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Melania’s brilliant suggestion on White House’s media strategy surrounding 2019 ISIS raid: “Talk about the dog!”

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Melania Trump was famously disinterested in being First Lady of the United States during her four years in Washington, D.C.

Not only did it take her six months to move into the White House after her husband took office, but once she got there, her biggest accomplishment was tearing up Jackie’s rose garden and overseeing the construction of a new tennis pavilion.

But in October 2019, she apparently did take a brief moment of interest in the U.S. raid in Syria that resulted in the death of ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi.

According to a new memoir by former acting Defense Secretary Christopher Miller, the then-first lady joined her husband and other top-ranking government officials in the White House Situation Room to watch the raid.

In “Soldier Secretary,” out this week, Miller writes that Melania’s presence in the room caught him by surprise.

“Her presence was unexpected, to say the least,” he says. “I wondered how it would play in the press if word got out that the first lady had popped in to watch a major military operation.”

Others in the room included Vice President Mike Pence, Defense Secretary Mark Esper and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Mark Milley.

But even more surprising to Miller was Melania’s suggestion for how the White House could turn the raid, which resulted in al-Baghdadi blowing up himself, along with two of his children and two of his wives, into a positive story for the Trump administration.

Her idea? Talk about the “hero dog”, Conan, named after late-night comic Conan O’Brien, that led troops into the compound where al-Baghdadi had been hiding!

When President Trump asked his team how they should announce the ISIS leader’s death, Melania jumped in to say he should make a public statement from the Diplomatic Room the very next day during the Sunday morning news hour.

“You should talk about the dog,” she advised, according to Miller’s account. “Everyone loves dogs!”

Trump ended up taking Melania’s suggestion. During a press briefing the ensuing day, he referred to Conan as a “talented” and “wonderful” Belgian Malinois that had been injured in the raid by an exposed live wire but was expected to make a full recovery.

He later honored the military animal during a White House ceremony in November 2019, saying, “Conan is a tough cookie. And nobody is going to mess with Conan,” and awarding him with a medal and a plaque.

In other Melania news, the former first lady is currently ensnared in a scandal involving $132,000 taken from Trump’s Save America PAC, which has been fundraising off false voter fraud claims, to cover the cost of her wardrobe stylist.

Last week, Business Insider reported that, Herve Pierre Braillard, who’s been dressing Melania since 2017, received seven payments of $18,000 and one for $6,000 in 2022 for “strategy consulting”. It’s unclear what “strategy consulting” actually means in this context, but the FEC prohibits donations going towards personal items, including clothing.

Neither Melania nor Braillard have commented on last week’s report.

Related:

Looks like another scandal involving Melania and her fashion stylist is about to blow up

As Donald Trump attempts to resuscitate his third presidential election campaign, one of his shady political action committees is working hard to make Melania’s stylist great again.

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