Melania Trump to hit campaign trail for husband after early absence

The enigmatic former first lady to appear at fundraiser on Saturday, marking a return to her husband’s side as he seeks re-election

Her biggest fashion statement as first lady was a green jacket emblazoned with the words “I really don’t care, do u?” More recently, Melania Trump has given the impression that she doesn’t care whether her husband, Donald, returns to the White House. That is about to change.

On Saturday Melania, 53, will appear at a fundraiser at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach, Florida, for the Log Cabin Republicans, the biggest Republican organisation dedicated to representing LGBT conservatives. It will be her first appearance at a political event since Trump, 77, launched his bid to regain the presidency.

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The vast majority of NFTs are now worthless, new report shows

Two years after tech trend that swept up artists and celebrities, researchers estimate 23 million people hold worthless investments

Tens of thousands of NFTs that were once deemed the newest rage in tech and dragged in celebrities, artists and even Melania Trump have now been declared virtually worthless.

According to a new report by dappGambl that reviewed data from NFT Scan and CoinMarketCap, 69,795 out of 73,257 NFT collections have a market cap of 0 Ether, leaving 95% of those holding NFT collections – or 23 million people – with worthless investments.

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Melania Trump’s auction of NFT, hat and painting fall short of $250,000 opening bid

Steep dive in crypto market resulted in final bid of about $170,000 – $80,000 short of the starting bid threshold

What do Melania Trump’s wide-brimmed white hat, a painting of her wearing the hat and an NFT of an animated version of the hat have in common?

They were all put up for auction by the former first lady – and as of early Wednesday, failed to rake in the target price of a $250,000 opening bid.

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Melania’s latest NFT is selling for £180,000 – at last one of the Trumps is showing entrepreneurial spirit | Arwa Mahdawi

The former first lady has launched a jewellery line and caviar moisturiser, but digital portraits could be her real money maker

There’s no rest for the wicked, eh? While a lot of people have spent the past few weeks trying to do as little as possible, it has been go-go-go for the Trump family. Donald, Ivanka and Donald Jr have been issued with subpoenas as part of a fraud inquiry into the family’s businesses. Melania, meanwhile, has been busy building a business of her own. The former first lady, turned crypto queen, has jumped on the non-fungible token (NFT) trend: last month she was flogging a digital painting of her eyes titled Melania’s Vision (and promising an unspecified portion of the proceeds from her digital ventures would go to children ageing out of foster care). The price? One SOL (Solana, the cryptocurrency, is worth about £128). Now, she has released a picture of herself dressed in white for a starting bid of just 1,415.86 SOL (£180,000).

Melania’s NFT venture isn’t her first brush with entrepreneurship. She had a jewellery line and once developed a skincare range called Melania Trump’s Caviar Complexe C6™ with Lipid Matrix Receptor™ Technology. She tested her caviar creams on her then seven-year-old son Barron (“It smells very, very fresh … He likes it!” Melania told reporters at the time). Alas, no one else got a chance to use them due to a complicated lawsuit that killed the product before it got to the shops.

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Donald Trump chops with Atlanta Braves fans before World Series game

Only months after calling for a boycott of Major League Baseball, former US president Donald Trump did the tomahawk chop with Atlanta Braves fans at Game 4 of the World Series on Saturday night.

Trump stood beside his wife, Melania, as he chopped away with fans before the game between the Atlanta Braves and Houston Astros from a private suite.

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Restorationists urge Jill Biden to erase Melania Trump’s Rose Garden makeover

A petition, signed by more than 54,000 people, calls on Biden to return the garden to its ‘former glory’ as Jacqueline Kennedy designed

Efforts to erase the Trump family legacy have reached the White House potting sheds and nurseries with Jill Biden being urged to restore the mansion’s garden to a state that predates ex-First Lady Melania Trump’s 2019 makeover.

An online petition calling on the first lady to return the Rose Garden to its “former glory” has been signed by more than 54,000 people. The petition says Biden’s predecessor “had the cherry trees, a gift from Japan, removed as well as the rest of the foliage and replaced with a boring tribute to herself”.

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Donald and Melania Trump quietly got Covid vaccines last month, reports say

Unlike other officials, the then president and first lady did not receive their shots on TV

Donald and Melania Trump received the coronavirus vaccine before leaving the White House, according to multiple news reports on Monday.

Citing unnamed advisers, the New York Times, CNN and other outlets reported that while other officials, including Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, and the former vice-president Mike Pence, chose to get their shots publicly to encourage confidence in the vaccines, the Trumps opted to quietly get vaccinated in January. There was no detail on which shot they received or how many doses they had been given.

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Melania Trump leaves Donald Trump alone in front of the cameras – video

The former first lady Melania Trump apparently spurned the conventions of her role by leaving Donald Trump alone in front of the cameras at Palm Beach airport after the couple left the White House for the final time ahead of Joe Biden's inauguration. 

Trump himself paused to wave at photographers, but his wife continued walking until she was firmly offscreen, leaving her husband alone and triggering speculation about the state of her marriage to the now former president

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‘We will be back in some form’: Trump vows return in final speech – video

Donald Trump said it had been his ‘greatest honour and privilege’ to have served as US president in a speech to supporters at Joint Base Andrews in Maryland. ‘Goodbye, we love you, we’ll be back in some form,’ Trump said, before boarding Air Force One to the sound of the Village People’s 'YMCA'. Trump is the first president in more than 150 years not to attend the inauguration ceremony of his successor.


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Melania Trump says ‘past four years have been unforgettable’ in recorded farewell speech – video

The US first lady thanked Americans on Monday for the 'greatest honour of my life' in a recorded video she posted on Twitter.

