There will be no tea for two at the White House on Wednesday for Melania Trump and Jill Biden, as the former first lady is too occupied with her newly released memoir Melania to join President-elect Donald Trump in Washington for the day. Anonymous sources told CNN that Melania will skip the traditional first lady meeting, citing a scheduling conflict related to the promotion of her New York Times bestselling book.
Another source offered a different explanation for Melania’s expected absence, suggesting she still harbors grievances over the FBI’s raid on Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence in Palm Beach, Florida, in August 2022, part of the federal classified documents case that was eventually dropped in July, Breitbart News reported. Agents reportedly rifled through Melania’s personal belongings, including her lingerie.
“She ain’t going,” that unnamed source told the New York Post. “Jill Biden’s husband authorized the FBI snooping through her underwear drawer. The Bidens are disgusting. Jill Biden isn’t someone Melania needs to meet.” A source also told the Daily Mail that “Mrs Trump is not going,” adding that Melania and Jill Biden “have not spoken.”
Trump’s team did attempt to convince Melania to reconsider, as they considered the meeting important, CNN reported. An insider told the network that her decision has not been finalized. President Joe Biden also extended an invitation to Trump to visit the Oval Office as part of efforts to smooth the transition between their administrations. Trump accepted the invitation, and the meeting is scheduled for Wednesday, just over a week after his decisive victory over Democratic candidate Vice President Kamala Harris in the 2024 race. The two are set to meet at 11 a.m., according to the White House.
Trump achieved the highest raw vote count of any Republican presidential candidate in history, according to projections for the 2024 election. As of Sunday morning, Trump had secured 74,650,000 popular votes, surpassing his previous record of 74,224,000 votes in the 2020 election, according to the Associated Press. Currently, this puts Trump ahead of Vice President Kamala Harris, who has 70.9 million votes. However, a significant number of votes remain uncounted, including those in California, where about 66% of the vote has been tallied.
Other states, including Alaska, Arizona, Maryland, Oregon, and Utah, still have outstanding votes, with approximately 5 million votes estimated to be left to count. Republicans have not won the popular vote in a presidential election since 2004, when President George W. Bush received 62 million votes, the New York Post reported.
Ronald Reagan, in his 1984 landslide re-election, won 54 million votes at a time when the U.S. population was 100 million smaller than it is today. President Biden still holds the record for the largest raw popular vote count in U.S. history, with 81.3 million votes in the 2020 election, though interestingly, the approximately 11 million votes that Harris is shy of Biden’s 2020 total did not show up for Trump, either.
