Ivana Trump, President Donald Trump’s first wife, once summed up his second and third wives in a single line, and that line is making the rounds again — during a stretch in which First Lady Melania Trump has barely been seen. The first Republican midterm convention opened in Dallas on September 9, 2026, and she spent the day in the White House Rose Garden instead. Word that she would skip the gathering had come from a White House official on September 3, in a report later carrying a September 4 update stamp at 4:07 p.m. ET that changed none of its substance.
The president had pushed for the convention as a way to lift his party’s midterm outlook. His wife, 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. Her remarks covered two efforts in particular: the Tennis Pavilion, completed in 2020, and conservation work on the 1852 Zuber wallpaper in the President’s Dining Room.
At the American Airlines Center, the president took the stage both nights — the keynote on the first, closing remarks on the second. Vice President JD Vance delivered the keynote on night two, after weeks in which the Republican National Committee had said he would headline the opening. The lineup ran to 109 speakers and programming items, among them Donald Trump Jr., Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and House Speaker Mike Johnson.
She never brought up her own 2020 Rose Garden restoration, which the White House counts among her major preservation projects. That garden’s central lawn is gone: Trump had it paved over with Indiana limestone in 2025.
Her standing inside the family has been picked over online once more, driven by photographs that placed her beside Marla Maples, the president’s second wife, at the rehearsal dinner for Tiffany Trump’s Mar-a-Lago wedding in November 2022. Those images have been read as a sign the two settled into an easier peace than the woman who came before them both ever did.
The 2017 Interview Behind the Line
The line came out of a book tour. 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 interviewer Jim Axelrod asked her to compare the two women. “One is nobody. And the other one is First Lady,” she said in the interview, broadcast by CBS’ “Sunday Morning” on Sunday, October 8, 2017.
The sharper edge fell on Maples. “I don’t talk about her,” Ivana Trump said in the same interview. “She’s a showgirl. Never achieve anything in her life.” Asked about the affair, she twice said Maples had been flirting and had got away with it. Her harshest version ran in a Page Six interview promoting the book: “She broke my marriage and destroyed my family. And now she’s nobody.”
She faulted Maples rather than her husband, describing him as a man who was 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.”
By then the grievance had decades on it. Born in Czechoslovakia in 1949, she was modeling in New York by 1976, the year Trump entered her life; they married the following April. Maples, 14 years her junior, approached her during a ski trip in Aspen in December 1989 and said, “I’m Marla and I love your husband. Do you?” The reply, as her memoir records it: “Get lost. I love my husband.”
Trump and Maples married in December 1993, separated in May 1997 and divorced in June 1999. He met Melania Knauss in September 1998 and the two married on January 22, 2005.
She also told ABC’s “Good Morning America”: “I’m basically first Trump wife, OK? I’m first lady, OK?” The answer came from Stephanie Grisham, then the first lady’s communications director, who left her unnamed: “There is clearly no substance to this statement from an ex, this is unfortunately only attention-seeking and self-serving noise.” Ivana Trump was 73 when she died at her Manhattan home on July 14, 2022, of blunt impact injuries after a fall, a death the medical examiner ruled accidental.
A Thin Year in Public View
Her 2026 calendar has been sparse. One tally, published August 19, put her at 38 days seen in public. She resurfaced the next day at a Rose Garden event for her foster care initiative, her first outing since the World Cup final on July 19.
“Good afternoon. I heard you missed me. Here I am,” she said. IndyCar and Fox Corporation each put up a million dollars toward the $2 million she unveiled for scholarships at Indiana University and Purdue University, earmarked for students who grew up in foster care.
Two more appearances followed in September. At the Pentagon on the 11th she joined the president for the 25th anniversary of the September 11 attacks, holding his hand on the way down the steps to the stage, and she stayed behind when he flew to Ireland the next day.
Then came a classroom stop. On Tuesday, September 15, she toured Mountain View Elementary School in Jefferson, N.C., to see how technology is used in Ashe County, where the school became a distribution center after Hurricane Helene and where 108 people died. The visit came “as tech and political leaders debate about how best to regulate AI,” and she “said the U.S. must lead on artificial intelligence as she spoke with elementary school students, teachers and staff about how they’re using technology and AI in the classroom.” To the pupils she said: “Dream big and use these AI tools to build something never created before,” and, “Maybe one of you will create the next great robot.” Her Be Best initiative, working with Nvidia and StudyFetch, gave 1,500 students in the county AI subscriptions and 100 robotics kits. She has not appeared publicly in the three days since.
The pattern is not new. A 53-day break in 2025 ended at an artificial intelligence education meeting that September, and at the 2024 Republican National Convention she turned up only on the final night and did not speak.
The designer behind her inauguration coat has described what followed it. Adam Lippes, who designed the navy and white coat Melania Trump wore at President Trump’s second inauguration in 2025, told The Telegraph in an account published September 14 that he was targeted over it. “I got death threats for designing it,” he said, adding: “People called me a gay Nazi. I had to have a security officer for a while.” He also said “everyone seems to think now I’m some raging MAGA Republican.”
By his own count, Lippes has dressed Melania Trump four times and Jill Biden 22 times. “I just thought the First Lady ought to be wearing an American designer on the day her husband got sworn in,” he said of his decision. Her stylist, Hervé Pierre, separately told WWD that significantly more brands are now eager to dress her.
Inside Her Policy Portfolio
Artificial intelligence and children, foster care, non-consensual intimate imagery and reuniting children separated in the Russia-Ukraine war all sit in her portfolio. She championed the Take It Down Act, signed in May 2025. And on April 9, from the Grand Foyer, she read a rare prepared address that took no questions and denied a friendship with Jeffrey Epstein: “I am not Epstein’s victim. Epstein did not introduce me to Donald Trump.”