It was the hand swat seen around the world.
When arriving at the airport in Tel Aviv, Israel in May, First Lady Melania Trump wouldn’t take President Donald Trump’s hand as the two walked down the tarmac alongside Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his wife Sara.
Footage of America’s first couple, which became a viral sensation, showed that Melania wouldn’t indulge her 70-year-old husband in what many regard as a routine gesture of affection between loving married couples. Instead, she swatted his hand away.
That hand swat now takes on potential new meaning in the wake of newly released recordings of interviews that Trump gave to shock jock Howard Stern from 1993 to August 25, 2015, shortly after Trump announced his presidential candidacy.
According to a 1999 radio chat between Trump and Stern, obtained by Newsweek, the real estate mogul admitted he sometimes had a hard time keeping his hands to himself, including when it came to Melania.
This disclosure probably shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone who listened to Trump’s leaked 2005 “Hollywood Access” recording, in which he boasted about being able to grope women because he’s a celebrity.
In the 1999 radio chat with Stern, Trump also admitted he groped Melania in public.
“Have you ever felt her up in public?” Stern asked in the sexually-laced banter that he has become famous for.
“Yeah,” Trump replied, but then added “I’m very well behaved, actually, and almost always I’m very down the middle.”
At the time, the future president and first lady, who married in 2005, had been been dating about a year. The Slovenian-born model was in her late 20s, and Trump was in his 50s.
“I met her at a very big party in New York,” Trump told Stern about their first encounter. “And she was there along with other supermodels, and I greeted all of them, and I said, ‘That’s the one that’s the most beautiful.'”
“Wow,” Stern said.
“And she is considered beautiful by the other girls,” Trump said. “I mean they, she’s really considered most beautiful, but she’s beyond beauty, she’s a very nice person.”
Trump then admitted that things didn’t go too well that first night — and it’s possible he means in terms of sexual performance.
“I didn’t do well with her the first time,” Trump said.
“You didn’t,” Stern said.
“No, it was not working. The whole thing was not working the first night,” Trump said.
Newsweek recently obtained the 15 hours of radio conversations between Stern and Trump.
During those interviews, Trump also discussed the attractiveness of his three wives — and almost every other female celebrity of the moment, Newsweek said.
He also explained his preference for women with accents, frequently gushed about oldest daughter Ivanka Trump’s looks, revealed that Ivanka and Donald Jr. wanted to “bump” younger half-sister Tiffany out of her inheritance and admitted how dismayed he was to learn that his second wife Marla Maples was pregnant with Tiffany.
The revelation that Tiffany was a surprise baby came up in a January 2004 interview that started with Trump talking about how he knew Melania was faithful and that she always used birth control.
“How do you know Melania’s faithful?” Stern asked.
“I know she’s faithful,” Trump said, adding “She’s on the pill.”
At that point, Stern’s co-host Robin Quivers piped in, “You know you fell for that one time before.”
“I did,” Trump said. “That happened. She (Maples) said, ‘I think I’m so happy! We’re about to have a child.’ I said, ‘Excuse me?’ I didn’t know about this.”
But then Trump told Stern he was glad Tiffany came along. Tiffany is now in her first year at Georgetown Law School.
“I have a great little daughter, Tiffany. But, you know at the time it was like, ‘Excuse me, what happened?’ And then I said, ‘Well, what are we going to do about this?’ She [Maples] said, ‘Are you serious? It’s the most beautiful day of our lives.’ I said, ‘Oh, great.'”
At that point, Trump said to Maples: “Do you want to get married?”
Newsweek exclusively obtained the audio and transcripts of Trump talking to Stern, whose preoccupation with sex and “unctuous questioning style” got the real estate mogul to open up on all sorts of topics, including his sex life, women’s breasts, money, enemies, politics and so much more.
“Taken together, the Stern interviews are a rich, Freudian case study, a gold mine for anyone trying to understand the president of the United States,” Newsweek reported.
During and after the 2016 presidential campaign, Stern said he wouldn’t make the recordings public, but Newsweek said an anonymous person provided the recordings earlier this month via a website that had earlier made an appeal for the tapes on various Stern fan sites and on Reddit.
