'The View' hosts mock Melania Trump after interview criticizing Vogue, poke fun at modeling career
'We've seen a lot of photographs online' of Melania, Joy Behar said to laughter from audience
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The women of "The View" uniformly mocked former First Lady Melania Trump Tuesday after she poked Vogue for not featuring her on its cover while in office, with co-host Joy Behar even appearing to allude to past racy photos Mrs. Trump took during her modeling career.
The audience laughed as Whoopi Goldberg introduced the segment where Trump told "Fox & Friends First" co-host Pete Hegseth the media was "biased" and it was "so obvious" that they had political preferences when it came to Vogue having prominent Democrat women on its cover but not her.
"I had much more important things to do, and I did in the White House, than being on the cover of Vogue," she said in a clip, to more light jeering from the "View" audience.
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"What did she do?" co-host Joy Behar asked. "She turned that beautiful Rose Garden into a cemetery. That's one thing she did. What did she do exactly? Honestly, I don't care what she does. I really don't care. Do you?"
Guest co-host Stephanie Grisham, who worked for the former First Lady and was also briefly White House press secretary – notably never holding a single briefing – offered a tepid defense when co-host Sara Haines asked if she was "busy," to more laughter.
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"You know what, she was first and foremost a mother, and she was a good mother and prioritized her son first. I will say that, and her initiatives were important to her," Grisham said.
"What are the initiatives?" Behar asked.
"Be Best," the others chimed in, alluding to the name of the child-focused awareness campaign that delved into social media behavior. Given her husband's well-known acidic Twitter account, she took heat from the media on that.
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"Online safety, opioids, and um, just helping children with emotional intelligence, et cetera," Grisham said.
Grisham said she believed Trump should have been on the magazine cover, leading Behar to quip, "We've seen a lot of photographs online, though."
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Trump posed nude for several shoots during her modeling career, which made for tabloid fodder during her husband's first presidential campaign in 2016.
As the crowd laughed again, Grisham said, "Again, I know it’s easy to take potshots at her, and trust me, I would like to as well, but I think for this topic, there was bias there. But I will also say when Vogue came to us and asked if she would do a shoot, she would only do a shoot if she could be on the cover."
Goldberg noted that magazines dictate who's on the cover, not the subjects of their stories. Trump did appear on Vogue's cover in 2005.
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"She’s a model and she knows how this works," Goldberg said.
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"She expected to be on the cover but rightfully so, she had seen all the other First Ladies on the cover, so I do get that," Grisham said.
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Co-host Sunny Hostin said Vogue made a business decision, calling Donald Trump a "very unpopular president."
The decision was likely rooted in politics, however.
Vogue editor-in-chief Anna Wintour is a major Democratic Party supporter and bundler, and the magazine's content leans heavily to the left. Vice President Kamala Harris was featured on the cover before she even took office in 2021, and Democratic First Ladies Jill Biden, Michelle Obama and Hillary Clinton were all featured on the cover, in Obama's case three times.
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Laura Bush, the last Republican First Lady before Trump, was featured in Vogue during her husband's administration but not on the cover.