” treatment of the first lady during her notable public absence.
“During her recovery from surgery they reported everything from near death, to facelift, to left the W.H. (and me) for N.Y. or Virginia, to abuse,” Trump tweeted on June 6. “All Fake, she is doing really well!”
After reemerging earlier this month, the first lady stoked outrage amid the migrant-children crisis when she wore a jacket emblazoned with the words “I Really Don’t Care, Do U?” during a visit to a Texas facility to meet immigrant children separated from their families because of her husband’s “zero-tolerance” immigration policy.
While Mrs. Trump’s communications director, Stephanie Grisham, said in a statement that “there was no hidden message” surrounding the first lady’s fashion choice, her husband insisted that his wife’s jacket was directed at the “the Fake News media.”
