“You’re giving her one day?” Stern asked.
“One or two,” Trump replied.
Moments later, the future president reconsidered. “I think I’ll give her a week,” he said. “No, I’ll give her a week.”
Trump’s remarks drew laughter from Stern’s female co-host, Robin Quivers, and Trump ultimately indicated that his ultimatum to Melania was not entirely serious.
“If there’s cellulite, will you be man enough to stay in the relationship?” Stern asked at one point.
“I will,” Trump answered. “I will love her so much. You have no idea. I’m a very loyal person. I will love her so much.”
The White House did not respond to a request for comment. Speaking generally about his appearances on Stern’s show, Trump told The Washington Post in April 2016: “I never anticipated running for office or being a politician, so I could have fun with Howard on the radio, and everyone would love it. People do love it. I could say whatever I wanted when I was an entrepreneur, a business guy.”
Trump also said in the 2005 interview that he had seen “beautiful women that for the rest of their lives have become [a] horror” after giving birth.
“You know, they gain like 250 pounds,” he told Stern. “It’s like a disaster.”
At the time of the interview, Melania Trump was five months pregnant with her first child, Trump’s fifth. Barron Trump was born March 20, 2006.
Daniels, whose real name is Stephanie Clifford, told In Touch magazine that she had sex with Trump in July 2006 at a golf tournament in Nevada. The In Touch interview was conducted in 2011 but published for the first time this week.
Trump denies the affair with Daniels. And Daniels denies a Wall Street Journal report that she accepted $130,000 from Trump attorney Michael Cohen to keep quiet during the 2016 presidential election.
Trump’s comments to Stern fit a pattern of public remarks and alleged behavior during and after Melania’s pregnancy. The infamous “Access Hollywood” video, in which Trump boasted about groping and kissing women without their consent, was recorded in September 2005, when Melania was about two months along.
Celebrity journalist Natasha Stoynoff claims that Trump pressed her against a wall and forcibly kissed her in December 2005, around the time of the Stern interview. At the time, Stoynoff was interviewing the Trumps at Mar-a-Lago for a People magazine feature. She wrote about the alleged encounter in October 2016.
New York Post columnist Andrea Peyser, who initially endorsed Trump for president, withdrew her support in August 2016 and shared the following anecdote in an article:
When I visited about two months after his lovely wife, Melania, now 46, gave birth to the couple’s son, Barron, now 10, the infamous germaphobe boasted that after fathering five children, he’d never changed a diaper.I enthused that Melania, who stood quietly nearby aboard 5-inch stilettos, had lost all her baby weight. Trump corrected me: “She’s almost lost all the baby weight.”I was embarrassed for the mother of his youngest kid, who ignored the dig.
Daniels told In Touch, in the newly published interview from 2011, that she “didn’t think that much about” Trump’s marital status. Daniels said when she asked Trump about his wife, he replied “Oh, don’t worry about her” and changed the subject.
Trump was a frequent guest on Stern’s show in the years before he entered politics, and various comments he made on the program attracted new attention after he became a politician. In one notable appearance on the show, Trump offered reluctant support for a military invasion of Iraq, undermining his claim as a candidate that he had opposed the 2003 invasion all along. In another interview, Trump bragged about walking in on naked beauty pageant contestants.
As the president denies Daniels’s account of a rendezvous in the months after Melania gave birth, remarks that Trump made to Stern again seem relevant.