Melania Trump fires back after Ivana calls herself ‘first lady’
NEW YORK — U. S. President Donald Trump’s first and third wives are fighting after Ivana Trump called herself the original “first lady.”
Ivana Trump boasted to ABC’s Good Morning America on Monday that she has a “direct number” to the White House, and talks to her ex-husband about once every two weeks.
“I don’t really want to call him there, because Melania is there,” she said referring to first lady Melania Trump. “I don’t want to cause any kind of jealousy or something like that, because I’m basically first Trump wife. OK? I’m first lady.”
The 68-year-old said she has no desire to be in Washington, D.C., and even turned down an ambassadorship to the Czech Republic offered by the president because she loves her “freedom.”
Melania Trump slammed Ivana’s remarks as “attention-seeking and self-serving noise.”
“Mrs. Trump has made the White House a home for Barron and the president. She loves living in Washington, D.C., and is honoured by her role as first lady of the United States,” Stephanie Grisham, the first lady’s communications director, said in a statement to CNN.
“She plans to use her title and role to help children, not sell books,” Grisham added. “There is clearly no substance to this statement from an ex, this is unfortunately only attention-seeking and self-serving noise.”
Ivana was promoting her new memoir Raising Trump in which she recounts growing up in communist Czechoslovakia and claims responsibility for raising the former couple’s three children: Donald Jr., Eric and Ivanka.
She married Donald Trump in 1977 and divorced him in 1992 following his highly publicized affair with former beauty queen Marla Maples, whom he married. Ivana told ABC that she had forgiven her ex but not Maples.
As for Trump’s infamous 2005 Access Hollywood tape in which he bragged about groping women, Ivana said she has “not really” spoken to him about it.
“He was not really disrespectful. He just jokes,” Ivana told ABC. “Sometime he said things which are silly.”