(Daily Mail) While Ivana Trump and former First Lady Melania Trump never explicitly said they disliked each other, their actions over the years have provided some insight about their true feelings of one another.
Ivana, the first wife of Donald Trump and mother of his three eldest children, feuded with the former president’s current wife while he held presidential office.
The Czech-born model and businesswoman once claimed that she was ‘the first lady’ because she was ‘the first Trump wife.’
She also said she shared a close relationship with her ex-husband, which apparently included a direct number to the White House she didn’t use because she didn’t want to cause any issues between Donald and Melania, 52.
Ivana, 73, has said very little about Melania’s role in their lives, though she once admitted her daughter, Ivanka, likes her father’s third wife ‘fine’.
The mother-of-three passed away Thursday in her home in New York City‘s Upper East Side after suffering cardiac arrest. Melania has yet to publicly pay tribute to her, despite other Trump family members having already done so.
Rumors started flying about Ivana’s apparent distaste for Melania in 2017, when she publicly declared herself the actual first lady.
‘Melania is there and I don’t want to cause any kind of jealousy or anything like that because I’m the first Trump wife. I’m the first lady, OK?’ Ivana said during a ‘Good Morning America’ interview in October 2017.
Ivana was invited on the morning show to promote her memoir, ‘Raising Trump.’
Her comment infuriated Melania, who quickly issued a statement through her spokesman, which called Ivana an ‘attention seeker.’
‘Mrs. Trump has made the White House a home for Barron and the president. She loves living in Washington, DC and is honored by her role as First Lady of the United States. She plans to use her title and role to help children, not sell books.
‘There is clearly no substance to this statement from an ex. Unfortunately only attention seeking and self-serving noise,’ the statement read.
During Ivana’s interview, she also revealed how she shared a close relationship with her ex and would speak with him about once every two weeks.
In an interview with CBS’ ‘This Weekend,’ conducted around the same time, Ivana revealed her ex-husband had offered her the ambassadorship to the Czech Republic, but she said she turned it down so she could keep up her jet-set lifestyle and summers in Saint-Tropez, France.
She claimed Ivanka, now 40, liked her father’s third wife ‘fine.’ adding she didn’t like his second wife, Marla Maples.
Ivana refused to even name Maples – whom she says contributed to the downfall of her marriage to Donald – as she discussed her daughter’s relationship with her stepmother.
‘She likes her [Melania] fine, because she didn’t cause me to break up the marriage like the other one – I don’t even want to pronounce her name,’ Ivana said of Maples in an interview with The Atlantic.
Trump’s first wife said around the time of their divorce that Ivanka would come home from school crying every day and ask if she was still going to be Ivanka Trump even after her parents were no longer together.
Another source described as close with Ivanka in the article – whose author had a short, off-the-record meeting with the then-first daughter – said the two women have a ‘desire to be mutually respectful,’ but added that their relationship is nowhere near ‘affectionate.’
Stephanie Grisham, Melania’s spokeswoman, told the magazine at the time that Ivanka and Melania have ‘always shared a close relationship and still do today.’
