"I tried...."

Melania Trump: I tried to steer Trump away from Howard Stern, Billy Bush

By Nolan D. McCaskill

Had Donald Trump listened to his wife, the Republican presidential nominee might have a better standing among female voters.

In an interview broadcast Tuesday morning on “Fox and Friends,” Melania Trump said she advised her husband not to do interviews with people like Howard Stern and Billy Bush because they try to pull inappropriate and dirty language out of the braggadocious real estate mogul.

Donald Trump’s campaign has plummeted since a 2005 “Access Hollywood” video emerged in which Trump is heard talking cavalierly about sexually assaulting women with impunity because of his celebrity. The GOP nominee, however, dismissed the notion that despite his rhetoric, he has actually done such things with women, a statement that set a series of sexual misconduct allegations against him.

Melania Trump defended her husband, praising him as a kind gentleman who cares about women. But she also gave Donald Trump a bit of an I-told-you-so.

“He’s not the man that we saw — we heard him on the tape,” Melania Trump told Fox News’ Ainsley Earhardt, contending that the man she knows today isn’t the man heard making “offensive” and “inappropriate” remarks in the video. “Many times, I gave him an advice and I didn’t agree to do all the tapes on Howard Stern, with Billy Bush because I know those people. They hook him on. They try to get from him some — some unappropriate and dirty language.”

In an interview with CNN’s Anderson Cooper broadcast Monday, Melania Trump also condemned her husband’s rhetoric but dismissed it as “boy talk” — though Donald Trump was 59 at the time.

“As you can see from the tape, the cameras were on. It was only a mic,” she said on CNN. “And I wonder if they even knew that the mic was on because they were kind of boy talk and he was led on, like, egg on from the host to say dirty and bad stuff.”

Melania Trump added that she was shocked because she hadn’t heard Donald Trump speak like that before. “I heard many different stuff, boys talk. I — the boys, the way they talk when they grow up and they want to sometimes show each other, oh, this and that, and talking about the girls and — but, yes, I was — I was surprised, of course,” she said. “But I was not surprised that the tape came out. I was not surprised about that.”

“I see that mainstream media,” she said on Fox News, “they want to damage my family and my husband’s campaign.”