US Election: Donald Trump uses victory speech to make weird brag about Melania

The President-elect awarded his wife an unprompted accolade in his victory speech - but, unlike many other claims Trump has made during his campaign, it wasn't entirely false

Donald Trump used his victory speech in the US election to make a bizarre brag about his wife, Melania Trump.

The former and now incoming president told supporters at his Mar-a-Lago residence in Florida that he has won the race against Democrat Kamala Harris without having crossed the 270 electoral vote threshold required to retake the Oval Office. He is just three votes short, however, and is essentially guaranteed to surge to victory with a Republican tsunami in the House of Representatives and Senate.

He announced that the US "has given us an unprecedented and powerful mandate", adding: "Nobody expected that. Nobody. Thank you very much for that and you have some great senators and great new senators and it also looks like we’ll be keeping control of the House of Representatives." During that landmark speech, he also awarded his wife an unusual accolade.

Bringing the incoming First Lady to the stage at his Florida compound, Trump thanked his "beautiful wife" as waves of applause and cheering broke out. He also strangely declared, unprompted, during his speech that Mrs Trump, "has the number one best-selling book in the country".

While Mr Trump is well-known for twisting the truth to his needs, his claim is not entirely false, but it is exaggerated. Mrs Trump's book, titled "Melania", is a bold, black-covered memoir released on October 8 that her husband has meekly promoted at some of his rallies.

Speaking at one appearance during his campaign this year, he informed supporters of the release by saying: "Go out and get her book. She just wrote a book. I hope she said good things about…I don’t know, I didn’t…so busy." The relatively short, 182-page memoir, has gone on to sell well, with 85,349 hardcover copies sold in the first week of its release.

Those numbers - while far short of the 636,696 copies of predecessor Michelle Obama's 2018 memoir Becoming - have given the memoir a place on the New York Times' bestseller list. The publication, which strictly conceals its sales criteria, has confirmed the sales were all legitimate.

The entry earned its place on the list without the notorious "dagger" symbol that is placed next to bestselling entries earned through bulk orders. New bestsellers have since replaced Mrs Trump's book, with John Grisham's Framed, a story of the US justice system through the eyes of wrongly convicted prisoners, having stayed in the non-fiction top-spot she once inhabited for the last two weeks.