97for about a year. During the height of the
scandal, shortly after Trump was called
an “unfit mother” in the tabloids, the
President sent a bodyguard to bring his
eldest son to his 28th-floor office and then
told her he was going to raise the boy. “I
said, ‘I have two more to raise. Keep him!’
Fifteen minutes later, Donald Jr. was on
his way home,” Trump says, laughing. She
thinks people should ignore some of what
the President says. “Very often he doesn’t
mean it. He has said silly things.”
There was also unpleasantness over
money and the allegations of assault.
“That was all just the lawyers’ talk,” says
Trump of the accusations—including
rape—in her divorce documents, which
she and her ex successfully fought
together to keep private last year.TRUMP IS CAREFULto distinguish
her administration from the ones that
followed. Hers was a marriage of equals.
When she met her future husband at
the ’70s hot spot Maxwell’s Plum, she
says, he was making $70,000 a year.
She worked on the Trump Tower and
the casino, then took on the Plaza, she
notes, all to great acclaim. So why did the
wheels come off the marriage? “I think
Donald probably felt a little bit jealous
of my success. And I felt it,” she says.
“There was nothing really he could do.
He saw how much profit I made, so he
would never fire me from Atlantic City.
He would never fire me from Plaza Hotel,
because I did such a great job. And maybehe resented it a little bit.” The problem
with being married to someone who
loves to compete is that only one person
can win. “I was too successful to be Mrs.
Trump,” she writes in the book. “In our
marriage, there couldn’t be two stars. So
one of us had to go.” (The President has
said in the past that making his wife part
of his business strained their union.)
Trump has little time for women who
stay with cheating husbands, though the
President was not her last. She writes that
she approached Clinton to ask, “How do
you deal with it?” but she didn’t answer.
“I think she should have left,” says Trump
of the former Secretary of State. “At least
she would have left with her dignity.”
But the Trump union was like the
Clintons’ in at least one way: the partners
saw eye to eye on politics. Were she First
Lady, says Trump, her core issue would
be health, especially prescription-drug
prices: “Obamabill, it’s a disaster. And
it has to be changed.” She also feels
strongly about limiting immigration.
Trump was able to leave the Soviet bloc
through means of a faux marriage to an
Austrian friend, which gave her Austrian
citizenship. She was then able to move to
Canada, where, she writes “everything
was new to her.”
That escape notwithstanding, Trump
has become hardened on immigration
by her time spent in Europe. (She has
a house in St.-Tropez and kept a yacht,
M .Y.Ivana, in the Mediterranean for
several years.) “There are millions ofimmigrants, which are coming from
Syria,” she says. “They don’t have
education. They don’t know our culture.
They don’t know how to dress to fit in.
So it’s a disaster.” It follows that she’s
in favor of the President’s wall. “What
I don’t like is that the Mexican woman
who is nine months pregnant crosses
over the wall, which is two feet tall,
goes to the hospital and gives birth to
the child, and it becomes automatically
American. Who is paying for her?”
But politics, Trump emphasizes, is not
really her interest. That’s not to say she
couldn’t take to it. “Could I straighten
out the White House in 14 days?” she
asks. “Of course. Can I go and give the
speech without a teleprompter for 45
minutes? Of course. Can I entertain?
Of course. But it is just not something I
would like to do.” Recently, she lets slip,
Milos Zeman, the President of the Czech
Republic, said he’d like her to be the U.S.
ambassador there, and her ex said it was
fine with him, but she declined. She likes
her current life too much.
Trump has no regrets. Even know-
ing what she now
knows, she would do
it all again. She may
not have been the
right partner for the
President, but she is
his ideal ex-spouse,
living in loud luxury,
playing by her own
PHOTOGRAPHS COURTESY OF IVANA TRUMP (7) rules. □
The two older siblings in Donald
Jr.’s room in Trump TowerThe young Trumps frolic off the
The weekend Donald and Marla met coast of France in the mid-’90s
in New York City in 1976Cooking for the
extended Trump-
family Thanksgiving