Former President Trump is remembering his ex-wife Ivana Trump as he prepares to attend her funeral.
The model and businesswoman, and the mother of Trump’s three eldest children, died last week at 73 from blunt impact injuries in an accident in her New York City home, according to a medical examiner. She was reportedly found near a spiral staircase.
Cindy Adams, the New York Post’s famed gossip columnist and a longtime friend of both the ex-commander in chief and Ivana Trump, reported Tuesday that she received a call from the 45th president.
“I’m just thinking how well you knew Ivana. You knew her very well. You knew her from the first. From the very beginning. From when I first met her,” Trump said, according to Adams.
“She was beautiful. She was special,” Trump said of his former spouse, who he was married to from 1977 until the early 1990s, when the couple split and engaged in a highly contentious public divorce that played out in the New York tabloids.
“She was outstanding. Beautiful inside and out,” Trump said. “We began all of it, our lives together, with such a great relationship.“
Trump is planning to attend Ivana Trump’s funeral on Wednesday at St. Vincent Ferrer Church in Manhattan, Adams said.
Remembering his ex-wife, who was born in what is now the Czech Republic, as “different,” Trump praised her, saying she “never gave up.”
“Beautiful, yes, but she was also a hard worker,” he said.
“No matter how rough things were or how badly they looked she never fell down. She went from communism to our lives together. She took nothing for granted.”
Despite their scandal-plagued divorce, the pair described their relationship in friendly terms in recent years. Ivana Trump expressed support for her ex-husband’s political ambitions, saying in 2016, “I think he would be a great president.”
Telling Adams that the two of them should “just manage to get through this awful, painful experience,” 76-year-old Trump’s words then appeared to turn to politics, hinting at a possible 2024 White House run.
“And after this … just remember … just remember what I’m telling you … 78 is not old,” Trump said.