“Truthfully, I was a much better father than I was a husband, always working too much to be the husband my wives wanted me to be,” Trump wrote in his 2015 book Great Again, right around the time he announced he was seeking the presidency. “I blame myself. I was making my mark in real estate and business, and it was very hard for a relationship to compete with that aspect of my life.” 1
Donald got no argument from Ivana when it was her turn to give her side in her own book, where she wrote about her ex-husband’s merits as a father to their three kids. “Donald might not have been the greatest husband to me, but he was a good father to the kids,” she said. “Obviously, they adore him and are fiercely loyal to him. If he were a horrible dad, that would not be the case.”
Justifiably, Ivana used her published soap box to extol her own skills and virtues as a fulltime working mom. During her fourteen-year marriage to Donald, as she illustrates, she designed the interiors of the Grand Hyatt and Trump Tower, served as president and CEO of the Trump Castle casino (presumably, she opines, the world’s only woman at the time in such a role) as well as president/CEO of the Plaza Hotel, the latter position connected to her being named Hotelier of the Year in 1990. That’s in addition to writing three international best sellers and raking in tens of millions of dollars with her own lines of fashion, fragrances, and jewelry. She was ambitious and aggressive as a woman in a man’s world.
“No matter how busy I was,” Ivana said, “I had breakfast with my children every day. I sat with them at dinner every night and helped them with their homework (I loved algebra), before going out in a Versace gown to a rubber-chicken charity event. Donald and I celebrated, traveled, and grieved together.” 2
Financial problems put a serious fiscal crimp in the Trump Organization in the latter half of the eighties. The double whammy for the luxury-loving Ivana came when she found out about Donald’s not-so-secret affair with the gorgeous Georgia-born Marla Maples, the 1984 Miss Georgia USA runner-up whose 37-25-37 vital statistics hit the jackpot in Donald Trump’s wandering eye, as did the number 17—the quantity of years by which Marla was Donald’s junior.
At the same time Donald was dating Marla while keeping her socially quarantined in his back pocket, mostly out of sight of an inquiring public (but not to a prying, opportunistic tabloid press), Donald’s hand-built empire was fraying and in danger of toppling. He was living a life of excessive risk and lies accompanied by piles of debts, looming bankruptcies, adulterous actions, and, as Blair puts it, “overcommitted resources.” The casinos, most visibly, were coming up snake eyes, not generating even enough revenue to pay for themselves, let alone turn a profit.
Weathering the business financial storm was par for the Trump course, but “ . . . There was one thing he was unable to do—tell his wife (Ivana) it was over,” Blair says. “‘I have to confess,’ he later wrote, ‘I never sat down calmly with Ivana to “talk it out” as I probably should have.’ Nor was his wife able to face squarely the disintegrating situation in which she was living. Meanwhile, Marla Maples was growing tired of being sequestered, of hiding in the back of the limo, of bringing her own escort to public events and standing across the room from her lover, of having a vacation with him mean (having to) travel separately and staying at a different hotel.” 3 Donald was not confrontational when it came to women. His inability or unwillingness to face reality and command the situation (a tact his biz side would have relished) allowed fate and others to determine his matrimonial future.
The duo of duels, one between Donald and Ivana and the other between Ivana and Marla, came to a much-publicized head during Christmas 1989. After flying his family out to Aspen, Colorado, where they stayed in a luxury hotel, he retrieved Marla in a separate trip to also bring her along to Aspen, where she holed up with a girlfriend in more modest quarters several blocks away from the luxury hotel where Ivana and the kids were.
Trump succeeded in keeping his wife and mistress apart for the better part of a week, although Marla and Ivana eventually met up on the same parcel of a ski slope on New Year’s Eve (Donald Jr.’s birthday). No doubt Ivana could have challenged Marla and smoked her in a downhill race to the ski lodge, but instead chose to stay and confront Maples, warning her younger rival to buzz off and stay away from Donald. Ivana punctuated her point with a slight shove of Marla—a moment captured by photographers—for added weight in making her point. “Are you happy?” Maples asked Ivana before they went their separate ways. 4
***
It was just after midnight, early morning on November 9, 2016, and the scene inside New York City’s Javits Center was a mixture of tension, anger, and dejection, as if something—or someone (Hillary Clinton maybe?)—were about to explode. The Clinton campaign had rented the Javits Center for what they were confident was going to be Hillary’s victory party on Election Night. Yet here it was 12:30 a.m. and the presidential race between her and Donald Trump had not yet been called. And that was bad—no, shocking news—for Hillary, her campaign people, the Democratic Party, and much of the media that had been poised to celebrate a Hillary election as America’s first female president.
In the media room, however. word came that Trump had won yet another key battleground state. He was edging closer to the 270 electoral votes he needed to beat Clinton and claim a prize that she believed was rightfully hers. When the announcement came of another state victory for Trump, some reporters in Javits angrily slammed their tables—as reported by a Hollywood Reporter correspondent onsite. Stunned “victory party” guests quietly filed out of the venue, with Hillary supporters muttering “heartbroken,” “disappointed,” “confused,” and “in shock” to describe their feelings as they headed out the door. 5
This much was clear: In winning the U.S. presidency, Trump, starting on November 9, 2016, had assured himself that his next four years and two months—including the gap between his election victory and Washington, D.C. inauguration—would see a steady stream of criticism, second-guessing, and mocking from a left-leaning media. The trickle-down was that his family members would also be caught in a frenzy of guilt by association (and party affiliation). That, of course, included Trump’s third wife, Melania, whom he had married in January 2005 and was now set to become America’s First Lady. It also included their son, Barron, ten years old at the time his father moved into the White House—the same age that Willie Lincoln was when Abraham Lincoln had been inaugurated.
