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Even before Melania Trump became first lady, she had to fend off various suspicions about the state of her marriage to Donald Trump.

But speculation intensified on inauguration day that she could be the hostage to her husband’s famous ego and political ambitions.

Trump memorably left behind Melania to rush up the White House steps to greet outgoing President Barack Obama and first lady Michelle Obama that January 2017 morning. Though elegantly clad in a powder blue Ralph Lauren dress, Melania awkwardly fumbled with how to hand a Tiffany’s gift box to Michelle Obama.

Then, as Trump waited to be sworn into office, cameras caught a moment of what appeared to be a small marital cruelty. Trump turned to say something to a briefly beaming Mrs. Trump; her face collapsed, and a “Sad Melania” meme was born.

Best-selling author Michael Wolff’s controversial new book, “Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House,” offers what is billed as a behind-the-scenes look at the tensions between the first couple that day.

Trump didn’t enjoy his inauguration because A-list stars snubbed the event, and he and his wife were fighting, enough to leave her in tears, Wolff wrote, according to an excerpt published by New York Magazine.

“Throughout the day, he wore what some around him had taken to calling his golf face: angry and pissed off, shoulders hunched, arms swinging, brow furled, lips pursed,” Wolff said.

Wolff’s book contains many such observations about the 71-year-old president’s behavior and personality, both as the leader of the free world and as a former real estate mogul and reality-TV star trying to navigate a role that many of the author’s some 200 sources reportedly said he’s unfit to handle.

Excerpts of the book also address aspects of his relationships with his close White House advisers and family members, daughter Ivanka Trump and son-in-law Jared Kushner, as well as with Melania, a former model and his Slovenian-born third wife.

In a column published Thursday in the Hollywood Reporter, Wolff refers to Melania as a “a non-presence” in the White House. Staff instead regard Ivanka Trump as the “real wife” and Hope Hicks, Trump’s 29-year-old personal aide, confidante and White House communications director, as the “real daughter.”

The book repeats claims made in previous stories in other publications, such as Vanity Fair, that Melania Trump, 47, didn’t want her husband to become president and only assented to him running for office because she, like him and everyone else around him, didn’t think he would win.

Trump saw the goal of his campaign as a way to promote his brand and become even more famous, Wolff wrote. The rest of the inner circle likewise hoped to reap the benefits of his campaign and seemingly inevitable loss: Ivanka and Jared would become international celebrities while Melania Trump could return to “inconspicuously lunching.”

“Not only would Trump not be president, almost everyone in the campaign agreed, he should probably not be,” Wolff wrote.

But then came election night Nov. 8, 2016. Around 8 p.m., it started to look like Trump might actually win.” Don Jr. told a friend that his father, or DJT, as he calls him, looked as if he had seen a ghost. Melania was in tears — and not of joy,” Wolff wrote.

Melania Trump didn’t move into the White House for months after Trump took office, leading to further speculation that their marriage was strained and that Melania resented her husband for trapping her into a highly public and political life she never wanted.

The official explanation for Melania Trump delaying her move to Washington, D.C., was that their 11-year-old son Barron needed to finish his school year in New York. It turns out that Melania and Barron Trump made good on that promise; they moved to Washington, D.C., in the early summer and Barron enrolled at a prestigious private school in Maryland.

But an Us Weekly story in March, citing multiple sources, suggested other reasons for Melania Trump to delay her move.

The story made the explosive allegation that Melania was so miserable in her marriage that she refused to share a bed with Trump on the rare occasions that they were in the same city.

“They have separate bedrooms,” a Trump family insider said. “They never spend the night together — ever.”

Wolff’s book repeats that claim, saying that the Trumps are the first couple since the Kennedys to maintain separate bedrooms.

Trump also found the “White House to be vexing and even a little scary” when he first moved in, and he adopted a solitary nighttime routine, Wolff wrote.

According to Wolff, Trump prefers to retreat to his bedroom by himself at 6:30 p.m. where he watches one of three TVs; he had two additional TVs installed after he moved in.

He likes to get in bed with a cheeseburger and make phone calls to a small group of friends, “who chart his rising and falling levels of agitation through the evening and then compared notes with one another.”

In addition to Trump’s personality quirks, Wolff’s book as well as sexual misconduct allegations made by multiple women, suggest that the marriage also has been challenged by Trump’s wandering eye.

Nine of the 19 women who have accused Trump of sexual misconduct say their unwanted encounters with Trump occurred after he and Melania married in January 2005, according to a New York magazine list of the accusers.

One of those women is a journalist who claimed Trump came on to her at Mar-a-Lago while they were waiting for Melania to arrive for an interview. She told People that Trump pushed her against a wall, forced his tongue down her throat and told her, “You know we’re going to have an affair, don’t you?”

According to an excerpt from Wolff’s book, which was shared by the New York Daily News, Trump at one point liked to boast about sleeping with his friends’ wives.

It’s not clear from the excerpt whether Trump allegedly pursued other men’s wives after he married Melania, though it makes it sound like Trump doesn’t honor other people’s marital fidelity.

Trump would try to soften up these wives for seduction by telling them that their husbands weren’t the men they thought they were, Wolff wrote.

“Then he’d have his secretary ask the friend into his office; once the friend arrived, Trump would engage in what was, for him, more or less constant sexual banter.”

Trump would ask the friend if he still liked having sex with his wife then propose that he had “girls” coming in from Los Angeles to join them for a “great time.”

While this banter was going on, Wolff wrote, Trump would have his friend’s wife on speaker phone, listening in.

The White House issued a blanket denial of claims contained in the book, with press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders saying “Fire and Fury” is filled with “false and misleading accounts from individuals who have no access or influence with the White House.”

Much of the Trump’s anger about the book was directed at former White House strategist Steve Bannon, who emerged as a source for some of the more incendiary allegations in the book about Trump’s competence and his family members. Trump’s lawyers are reportedly seeking to block publication of the book, the Washington Post said.

In an usual move for a first lady, Melania Trump’s spokesperson Stephanie Grisham also issued a statement on her behalf, according to CNN’s Jim Acosta. Grisham said: “The book is clearly going to be sold in the bargain fiction section.” That’s not the case yet. As of Thursday, it was the No. 1-selling book on Amazon, even though it won’t be released until Friday.

But with regard to Melania Trump’s view of her husband’s presidential ambitions, Grisham said, “Mrs. Trump supported her husband’s decision to run for president and, in fact, encouraged him to do so. She was confident he would win and was very happy when he did.”

The book’s credibility has also come under attack from Republicans, Trump supporters and some White House reporters, such as the New York Times’ Maggie Haberman who tweeted: “Thin but readable. Well-written. Several things that are true and several that are not. Light in fact-checking and copy-editing.”

In publishing circles, Wolff is known as a muckraking writer who lobs “critical bombs” from the pages of prestigious magazines like New York and Vanity Fair, the Washington Post reported. In the past, writers have blasted him for filling his column inches with “insight and imaginative recreation” rather than actual reporting, the Post said.

“Historically, one of the problems with Wolff’s omniscience is that while he may know all, he gets some of it wrong,” David Carr wrote in a 2008 New York Times’ review of Wolff’s 2008 book on Rupert Murdoch.

Wolff has defended the accuracy of “Fire and Fury” by saying he gained unparalleled access to the White House in his 18 months of reporting — encouraged by the president himself. according to New York magazine. Haberman and other reporters have acknowledged they often saw him at the White House. Wolff added that his book is based on interviews with more than 200 people, including the president and senior White House staff members.