Ivana Trump, President Donald Trump’s first wife, once summed up his second and third wives in a single line, and that line is circulating again during a stretch in which Melania Trump has barely been seen. The first Republican midterm convention opened in Dallas on September 9, 2026, and the first lady spent the day in the White House Rose Garden instead. A White House official had said on September 3 that she would skip the gathering.
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, where she called the building “an architectural autobiography of America.” Her remarks covered two projects: 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.
Melania Trump 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: the president had it paved over 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.
The 2017 Interview Behind the Line
The line came out of a book tour nine years ago. Ivana Trump — the president’s first wife and mother of Donald Trump Jr., Ivanka Trump and Eric Trump — was promoting her memoir “Raising Trump” 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.” 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. “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, when 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. 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
Melania Trump’s 2026 calendar has been sparse. One widely cited tally put her at 38 public sightings for the year when she resurfaced on August 20 at a Rose Garden event for her foster care initiative — her first outing since the World Cup final on July 19.
“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 foster-care scholarships at Indiana University and Purdue University.
Two more appearances followed in September. At the Pentagon she joined the president for the 25th anniversary of the September 11 attacks, holding his hand on the way to the stage, and she stayed behind when he flew to Ireland the next day.
On Tuesday, September 15, two years after Hurricane Helene, she toured Mountain View Elementary School in Jefferson, N.C., which kept students out for more than 30 days after the storm and served as an emergency childcare and supply distribution site. The storm killed 108 people across North Carolina. “I think they need to learn we need to lead,” she said of students and artificial intelligence. “Of course they need to be vigilant as well. But this is our future.” Her Be Best initiative, working with Nvidia and StudyFetch, gave 1,500 students in Ashe County AI subscriptions and put 100 Jetson Nano robotics kits into district schools.
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.
Adam Lippes, who designed the navy and white coat she wore at the president’s second inauguration, 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.” By his own count he has dressed Melania Trump four times and Jill Biden 22 times.
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.”