Not only was Melania (Knauss) Trump just the second First Lady to have been born outside the USA (Louisa Adams was the first), she was the first who had been an immigrant to the U.S. and the first for whom English was not her first language. It was, in fact, the fifth language in which she is reportedly fluent; she also speaks French, Italian, and German, in addition to her native Slovenian. 6 The fact that she also was a former supermodel with enviable fashion tastes—indisputably one of the most beautiful women in the world—and married to the much-hated Donald Trump, media now had its “journalistic” license to take aim at Melania sitting pretty as fair game, unlike her predecessor, Michelle Obama, who had been practically worshipped by much of the media. Two public figures (Donald and Melania) for the price of one. This, in a world where some of the most prominent public figures get preferential treatment, and some, like the Trumps, don’t. Melania has been the subject of controversy, some of it engineered by media.
Media disrespect toward Melania was taken up a notch or two after her husband declared his presidential candidacy . . . and before her husband had won the election. One media organization that climbed aboard the anti-Melania train early on was the Daily Mail, a British tabloid newspaper that in August 2016 published an article that claimed Melania had worked for an escort service during her days as a model. Mrs. Trump filed suit against the Daily Mail and settled with the newspaper for a judgment of $2.9 million with the newspaper retracting the story while admitting its falsehood. 7
Her modeling past also became a source of controversy when it was found she had been part of a sexually explicit photo shoot in the January 1996 issue of a French men’s magazine 8 as well as a cover photo for the January 2000 edition of GQ magazine. For the latter, she had posed nude except for diamond jewelry she wore while posing in a reclining position on fur—in Trump’s custom-fitted Boeing. Of course, both photo shoots took place more than fifteen years before Trump won the 2016 election and more than five years before they were even married. Donald Trump defended his wife’s professionally risqué past, saying, "Melania was one of the most successful models, and she did many photo shoots, including for covers and major magazines. . . In Europe, pictures like this are very fashionable and common.” 9
Around the same time of the appearance of the Daily Mail story, Melania was accused of plagiarism when the speech she gave at the 2016 Republican National Convention reportedly included a paragraph similar in wording to a segment of Michelle Obama’s speech at the 2008 Democratic Convention, with a Trump speechwriter later taking responsibility for the “confusion.” Another charge of plagiarism made against Melania concerning a booklet that had accompanied her Be Best public awareness campaign was found by fact-checking web site Snopes to be “mostly false.” 10
Other digs against the First Lady have been groundless, a distortion of facts, or simply taking her to task for such meaningless “indiscretions” as discussing certain topics and not others during an interview in which someone else, not Melania, was asking the questions. Case in point: CNN contributor Kate Anderson Brower opining in a December 2018 commentary that Melania “doesn’t understand what it means to be First Lady.” Brower’s beef with Trump concerned an interview with Fox News’s Sean Hannity in which Melania touched on subjects such as “opportunists who are using my name” as one of the most difficult parts of being First Lady.
Brower griped that Trump at that moment should have instead been talking about the struggles of Americans she had met in her role as First Lady, such as women and babies dealing with opioid addiction. 11
Welcome to All in the First Family; Season 2, coming soon to a TV screen near you.
Notes:
1. Donald J. Trump, Great Again: How to Fix Our Crippled America (New York: Threshold Editions, 2015), 129.
2. Ivana Trump, Raising Trump (New York: Gallery Books, 2017),2–3.
3. Gwenda Blair, The Trumps: Three Generations That Built an Empire (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2000), 399.
4. Blair, 399.
5. O’Reilly, 242.
6. Bethania Palma, “Is Melania Trump Fluent in Five Languages?”, Snopes, December 30, 2019, https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/melaniatrump- multiple-languages/, viewed July 3, 2020.
7. Gabriella Paiella, “Melanie Trump’s Daily Mail Lawsuit Settled for $2.9 Million,” The Cut, April 12, 2017, https://www.thecut. com/2017/04/melania-trumps-daily-mail-lawsuit-settled-usd2-9-million. html, viewed July 3, 2020.
8. Isabel Vincent, “Melania Trump’s Girl-on-Girl Photos from Racy Shoot Revealed,” New York Post, August 1, 2016, https://nypost. com/2016/08/01/melania-trumps-girl-on-girl-photos-from-racy-shootrevealed/, viewed July 4, 2020.
9. Isabel Vincent, “Melania Trump Like You’ve Never Seen Her Before,” New York Post, July 30, 2016, viewed July 4, 2020.
10. David Smith, “Melania Trump in New Plagiarism Row over Online Safety Pamphlet,” The Guardian, May 8, 2018. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/may/07/melania-trump-plagiarism-row-be-best-campaign, viewed July 4, 2020.
11. Kate Anderson Brower, “Melania Shows She’s a Trump Through and Through,” CNN, December 15, 2018. https://www.cnn.com/2018/12/13/opinions/melania-trump-interview-poll-brower/index.html, viewed July 3, 2020.