by Ivana Trump
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To my three amazing kids, Don, Ivanka, and Eric, for making my life so full and fun.
To my parents, Babi and Dedo, and my grandparents, for giving me all the love in the world.
To Trudy, Bridget, and Dorothy, for helping me every step of the way.
To David Moya, for taking care of me, my mother, and my children in my house in Palm Beach.
And to Donald, the kids’ father and my dear friend.
CONTENTS
Introduction
PART ONE: CZECH FAMILY VALUES
1: You Are Being Watched
2: Hot Pants, Lipstick, and Tanks
3: Welcome to America
PART TWO: BECOMING A TRUMP
4: How I Met Their Father
5: Meet the Trumps
6: First Comes Marriage
PART THREE: BRINGING UP TRUMP
7: Snapshot
8: Minor Crime and Punishment
9: The Competitive Edge
10: Real Enrichment
11: I Hate Playdates
12: Happy Birthday!
13: Happy Holidays!
14: Helicopter Parenting, Trump-Style
15: Everything but the Cat
PART FOUR: SURVIVING THE WORST OF THE WORST
16: Holding Us Together
17: Deaths in the Family
18: 20/20 Hindsight
PART FIVE: PRIDE OF THE LION MOM
19: The Value of a Dollar
20: How to Talk to Anyone
21: Kids Who Work
22: Moms Who Date
23: Ban on Brats, Couch Potatoes, and Druggies
24: Travel Makes You Rich
PART SIX: ADVANCED PARENTING
25: I Don’t Meddle (Much)
26: Pride of the Lion Glam-Ma
27: My Work Here Is (Almost) Done
Photographs
Acknowledgments
About the Author
INTRODUCTION
Nothing is worse than bratty, spoiled rich kids, right? You just want to rip the silver spoon right out of their mouths. Off the top of your head, you can probably think of a few adult children of the superrich who’ve thrown tantrums on airplanes, been arrested for drunk driving, made a sex tape, and wasted every advantage they’ve been given.
My three children—Donald Jr., Ivanka, and Eric—are the opposite. While campaigning for their father last year, they were praised for their intelligence, poise, dedication, and confidence. Many Americans formed their first impressions of my kids at the Republican National Convention in July 2016, where they gave speeches to support their father’s campaign. It is a humbling experience for a mother—even one who’s lived under an intense media spotlight for forty years—to watch her children excel on the world stage. Some people—including Hillary Clinton—consider the three of them to be Donald Trump’s finest accomplishments. At the town-hall-style presidential debate in October last year, a man in the audience asked the candidates to mention one thing they respected about each other. Hillary said, “I respect his children. His children are incredibly able and devoted, and I think that says a lot about Donald.”
I believe the credit for raising such great kids belongs to me. I was in charge of raising our children before our divorce, and I had sole custody of them after the split. I made the decisions about their education, activities, travel, child care, and allowances. When each one finished college, I said to my ex-husband, “Here is the finished product. Now it’s your turn.”
Donald might not have been the greatest husband to me, but he was a good father to the kids. Obviously, they adore him and are fiercely loyal to him. If he were a horrible dad, that would not be the case. If Donald wants to write a book about fatherhood, I would be happy to read it, but Raising Trump is my story, from my perspective, about what I did, and still do, for my family.
It wasn’t easy to raise three kids as a full-time working mother, even with nannies. During my fourteen-year marriage to Donald, I designed the interiors of the Grand Hyatt Hotel and Trump Tower, was president and CEO of Trump Castle (the only woman in the top position at any casino in the world that I know of), and president and CEO of the Plaza Hotel, winning the prestigious Hotelier of the Year award in 1990. I wrote three international bestsellers and made tens of millions selling House of Ivana clothes, fragrances, and jewelry on HSN Tampa, QVC London, and TSC Canada. No matter how busy I was, I had breakfast with my children every day. I sat with them at dinner every night and helped them with their homework (I loved algebra) before going out in a Versace gown to a rubber-chicken charity event. The kids and I celebrated, traveled, and grieved together. Our bond was, and is, our most valuable possession.
By all rights, as children of divorce, surrounded by wealth and forced into fame, Don Jr., Ivanka, and Eric could have become the most damaged, druggie, poor little rich kids on the planet. Instead, the boys are devoted husbands and fathers, and are jointly running a multibillion-dollar company. Ivanka is a marvelous mother and wife; founded her own apparel, jewelry, and shoes business; authored two books (her most recent one, Women Who Work, I believe, was inspired by me); is now the assistant to her father, the president of the United States; and is actively working to improve the lives of women and children. I think Ivanka played a big part in Donald’s victory. Voters looked at her and thought, I like her. I trust her. She loves her father, so he can’t be that bad. Who knows? One day, she might be the first female—and Jewish—POTUS.
I’m often asked about the secret to mothering success, and my answer is always the same: there’s no magic recipe. I told the kids, “Don’t lie, cheat, or steal. Don’t smoke, do drugs, or drink.” I was strict and demanding but always loving and affectionate. I encouraged sports and competitiveness, and enriched their lives by exposing them to different cultures and the arts. I always held them accountable for their actions and didn’t let them get away with anything. I showed them dignity, diligence, and determination by example, and gave them age-appropriate responsibilities and rules, which they followed without question—or there’d be hell to pay.
