On Tuesday, in an article detailing the transfer of power between the Trump administration and the incoming Biden administration, CNN chose to get personal, or one might say intimate, as they criticized President Trump, highlighting the Trumps’ separate bedrooms and contrasting them to the Bidens’ intention to share a bedroom.
In the same article in which CNN slammed Trump for a “series of broken norms and childish behavior that comes directly from the President of the United States,” the outlet wrote of the move-in of the Bidens to the White House:
A particular focus of this move will be paid to the bedrooms in the residence, where new mattresses and box springs for the incoming first family are standard operating procedure, according to the source. Yet one part of the bedroom set-up will be markedly different with the Bidens than it was for the Trumps: the Bidens will be sharing a bedroom. Melania Trump spent the majority of her time in the White House in the large bedroom suite typically reserved for Presidents and their spouse, adjacent to the West Sitting Hall, according to a source with knowledge of the arrangement. “Donald Trump slept in his own bedroom, which was previously a study or den during other administrations,” the source said of the arrangement.
Prior to the Gerald Ford administration, it was common for presidents and their wives to have separate bedrooms. First Lady scholar Annette Dunlap pointed out to People Magazine, “It was kind of a European thing. The idea of sleeping in the same bed together in the late 19th century and into the early 20th century was a symbol of poverty, because you couldn’t afford your own bed or your own bedroom.”
Dunlap noted that Democrat presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Baines Johnson had separate bedrooms from their wives. Both were known for philandering. She noted that Johnson’s philandering had him bedding “more women than John Kennedy did, which is hard to believe.”
Author Kate Andersen Brower added that a White House butler told her Hillary Clinton kicked her husband Bill out of their shared bedroom after news broke of his affair with White House intern Monica Lewinsky. In her book “The Residence,” Brower wrote, “For three or four months in 1998, the president slept on a sofa in a private study attached to their bedroom on the second floor. Most of the women on the residence staff thought he got what he deserved.”
Melania Trump told People Magazine in 2016 that if her husband were elected, they would have separate bathrooms, joking that separate bathrooms were the “key” to a healthy marriage.
The separate bedrooms could well have stemmed from the fact that President Trump, as has been noted, often was awake in the middle of the night. He wrote in his 2004 book “Think Like A Billionaire, “Don’t sleep any more than you have to. I usually sleep about four hours per night.”