In Jill’s telling, the friendliest first lady is Brigitte Macron, who she says treated her like a sister when they shared “champagne and french fries” during an October 2021 trip to Rome. “Every time I saw Brigitte, I liked her even more,” Jill notes.
Macron was apparently especially thoughtful in a pinch. “I arrived in Paris for the 2024 Summer Olympics opening ceremonies in the middle of a torrential downpour,” Jill writes. “Before I had to face the public, Brigitte called me into a room she’d saved just for me, and brought in a hair dryer so I could dry off and fix my makeup before I had to greet everyone else.”
Yet the one powerful woman Jill didn’t connect with was her successor in the office of first lady: Melania Trump. Jill writes that Melania didn’t invite her over for the traditional first lady tea in 2021, after Joe defeated Donald in the 2020 election. In 2024 the Democrats lost—and once again, Melania and Jill’s contact was limited; Jill writes that Melania declined her invitation for tea that year. “We met briefly at both Carter funerals,” Jill adds. (Rosalyn Carter died in the fall of 2023; Jimmy Carter died at the end of 2024, and his funeral took place in January 2025.) In the book, Jill says that she also included Melania in an annual tradition of hers: “Each year, I sent her a birthday card, as I sent one to every other living First Lady.”
Jill says she did reach out to Melania after Thomas Matthew Crooks attempted to assassinate Donald in Butler, Pennsylvania, in July 2024. “The dramatic image of the once and future president with blood on his face, making a fist, was everywhere,” Jill writes. “I called Melania and said that I was thinking of her and Barron. She was polite and controlled as ever. She said they were ‘good,’ and thanked me for calling.”
According to Jill, they met once more in January 2025, during a limousine ride to Donald’s second inauguration. For some reason, Amy Klobuchar’s husband, John Bessler, was their escort during the ride; Jill speculates that he drew “the shortest of all possible straws” to land this tricky assignment.
The conversation in the car was terse, according to Jill; she writes that the high-profile 2022 raid on Mar-a-Lago, which resulted from the Justice Department’s investigation into Donald’s handling of classified documents, might have been the reason for the hostility. “Melania kept trying to switch the topic to the weather,” the onetime first lady writes. “I asked Melania about her father, because her mother had recently died. She said he was doing okay, and he was there with them, then said, ‘But you know, it’s only been a year.’ I tried to get with Melania’s weather-only program. I said I felt bad for the military dogs we passed along the route because of the cold.” Perhaps Jill would have had better luck if she’d kept the conversation to her successor’s favorite topic: Melania Trump.