“Women, especially, they go back, and they see it two or three times, four times,” he said at an event in Washington, days after its release.
The documentary film had made his wife a “big movie star”, Trump insisted.
In a trailer for the new series, Melania Trump says: “Everybody wants to be close to power, and sometimes [that] could be very dangerous.”
Over images of her and Barron Trump, the 20-year-old son she shares with the President, she says: “He’s my priority. He will always be my priority”.
The figure Amazon offered for the feature-length documentary, reportedly US$26m more than the next highest bidder, led some to question whether it amounted to a “bribe”.
Democratic representatives wrote to Amazon chief executive Andy Jassy in March demanding an explanation.
“Given questions regarding whether Amazon’s investment was commercially justified, and given the Trump family’s personal enrichment from the deal, observers have questioned whether Melania was Amazon’s attempt at ‘currying favour’ with the Trump Administration, or even an outright bribe,” they wrote.
Amazon’s billionaire founder Jeff Bezos defended his company’s decision, claiming it was “just not correct” to say it had bought the film to curry favour with the Trump Administration, but he said: “I can see why people say this”.
Bezos has been accused of seeking to ingratiate himself with Trump, partly by preventing his newspaper, the Washington Post, from endorsing Kamala Harris in 2024.
In January 2025, Bezos and his wife, Lauren Sanchez, attended Trump’s inauguration, after Amazon donated US$1m to the event.
The first lady has kept a relatively low profile since the couple returned to the White House last year, although she has been in the spotlight recently through her work to broker a ceasefire in the occupied Ukrainian town of Oleshky.
In April, she made a surprise speech at the White House denying that she had any relationship with Jeffrey Epstein or knowledge of his crimes.
She described claims the convicted paedophile had been the person who first introduced her and Trump as “false smears”, made by “mean-spirited and politically motivated individuals”.
Reports have suggested the Trumps keep largely separate schedules, with Business Insider noting there was a month-long stretch over the Northern Hemisphere summer when she did not make a single public appearance.
In the trailer for the new Amazon series, she says: “The media, they want gossip. For me, it’s noise.”
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