Former aide portrays First Lady Melania Trump as powerless before her ‘dictatorial’ husband
By TATIANA PROPHET

Stephanie Winston Wolkoff was an aide to Melania Trump and has leaked tapes of their phone calls to CNN.

In this recording from July 2018, Melania discusses the zero tolerance policy at the border, and the contrast of that with her being "required" to design the Christmas decorations at the White House. She sounds like me. We’re talking about saving children and I have to deal with Christmas decorations?!

She also sounds genuinely upset — expressing concern for the situation at the border and how the media refused to pick up her concern for the children. As part of their rollout of these tapes, CNN had Wolkoff on with Anderson Cooper. In airing the tape (go to link above), Wolkoff tells Cooper that Melania fell in line on zero tolerance due to being part of a dictatorship. This is so deceptive. Zero tolerance, as most people remember, resulted in the separation of parents from their children after crossing the border illegally and then asking for asylum if they were caught. (If they went to a port of entry, they would not be charged with a crime).

Normally, parents have not been charged with illegal entry simply because they crossed illegally. Here is what most people do not realize. When the consequences are enforced, the illegal activity stops. The illegal activity has cost our nation not simply taxpayer money for those here working, but jobs for young and lower-skilled who were born here.

Now the personal rant: The idea that people don't want these jobs is a talking point that I myself participated in early in my journalism career. Eventually I met enough people who did want a farm job or a job in a denim factory or chicken plant, that I finally conceded to myself that the truth was mixed. And if the truth is mixed, then that meant we are harming our own citizens.

The illegal activity also harms those who come for a better life, because they are vulnerable to exploitation (even in a state like California).

Re: Zero tolerance - I've explained elsewhere that I don't approve of the flaws in our system that involved long separations for some of these children. As painful as this was, however, the whole idea is to make the consequences so difficult that they outweigh the benefits of embarking on the arduous journey.

If anyone else can think of a way to put the genie back in the bottle, I'm all ears. I personally saw the consequences of people being denied entry, then realizing the easy situation was no longer an avenue they could take. Read my debunking of the “kids in cages” narrative.

If you think that after we've allowed multinational corporations to pillage the proud countries of Central America, that the solution would be to circumvent our own laws and borders, then perhaps you should travel there to see the poverty first-hand. It's not pretty. And often it's much worse than being separated from their parents in America, sadly.

And the conditions in Honduras, El Salvador and Nicaragua are largely America's fault. Hillary Clinton was knee-deep in the exploitation of the area’s natural resources as Secretary of State (search for Berta Caceres). So are most of our politicians. This is why I defend Trump. He called out this hypocrisy. He wasn't afraid to do it, and you shouldn't be either.

By the way: After about a month of zero tolerance, Melania actually was successful in convincing her husband to abandon it. In the end, he tried a different way to enforce the consequences of crossing the southern border illegally. And it worked. In my opinion this is a major reason why our unemployment rate went lower than it ever has, especially for lower-skilled workers -- and wages were no longer suppressed by unauthorized labor accepting them.

One more thing: Don’t feel bad, Melania. The lady who leaked your call sounds fake AF in it.