President Donald Trump’s top Democratic antagonist has revealed that he has an unusual sleeping arrangement with the first lady—even when they’re mid-air.
Gavin Newsom, 58, spilled the details of his exclusive Air Force One tour in his book Young Man in a Hurry: A Memoir of Discovery.
The California governor said the tour took place in November 2018 when Trump, now 79, visited the blue state in the aftermath of the devastating wildfires in the northern Californian town of Paradise.
After Trump met with local officials, he welcomed Newsom to the presidential jet to head to Southern California, where the Woolsey fire ravaged the Los Angeles and Ventura counties.
Newsom recalled that Trump became “a giddy child” as he showed him around the multimillion-dollar plane, writing that “every bell and whistle seemed to give him great personal satisfaction.”
Newsom said he was beginning to turn and head back into the main cabin when Trump called him over to check out the bedroom.
“This was the chamber where he and Melania, on trips to distant places, retired. A room with two beds, I could see, separated by more than a few feet,” the Democratic firebrand wrote.
Newsom said Trump did not wait for him to “mentally fill in the blank.”
“Melania wanted one bed,” he quoted Trump as saying. “But two beds, you know, two beds next to each other.”
“He seemed to be winking,” Newsom observed.
Trump’s odd sleeping setup with the 55-year-old first lady has long generated speculation about their marriage.
In 2018, The Washington Post reported that the first couple had separate bedrooms in the White House and are often apart even during their free time.
After the couple returned to Washington, D.C., last year, longtime Trump biographer Michael Wolff said “they clearly do not in any way inhabit a marriage as we define marriage.”
“And I think maybe we can more specifically say they live separate lives. They are separated. The president of the United States and the first lady are separated,” he said on a May 2025 episode of The Daily Beast Podcast.
Insiders at Windsor Castle also revealed that Trump and Melania slept in separate bedrooms during their visit to the United Kingdom last September.
“Below-stairs wags, noting that Melania has a separate suite, joke that if she’d asked for a water bed she could effortlessly drift apart from Donald,” the Daily Mail’s Ephraim Hardcastle column noted.
The couple got married in 2005 and shares a son, 19-year-old Barron.
The White House did not immediately return a request for comment on Newsom’s anecdote.
