PLAYING FAMILY FEUD
First lady fires back publicly at prez’s ex
First lady Melania Trump engaged in a rare public feud yesterday, lashing out at her husband’s first wife after the president’s ex bragged about having a “direct line” to the White House and insinuated she was the real “first lady.”
The spat comes amid an already tumultuous stretch in the West Wing, where President Trump is juggling a slew of controversies both at home and abroad.
It began yesterday when Ivana Trump — during an appearance on ABC’s “Good Morning America” to promote her new memoir — claimed she has a “direct line” 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,” Ivana Trump said, adding: “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, OK?”
That drew a quick rebuke from Melania Trump, who’s largely carved out a quiet persona within her husband’s headline-generating administration.
Saying she “loves” living in Washington, D.C. — an apparent response to Ivana Trump’s statement that she has no desire to move there — Melania “plans to use her title and role to help children, not sell books,” Stephanie Grisham, the first lady’s communications director, said in a statement.
Ivana married Donald Trump in 1977 and divorced him in 1992 following his highly publicized affair with former beauty queen Marla Maples.
But she says the two are still “friends” and that she’s offered him advice.
“Sometime I tell him to just not to speak that much,” she said. “And tweets are the tweets and I think I don’t disagree with him because he has so many press against him so if he say something, his words will be twisted immediately. If he tweets, the whole world can get his mind.”
The president’s tweets sparked an ugly brawl with a senior Republican lawmaker over the weekend, when Trump assailed outgoing U.S. Sen. Bob Corker.
Most GOP senators were silent yesterday, a day after Corker fired back at the president that the White House was an “adult day care” and Trump could set the nation “on the path to World War III.”
The only senator who publicly hinted at similar concerns was Iowa U.S. Sen. Chuck Grassley, who said both Trump and Corker should “cool it.”
“And I think it would help if the president would be the first to cool it,” he added.
“I don’t see how it’s productive, and I think that two words would kind of answer your question from my point of view: Cool it,” Grassley said. “I think it would be better if we stuck to the issues and leave personalities out of it.”