One member of the family skipped President Donald Trump’s trip to Ireland, and the president was happy to say why. He touched down in Dublin on Saturday, September 12, 2026, with two sons, a daughter-in-law and grandchildren in tow, and a golf tournament waiting on the far side of the country.
The explanation came at the U.S. ambassador’s residence on day one of the two-day visit. Trump was working his way through the list of representatives in the room of business leaders when he got to First Lady Melania Trump.
“My wife is here in spirit. She’s watching right now,” Trump said.
His wife had asked him to pass along a hello to people she is friendly with, he said, nodding toward U.S. Ambassador to Ireland Edward Walsh and his wife, Lynn. Then came the exchange that cracked up the room.
“I said, ‘Well, why don’t you come with me?’ She said, ‘Well, it’s a seven-hour trip. Maybe I’m not that friendly,’” Trump continued.
“I said, ‘Put on a Make America Great Again hat and come on. Let’s go.’ But, uh, she sends her regards.”
Family stayed his subject. His son Donald Trump Jr. did make the trip, and in May he married Bettina Anderson in the Bahamas. “He’s calmed down so much, you know. It’s amazing,” Trump said. “No, it’s a good sign. He’s like a different human being. He had a lot of energy. Now he’s a little less energy. That’s a good thing.”
Who Went to Ireland Instead
The plane was hardly empty. Sons Eric Trump and Donald Trump Jr. flew over, along with a daughter-in-law and grandchildren. White House Chief of Protocol Monica Crowley was aboard. Natalie Harp, 35, the White House Appointments Secretary, also made the trip, and she joined the group that shook hands with Irish President Catherine Connolly. At the September 12 arrival at Áras an Uachtaráin, cameras showed Harp standing at the end of the receiving line as Trump introduced Connolly to Donald Trump Jr., Bettina Anderson and their children.
Connolly welcomed the president at an arrival ceremony, where he inspected an honor guard. A set of gifts followed, among them a volume by the late Irish poet Michael Longley containing the sonnet “Ceasefire.” In Dublin, Trump also met Irish Prime Minister Micheál Martin, and he then flew across the country to his golf resort on the Atlantic coast at Doonbeg, County Clare, for the Irish Open. September 12-13 were the dates of the visit.
The Truth Social Hat Comparison
Headwear and his wife had come up before. In early July, the president put a side-by-side image on Truth Social showing Melania Trump and former First Lady Hillary Clinton in similar hats. Trump’s 2025 inauguration supplied the Melania photograph; Clinton’s image came from the state funeral of Queen Elizabeth II in September 2022. He gave no explanation for the pairing. Replies came in by the plenty, and the post drew more than 12,000 likes.
“Hillary was first lady 30 years ago, idiot. Let’s check in with Melania in 30 years and see if she can still pull off this outfit. Wonder who she’ll be married to then,” wrote one user on X.
Other prominent women have drawn the same comparison from him. Elon Musk hosted him for a live interview on X on August 12, 2024, and during it Trump said the TIME magazine cover portrait of Kamala Harris made her look “like the most beautiful actress ever to live,” then added: “Actually, she looked very much like our great first lady, Melania.”
Where the First Lady Has Been
Melania Trump logged 38 days of public appearances in 2026 through late July, according to an analysis published in August — a lighter pace than recent predecessors. Michelle Obama gave 130 speeches in her first 18 months in the role, and Jill Biden gave 43 speeches in a comparable period. Ireland was not the only trip she passed on, either. She also sat out the two-day Republican Midterm National Convention held earlier in September, and by one tally her number of public appearances “falls short of 50.”
An account updated September 15 flagged a 32-day stretch from mid-July to mid-August during which she made no public appearances at all. Still, the first lady, 56, has hardly been idle since the August count closed — and a deadpan of her own is part of the act.
A White House Rose Garden event for her Fostering the Future initiative drew her back out on August 20, after a stretch out of public view, and she opened with a line that got the crowd laughing. “I heard you missed me. Here I am,” she said. Scholarships at Indiana University and Purdue University drew $1 million each from Fox Corporation and IndyCar, which brought the program to 26 colleges and universities.
The 25th anniversary of the September 11 attacks also put her beside the president at the Pentagon on September 11 — the day before he left for Ireland.
Three days after the Dublin routine, on Tuesday, September 15, Mountain View Elementary School in Jefferson, North Carolina, hosted her visit. The rural Ashe County school leans hard into artificial intelligence, robotics and engineering. “I think they need to learn we need to lead,” she said of the technology. “Of course they need to be vigilant as well. But this is our future.” She sat in with a group building chatbots to explore career ideas, watched the 3D printers run and took a turn steering the robotic arms. One 11-year-old student asked for a hug and got several.
Fox News did not stick with her. As she talked on September 15 about the county’s rebound from Hurricane Helene and her AI initiatives, anchor Harris Faulkner told viewers, “Alright, we’re pulling away from this,” and the network switched to coverage of the holdout juror in the Lindsay Clancy trial. Complaints piled up on X.
“And, I have a special surprise to help jumpstart that curiosity,” she told the students before leaving. Her BE BEST Fostering the Future initiative made the announcement “alongside NVIDIA and StudyFetch”: AI literacy training licenses for 1,500 Ashe County students, plus 100 robotics learning kits powered by Jetson Nano for district schools. “Dream big and use these AI tools to build something never created before,” she said. A hand-painted banner hung on a wall of the gym: “Welcome to Ashe County 1st Lady Melania Trump!” This time she came in person, into a room full of robots, and no seven-hour flight was involved.