President Donald Trump touched down in Dublin on Saturday, September 12, 2026, trailed by two sons, a daughter-in-law and grandchildren, with a golf tournament waiting on the far side of the country. His wife was not on the plane, and he was happy to tell a room of business leaders why.
The remark came at the U.S. ambassador’s residence on the first day of a two-day visit. Working down the list of representatives in the room, the president reached First Lady Melania Trump.
“My wife is here in spirit. She’s watching right now,” Trump said.
She had asked him to pass along a hello to people she is friendly with, he said, gesturing toward U.S. Ambassador to Ireland Edward Walsh and his wife, Lynn. Then came the exchange that cracked up the room.
“I said, ‘Well, why don’t you come with me?’ She said, ‘Well, it’s a seven-hour trip. Maybe I’m not that friendly,’” Trump continued.
“I said, ‘Put on a Make America Great Again hat and come on. Let’s go.’ But, uh, she sends her regards.”
Family carried the rest of his riff. He turned to his son Donald Trump Jr., who did make the trip and who married Bettina Anderson in the Bahamas in May. “He’s calmed down so much, you know. It’s amazing,” Trump said. “No, it’s a good sign. He’s like a different human being. He had a lot of energy. Now he’s a little less energy. That’s a good thing.”
Who Went to Ireland Instead
The traveling party was not small. His sons Eric Trump and Donald Trump Jr. were aboard, along with a daughter-in-law and grandchildren. White House Chief of Protocol Monica Crowley flew over, and so did White House Appointments Secretary Natalie Harp, 35, who was part of the group that shook hands with Irish President Catherine Connolly.
Cameras at the September 12 arrival outside Áras an Uachtaráin caught Harp at the end of the receiving line as Trump introduced Connolly to Donald Trump Jr., Bettina Anderson and their children. A former One America News anchor who began working for Trump in 2022, Harp is nicknamed the “human printer.”
Connolly welcomed the president at an arrival ceremony, where he inspected an honor guard, then handed him a set of gifts that included a volume by the late Irish poet Michael Longley containing the sonnet “Ceasefire.” The president also met Irish Prime Minister Micheál Martin in Dublin before crossing to the Atlantic coast and his golf resort at Doonbeg, County Clare, for the Irish Open. The visit ran September 12-13.
The Truth Social Hat Comparison
Headwear and his wife had come up before. In early July, he put up a Truth Social post pairing an image of Melania Trump with one of former First Lady Hillary Clinton in similar hats. Her photograph came from Trump’s 2025 inauguration; Clinton’s was taken at the state funeral of Queen Elizabeth II in September 2022. No explanation accompanied the pairing. The post drew more than 12,000 likes and plenty of replies.
“Hillary was first lady 30 years ago, idiot. Let’s check in with Melania in 30 years and see if she can still pull off this outfit. Wonder who she’ll be married to then,” one user wrote on X.
He has reached for the comparison with other prominent women, too. Speaking to Elon Musk in a live interview on X on August 12, 2024, Trump said Kamala Harris’ TIME magazine cover portrait made her look “like the most beautiful actress ever to live,” then added: “Actually, she looked very much like our great first lady, Melania.”
Where the First Lady Has Been
By one August analysis, Melania Trump had made public appearances on 38 days in 2026 through late July, a lighter pace than recent predecessors: Michelle Obama gave 130 speeches in her first 18 months in the role, and Jill Biden gave 43 speeches in a comparable period. She also stayed away from the two-day Republican Midterm National Convention this month. Still, the first lady, 56, has hardly been idle since that count closed — and she has a deadpan of her own.
An appearance log updated September 15 notes a 32-day stretch from mid-July to mid-August in which she made no public appearances. On August 20 she resurfaced in the White House Rose Garden for a Fostering the Future event, opening with a line that got the crowd laughing. “I heard you missed me. Here I am,” she said. Fox Corporation and IndyCar each contributed $1 million for scholarships at Indiana University and Purdue University, taking the program to 26 colleges and universities.
On September 11, she and the president marked the 25th anniversary of the September 11 attacks at the Pentagon, a day before he flew to Ireland.
Three days after the Dublin routine, on Tuesday, September 15, she turned up at Mountain View Elementary School in Jefferson, North Carolina, a rural Ashe County school where the curriculum leans hard into artificial intelligence, robotics and engineering. “I think they need to learn we need to lead,” she said of the technology. “Of course they need to be vigilant as well. But this is our future.” She dropped in on students building chatbots to explore career ideas, looked in on the 3D printers and took a turn at the robotic arms. She gave several hugs to an 11-year-old student who asked for one. She also talked about the community’s rebound from Hurricane Helene, and told the students, “Dream big and use these AI tools to build something never created before.”
The giveaway she announced runs through her BE BEST Fostering the Future initiative alongside NVIDIA and StudyFetch: 1,500 Ashe County students are set to receive AI literacy training licenses, and 100 robotics learning kits powered by Jetson Nano will go to Mountain View Elementary and other schools in the district. A hand-painted banner hung on a wall of the gym: “Welcome to Ashe County 1st Lady Melania Trump!” She was there in person, in a room full of robots — with no seven-hour flight required.
Fox News did not stay with her the whole way. The network cut away from the September 15 remarks mid-speech, with anchor Harris Faulkner saying on air, “Alright, we’re pulling away from this,” before it pivoted to coverage of the holdout juror in the Lindsay Clancy trial.
