The first lady’s spokeswoman, Stephanie Grisham, on Friday criticised “a laundry list of salacious and flat-out false reporting” on Trump. It came after Nikki Haley, the US ambassador to the United Nations, denied having an affair with the president.

“BREAKING,” wrote Grisham on Twitter. “The laundry list of salacious & flat-out false reporting about Mrs. Trump by tabloid publications & TV shows has seeped into ‘main stream media’ reporting.”

Meanwhile, the porn actor Stormy Daniels, who is claimed to have had an affair with Trump, will appear on Jimmy Kimmel Live on Tuesday, the night of President Donald Trump’s state of the union speech, according to Kimmel and the ABC network.

In her tweet, Grisham added that Melania Trump was focused on her family and her role as First Lady, “not the unrealistic scenarios being peddled daily by the fake news”.

The Daily Mail reported on Friday that Melania Trump had spent a number of nights at a DC hotel in the wake of reports about the alleged affair with Daniels.

The Wall Street Journal reported that Trump’s personal lawyer brokered a $130,000 payment to Daniels in October 2016 to prohibit her from publicly discussing the alleged affair before the election.

Melania Trump had originally been scheduled to join her husband at an economic summit in Davos, Switzerland, this week. But her office said on Tuesday, the day before the president’s departure, that she would not be going, citing unspecified scheduling and logistical issues. She has joined her husband on his other foreign trips.

On Thursday the first lady paid a visit to the US Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington in advance of International Holocaust Remembrance Day.

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