Melania Trump said: 'The past four years have been unforgettable, as Donald and I conclude our time in the White House. I think of all of the people I have taken home in my heart and their incredible stories of love, patriotism and determination'

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Melania Trump faces backlash after revealing new White House tennis pavilion

First lady’s announcement sparked a slew of Twitter responses including a terse ‘282,345’ from Washington DC journalist David Corn

Melania Trump drew backlash on Monday after announcing that a new tennis pavilion is set to be unveiled on the south grounds of the White House, as coronavirus cases and hospitalizations continue to surge across the country.

“It is my hope that this private space will function as both a place of leisure and gathering for future first families,” the first lady said in a written statement on Monday, which came just weeks before the Trump family turns the White House over to his Democratic rival, Joe Biden, who handily won the 2020 presidential election.

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Melania Trump swaps horror for tradition with lighter approach to Christmas decor

Outgoing first lady unveils ‘America the beautiful’ theme in White House, breaking with previous years that featured blood red trees and bare branches

Apart from the odd nod to a funerary urn, first lady Melania Trump broke with tradition this year with her White House Christmas decorations, opting for fairly normal green trees with red and gold ornaments instead of the blood-red foliage or Shining-esque ghost-white branches of previous years.

This year’s theme, unveiled on Monday, was “America the beautiful”, inspired, she said, by Americans’ shared appreciation “for our traditions, values and history”.

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More than a second gentleman: why Doug Emhoff is Kamala Harris’ secret weapon | Hadley Freeman

I’m not obsessed with Doug, but he could probably be my pub quiz subject

There is much to say about Joe Biden and Kamala Harris’s historic win, but I’d like to focus on a man called Doug. Doug Emhoff is a lawyer and – more relevantly to your interests and mine – Harris’s husband, and unless you are part of the #DougHive, Doug’s devoted (and, one suspects, mainly female) fans, it’s likely you don’t know much about him.

This in itself is astonishing, given that women are generally discussed through the prism of their personal lives. I didn’t realise until last month that the young adults with whom Harris is occasionally photographed are not, as I’d assumed, her children, but rather Doug’s children and her stepchildren. Having children, or not, once defined a woman’s public image, as Theresa May could tell you, but I don’t recall a single discussion of Harris’s parental status during this campaign. Before we all celebrate this too ecstatically, Harris remains an anomaly; just try to find a single article about Amy Coney Barrett that doesn’t mention how many kids she has, and then imply that this has some bearing on her fitness for the supreme court. That Harris has largely swerved this is mainly down to her, but also down to Doug. (I know newspaper style dictates I should refer to him as Emhoff, but, really, he is such a Doug.)

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Biden is far from perfect – but we should still take a moment to savour his victory | Suzanne Moore

The left is so used to losing that we have become sore winners. While the US has not been fixed overnight, there is reason to feel hope again

There are many things Joe Biden is not. He is not young. He is not an anti-establishment peacenik. He is not unbeholden to huge, anonymous donors. He is not free of accusations of using male privilege to be gropey with women. He is neither a radical, nor exciting. He is not a brilliant orator. He is not Bernie Sanders. And on it goes: the disappointments pile up thick and fast.

But he is not a loser – and he is not Donald Trump. So let us have a moment, however brief, of celebration.

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Who will tell Trump to go? Not Melania or Jared, reports say

Confusion reigns as accounts of attempts to talk president into conceding to Joe Biden are swiftly shot down

As Donald Trump spent Sunday morning visiting one of his golf clubs and doubling down on bogus election fraud claims, conflicting reports emerged about whether the president’s family and top advisers were advising him to admit defeat.

Related: Joe Biden gets to work as president-elect while Trump refuses to concede

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Jacinda Ardern wishes Donald and Melania Trump a speedy recovery – video

New Zealand's prime minister has wished the US president and his wife a rapid recovery after they were diagnosed with Covid-19 on Friday. She said the virus had had a 'devastating impact' globally and noted that several world leaders had been taken ill with it

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Trump in quarantine as Covid diagnosis throws US into fresh upheaval

America’s leadership has been plunged into extraordinary uncertainty after Donald Trump tested positive for the coronavirus, raising questions over how far the infection has penetrated the heart of government.

Related: Donald and Melania Trump showing 'mild' Covid symptoms as Joe and Jill Biden test negative – live

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Trump’s Covid diagnosis throws final month of campaign into total confusion

Huge questions over practical matters of rallies and travel, but also of whether Trump falls ill – and what that means for the election

Hours after the announcement that he had tested positive for Covid-19, Donald Trump canceled a planned trip to Florida for a campaign rally on Friday and announced that he and the first lady, Melania Trump, who also tested positive, would enter quarantine.

Related: What happens if Trump is incapacitated and how would it impact the election?

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Trump joked while people suffered with Covid. Well, is now the time to stop? | Marina Hyde

Maybe the real victims of the president’s diagnosis are his MAGA disciples who don’t believe the virus even exists

Well, it’s definitely a plot twist. Like a lot of people who sat through Tuesday’s presidential debate, I’m amazed the week has ended with Donald Trump ingesting bleach, and not me.

As you may vaguely have heard, the US president and his wife, Melania, have tested positive for the novel coronavirus – which feels untimely given that, mere hours earlier, Trump had been declaring: “The end of the pandemic is in sight.” Perhaps this is a one-last-job movie. Alternatively, picture a Wuhan bat staring pensively into the fireplace as its butler suggests not thinking too hard about Trump’s motivations. Some poorly facepainted men just want to watch the world burn.

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