First Lady Melania Trump spent the opening night of the first-ever Republican midterm convention in the White House Rose Garden rather than in Dallas, Texas, on September 9, 2026. The White House confirmed on September 4 that she would not attend the two-night convention at all, including its closing night on September 10.
As President Donald Trump traveled to Dallas for the convention — an event he pushed for to boost his party’s midterm election outlook — the first lady was delivering remarks at the White House Historical Association’s annual presidential sites summit in the Rose Garden, her office said in a release. The president was scheduled to close both nights at the American Airlines Center, and Donald Trump Jr., the president’s son, was on the night-two lineup alongside Vice President JD Vance, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and House Speaker Mike Johnson.
The absence lands in a stretch when the first lady’s standing inside the Trump family has been picked over online again, driven partly by a resurfaced clip of her beside Marla Maples, the president’s second wife. The pairing once drew a blunt verdict from the woman who preceded them both.
What Ivana Trump Said in 2017
Ivana Trump, the president’s first wife and the mother of Donald Trump Jr., Ivanka Trump and Eric Trump, was promoting her memoir “Raising Trump” in October 2017 when she was asked to weigh Maples against Melania Trump. “One is nobody. And the other one is first lady,” she said in an interview that aired on CBS’ “Sunday Morning” on Sunday, October 8, 2017. She did not name Maples, and she declined to discuss her beyond calling her “a showgirl” who had never accomplished anything in life — the same label she had used in a Page Six interview promoting the book, where she also called Maples “a nobody.”
Pressed on why she faulted Maples rather than her husband, Ivana Trump said women threw themselves at Trump constantly — that he collected thousands of business cards from women every night and could have had any of them — and cast Maples as someone who flirted and got away with it.
The grievance was old by then. Born in Czechoslovakia in 1949, Ivana Trump emigrated to Canada in 1971 and moved to New York in 1976, working as a model and ski instructor. She married Trump in 1977 and became vice president of interior design at the Trump Organization. On a December 1989 ski trip in Aspen she met Maples, a young model 14 years her junior, who walked up to her and said, “I’m Marla and I love your husband. Do you?” Ivana Trump told her to get lost — a response she later called unladylike, explaining she had been in complete shock. Trump reportedly tried to ski away from the confrontation, and Ivana Trump was said to have chased him down the mountain.
Their divorce became tabloid fodder in the early 1990s. Trump and Maples married in 1993 and announced their split in 1997, when their daughter, Tiffany Trump, was three, divorcing in 1999. He met the model Melania Knauss in 1998, and the two married on January 22, 2005, when she was 34 and he was 58. They have been married 21 years.
Ivana Trump’s 2017 publicity run also took her to Fox News’ “Fox and Friends,” where she said she had texted Melania Trump that she would never say anything bad about her because she was family, and to ABC’s “Good Morning America,” where she called herself the first Trump wife and the first lady. Stephanie Grisham, then the first lady’s spokeswoman, dismissed that claim as insubstantial and said Melania Trump planned to use her title and role to help children, not to sell books. Ivana Trump died in 2022 at the age of 73; the president praised her at her funeral.
The comparison found a new audience in late August 2026, when a clip of the first lady standing alongside Maples at the rehearsal dinner for Tiffany Trump’s Mar-a-Lago wedding in November 2022 circulated again on social media. Maples, who shares Tiffany Trump with the president, posed with him and Melania Trump at that celebration, and commenters read the reunion as a sign the two women had settled into an easier peace than Ivana Trump ever made with her successor.
A Sparse Year in Public View
Melania Trump’s public schedule has been thin this year. She went more than a month without an appearance over the summer, resurfacing on Thursday, August 20, at a Rose Garden event promoting her foster care initiative. An analysis reported at the time found she had appeared in public on only 38 days in 2026, and she had last been seen at the 2026 World Cup final.
“I heard you missed me,” she said to the crowd, adding, “Here I am.” At the event, she unveiled a $2 million collaboration with IndyCar and Fox Corporation intended to widen the pool of scholarships available to young adults aging out of foster care. Around the same time, presidential aide Natalie Harp, who regularly travels with the president, was drawing public and political attention over her role in the White House inner circle and a delayed security clearance process.
The pattern is not new. Over the summer of 2025, she took a nearly two-month hiatus from public life before appearing at an artificial intelligence event that September. She was scarcely on the campaign trail in 2024, and at that year’s Republican National Convention, held days after Trump was shot at a rally in Pennsylvania, she appeared only on the final night and did not speak.
Policy Work, a Robot and a Docuseries
Her portfolio covers access to artificial intelligence for children, repairing the foster care system, pushing back against non-consensual intimate imagery, and work to reunite children separated from their families in the Russia-Ukraine war. She championed the Take It Down Act, signed into law on May 19, 2025, and promoted her documentary “Melania” heavily when it was released in January 2026. On March 3 she made history as the first presidential spouse ever to preside over a United Nations Security Council session, and at an international summit for her Fostering the Future initiative, she debuted a humanoid robot she says could help teach students. On April 9 she called a press conference to deny that she had a friendship with Jeffrey Epstein and to urge Congress to hold a public hearing for survivors. Her senior adviser announced that a docuseries extension of the “Melania” film would come to Amazon Prime in the fall of 2026.
The president has five children and 11 grandchildren. Barron Trump, 20, the only child of Donald and Melania Trump, has joined the family on just a few outings since his father returned to office.