Ivana talks about 'Raising Trump' and Ivanka's chance at the US presidency

Ivana Trump, first wife of President Donald Trump, to publish book on 'insane' divorce


News Desk October 09, 2017
Ivana and Donald Trump relax in the living room of their Manhattan apartment on March 12, 1979.

Ivana Trump, the first wife of US President Donald Trump has said that her daughter Ivanka can run for presidency, and that she and Trump speak regularly and have a good relationship, The Guardian reported.

After their notorious divorce and its ‘insane’ circumstances, she is going to be publishing Raising Trump, a book on her marriage and her life. She was married to Trump from 1977 to 1992, and is the mother of Donald Jr, Ivanka and Eric. She knew her marriage was over, she writes, soon after a day in December 1989 when a “young blonde woman approached me out of the blue and said ‘I’m Marla and I love your husband. Do you?’ I said ‘Get lost. I love my husband.’ It was unladylike but I was in shock.”

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In 1990, Trump had an affair with Marla Maples, which led to an infamous New York Post headline: “Best Sex I’ve Ever Had”. Trump then went on to marry Maples three years later, and they have a daughter Tiffany. He is currently married to Melania Trump, the mother of his son Baron.

The Associated Press purchased an early copy of Ivana Trump’s book, in which she writes glowingly about her marriage and her prominent role at the Trump Organisation. She also writes about the pain Trump’s affair with Maples caused her and her children. Donald Jr did not speak to his father for a year after the split. “I can only shake my head at how insane it was,” Ivana writes. “I couldn’t turn on the television without hearing my name.”

The divorce came under scrutiny during the 2016 election, when it was reported that Ivana once signed a sworn deposition alleging Trump had raped her. She sought to clarify that the accusation, which Trump has consistently denied, was not intended in a “literal or criminal sense”. Trump’s lawyer amplified the issue, however, by suggesting to a reporter that there was no such thing as marital rape. In her book, she says that she and Trump are on “warmer terms”, and they speak about once a week.

In a CBS News interview this week, Ivana said she was offered the post of ambassador to the Czech Republic but turned it down because she already had “a perfect life”. Much of the book is chronicled around Ivana’s childhood in Europe, her modeling career in New York and Trump’s proposal. At their first meeting, she writes, Trump secured her friends and her a table at a hot Manhattan restaurant, paid the check and chauffeured her back to her hotel in a giant Cadillac.

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“My instincts told me that Donald was smart and funny, an all-America good guy,” she writes. Her children also contribute passages to the book and Ivana muses that her former husband may not be the only Trump to call the White House home. “Maybe in 15 years, she could run for president?” she writes about Ivanka. “First Lady?, Holds no appeal for me personally. First Mother?: That could work.”

Ivanka is among the most high-profile figures in the Trump administration, a senior adviser to her father. But she has struggled to assert herself, appearing to hold little if any influence on his actions.

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