Melania Trump is promoting her upcoming book by bragging about her controversial “evisceration” of the most iconic garden in America.
The former first lady was widely criticized for ripping up the White House Rose Garden designed by Jackie Kennedy in its last major renovation in the early 1960s.
But she was happy to show off her plans and photos of the new-look landscaping, with some carefully placed snaps of herself and her book, in a new video plug on X, formerly known as Twitter.
“When the committee for the preservation of the White House asked me to renovate the Rose Garden I felt a deep responsibility to “respect tradition and to preserve its grandeur for future generations,” she said in the brief commentary. “In my book, I share the story of this journey, how my team and I worked to safeguard this piece of our history.”
The puff piece finishes with the title of her book, Melania, which is available from her website on Oct. 8.
Unsurprisingly, there was no mention of the outcry over the 2020 renovation, which was all the more heated because work began on the new-look garden during COVID.
The following year, more than 50,000 people signed a petition calling on the then first lady Jill Biden to restore the garden to its “former glory.”
The petition called Melania’s creation “a boring tribute to herself.”
“Jackie’s legacy was ripped away from Americans who remembered all that the Kennedys meant to us,” it added.
Historian and author Michael Beschloss tweeted a photo of Melania’s restoration work with the caption: “Evisceration of White House Rose Garden was completed a year ago this month, and here was the grim result—decades of American history made to disappear.”
Melania hit back at Beschloss on her own social media account, calling him ignorant and dishonorable.
