The verdict Ivana Trump, President Donald Trump’s first wife, once delivered on his second and third wives is getting a fresh airing online — and it lands in a stretch in which First Lady Melania Trump has been scarce. When the first Republican midterm convention opened on September 9, 2026, she was in the White House Rose Garden, not in Dallas; a White House official had confirmed on September 3 that she would skip the gathering.
Her husband had pushed for the convention to lift his party’s midterm outlook. She, meanwhile, was addressing the White House Historical Association’s presidential sites summit. “The White House stands as an architectural autobiography of America, embodying the enduring values of ambition, democracy, and civic life through its design, craftsmanship, and the objects within,” she said. She also highlighted the White House Tennis Pavilion, the Queens’ Bedroom renovations, Zuber wallpaper conservation in the President’s Dining Room and the Rose Garden restoration.
The president spoke on both nights at the American Airlines Center, delivering the keynote on the first and closing remarks on the second. Vice President JD Vance keynoted the second night, after Trump bumped him from the first. Donald Trump Jr., Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and House Speaker Mike Johnson were among the 109 speakers and programming items on the schedule.
The White House counts her 2020 Rose Garden restoration among her major preservation projects. That garden’s central lawn no longer exists: Trump had it removed in 2025 and replaced with a white limestone patio.
Online, her standing inside the family has been picked over again, fueled by images of her beside Marla Maples, the president’s second wife. The woman who preceded them both once summed up that pairing in a sentence.
What Ivana Trump Said in 2017
Ivana Trump, the president’s first wife and mother of Donald Trump Jr., Ivanka Trump and Eric Trump, was promoting her memoir “Raising Trump” in October 2017 when Jim Axelrod asked her to compare Maples and Melania Trump. “One is nobody. And the other one is first lady,” she said in the interview, which CBS’ “Sunday Morning” broadcast on Sunday, October 8, 2017.
Maples drew the sharper edge of it. “I don’t talk about her,” Ivana Trump said in the same interview. “She’s a showgirl. Never achieved anything in her life.” The harder line came in a Page Six interview promoting the book, in which Maples “broke my marriage and destroyed my family,” and “now she’s nobody.”
The blame, as she told it, belonged to Maples and not to her husband — a man she described as never short of options. “Donald would get 1,000 business cards in the pocket every night,” she said. “He could choose any girl he wanted to have.”
The grievance was already old by then. Born in Czechoslovakia in 1949, she was modeling in New York by 1976, when Trump entered her life; they married in 1977. Maples — 14 years her junior — walked up to her on a ski trip in Aspen in December 1989 and said, “I’m Marla and I love your husband. Do you?” Her memoir records the reply: “Get lost. I love my husband.”
The divorce played out as tabloid fodder. Trump married Maples in December 1993, separated in May 1997 and divorced in June 1999. He met Melania Knauss in September 1998 and married her on January 22, 2005.
On ABC’s “Good Morning America,” she said: “I’m basically first Trump wife. OK? I’m first lady.” Stephanie Grisham, then the first lady’s communications director, called that “attention-seeking and self-serving noise.” Ivana Trump died at her Manhattan home on July 14, 2022, at 73, after a fall.
Photographs of the first lady standing alongside Maples at the rehearsal dinner for Tiffany Trump’s Mar-a-Lago wedding in November 2022 also went back around, read as a sign the two had made an easier peace than Ivana Trump ever managed.
A Sparse Year in Public View
Her 2026 calendar has been thin: 38 public days, by a Daily Beast tally through early August. She resurfaced at a Rose Garden event for her foster care initiative on August 20, her first outing since the World Cup final on July 19.
“Good afternoon! I heard you missed me,” she said. “Here I am!” IndyCar and Fox Corporation backed the $2 million she unveiled, funding scholarships at Indiana University and Purdue University for students who grew up in foster care.
She did turn out two days later, traveling with the president to the Pentagon for the ceremony marking the 25th anniversary of the September 11 attacks, and holding his hand as they came down the steps to the stage. She stayed behind that weekend when he flew to Ireland. A diplomatic source told the i that Trump dislikes Israeli settlements and has been briefed on them by Melania Trump and Jared Kushner, and that she may have softened his response to new U.K. sanctions. Asked about the U.K. move, the president said: “Well, I’ve just seen it, and I’ll be speaking to Israel…I understand exactly what’s going on, but I want to find out why all of a sudden does that happen.”
None of this is new. A 53-day break from public life in 2025 ended at an artificial intelligence education meeting that September, and at the 2024 Republican National Convention she appeared only on the final night and did not speak.
Her Policy Portfolio
Her portfolio spans artificial intelligence and children, foster care, non-consensual intimate imagery and reuniting children separated in the Russia-Ukraine war. She championed the Take It Down Act, signed into law in May 2025.
On April 9 she delivered a rare prepared address from the Grand Foyer, taking no questions, to deny a friendship with Jeffrey Epstein: “I am not Epstein’s victim. Epstein did not introduce me to Donald Trump.” She is due in Ashe County, N.C., on Tuesday, September 15, to speak at an elementary school about classroom technology and community resiliency.
