Ivana on Melania: No problem. Marla? That’s another story
Trump’s ex-wife dishes on president, his loves.
Ivana Trump’s new book is being billed as a parenting manifesto from a self-styled “Lion Mom,” but readers of “Raising Trump” will likely be thumbing past the advice on keeping kids off drugs and on curfew.
Trump’s stance on kiddie credit cards? Womp, womp. What folks really want to know is how “the original Mrs. Trump” feels about the current Mrs. Trump, particularly after the eye-popping public spat between the two women on Monday.
It takes nearly 200 pages for Ivana Trump to get to the current first lady. On page 196, after countless anecdotes from her previous lives as an athlete, model and eventually her kid’s limo driver (like a minivan but not), Trump recounts a tale about wife No. 3.
“Melani a Trump: I have no problems with her at all. Why should I? She didn’t break up my marriage,” writes Trump, drawing a clear divide between Melania Trump and Marla Maples, President Donald Trump’s sec- ond wife and the woman with whom he had an affair while married to Ivana.
Ivana writes that up until the 2016 presidential race her interactions with Melania had been “cordial.” So, what happened?
In Ivana Trump’s telling, while having a fabulous lunch with 40 friends, a conversation about the prospect of a Trump presidency veered toward the future first lady.
She writes: “… all I said was that Melania is a quiet, private woman and that she might not enjoy being in public so much.” A much cattier version of that assessment landed in the New York Daily News, which reported that Ivana had said of the future first lady, “She can’t talk, she can’t give a speech.”
Melania Trump was obviously not happy about that headline. Ivanka Trump, Ivana’s daughter with Donald, played media--
tor, and Ivana sent a conciliatory message.
“You have never done anything wrong to me, and I never have to you,” the mother of the president’s three older children recalls texting. “You are in the family, and I would never do anything against the family. Love, Ivana.”
Those three lines with their “Godfather”-eqsue tone smoothed things over.
That is, until Monday. That’s when Ivana Trump claimed in an interview to promote “Raising Trump” that as the first Trump wife she was technically “the first lady.” Melania Trump’s East Wing responded swiftly and publicly with an official statement that read in part, “(Melania Trump) plans to use her title and role to help children, not sell books.”