I raised them right and they turned out fabulous. It seems simple. And yet people are shocked that they’re not train wrecks or in need of intensive therapy. Assumptions made by the public are often misguided. If Saturday Night Live were accurate, Don would be stiff, serious, and humorless. But he’s actually very sensitive, wryly funny, and utterly smitten with his five children and his wife, Vanessa. They got Eric completely wrong, mistaking his niceness for naïveté. He is nice, yes, but he’s also wise, loyal, generous, open, smart, polite, a master conversationalist, and full of energy and enthusiasm. And Ivanka. Well. People think she’s all hard polish and elegance, a control freak and a little princess, but really, she’s down-to-earth, empathetic, insightful, and vulnerable at times, and she cares deeply about the people she loves and the causes she supports.
I decided to share some stories about every stage of their lives, from infancy through the present, to set the record straight about who they really are. I’m also going to share some stories about my own childhood and early life so you understand exactly who I am. The mother makes the child. I learned everything I needed to know about how to be a good parent long before I became the original Mrs. Donald Trump. If you admire my children and
would like to raise accomplished, ambitious winners of your own, you’ll pick up some ideas from me on these pages—or from the kids themselves. Don, Ivanka, and Eric have contributed their own stories and insights, too, in boxes like this one:
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IVANKA
I’m immensely proud of our mother and excited that she’s written this book. She is an amazing mom, teacher, and inspiration to all of us.
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Not every daughter in the world would be so excited and proud to have her mother divulge stories about her adolescence and ex-boyfriends. But Ivanka needn’t worry. She was very good. If she did anything wrong, she knows I would have killed her.
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ERIC
Mom was tough. She does not put up with nonsense, and I love that about her. I think her toughness is her greatest trait. She’s also elegant, charming, and funny. Her personality spans a wide spectrum. There are a lot of people who may be charming but may not be as demanding. Our mom has a fun little devious laugh. She can tell a story and be so funny while conveying a toughness that commands respect.
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What can I say? The kid gets me.
PART ONE
CZECH FAMILY VALUES
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YOU ARE BEING WATCHED
About thirty years ago, my friend Dennis Basso, a fur designer with a then-new boutique on Madison Avenue, asked me to be the muse of his first fashion show. For the finale, I walked down the runway in a full-length sable coat. In the mid-1980s, the antifur movement was out in force, and women who wore their minks in public were sometimes splattered with red paint by PETA protesters. Some of my friends asked me if I was sure I wanted to wear fur in a fashion show. “Aren’t you afraid of what the press may say?” they asked.
“No, I’m not afraid of the press,” I said. “I was raised in communist Czechoslovakia. The secret police watched us constantly. We were told what to eat, where to work, how to think. I came to America to experience freedom and opportunity. I’m going to wear what I want to wear and nobody is going to tell me otherwise.”
I wore the hell out of that sable coat and had a great time doing it. Not one bad thing was written in the press about my doing the show, and even if there had been, I wouldn’t have cared one tiny bit. Where I grew up, there was no free press to write articles about socialites and fashion shows. Until I was in my teens and traveled to the West as a competitive skier, I didn’t know that “fashion” existed! And forget about protesting for animal—or human—rights. If you spoke out about anything, you’d be arrested, thrown in jail, and maybe never seen or heard from again.
So, no, I’m not afraid of anyone: not reporters, protesters, or ex-husbands. Without a doubt, my fearlessness comes from having grown up behind the Iron Curtain.
Comrade Joseph Stalin of the USSR staged a hostile takeover of the democratic Czechoslovakian government in February 1948. Anyone who fought against him was thrown in prison for life. Before I was born my home country was free and happy, and in the span of only a few months, it was dismantled by a dictator.
Exactly one year after Stalin’s coup, I was born to Milos Zelnicek and Marie Zelnickova, an engineer and a telephone operator, respectively, in Zlín (the communists called it Gottwaldov), a factory town in the southeast. About 190 miles from Prague, Zlín was a town in which any influence or knowledge of the West was completely blocked out by those in charge. I arrived two months early, at only three pounds, and my parents hadn’t decided on a name yet. My mother turned to the friendly woman next to her in the hospital and said, “What did you name your daughter?” She replied, “Ivana,” so that’s what they called me. My parents despised the Russians, but they gave me a Russian name. Maybe they thought it would help me with the Soviets.
Before Stalin took power, my father’s family was well-off. My grandmother Katrine was the president of the Bata shoe factory, the biggest employer in the region. She would go to the factory at five a.m. and be the boss all day long, while my grandfather Emmanuel stayed home to do the washing and the shopping, a gender role reversal that was unheard-of in the forties. My business acumen comes from my grandmother. My passion comes from my father, who refused to join the Communist Party despite intense pressure from the government. He kept his integrity but gave up privileges—access to better jobs, housing, and schools—that were given to loyal party members (often spies for the government). We were always watched. The police didn’t arrest my father for refusing the Communist Party because he was a talented electrical engineer, and they needed his skills. I remember blueprints rolled out on the kitchen table and Dad teaching me how to read them when I was a toddler—a skill that came in handy when I worked at Trump properties and when I gut-renovated my seven-story town house on East Sixty-Fourth Street in Manhattan.
Under communism, everyone lives at the same level in one huge sprawling middle class. There aren’t rich people or poor people. A doctor has the same quality of life as a farmer. (My paternal grandparents’ privilege disappeared under communism, but Katrine continued to excel at the shoe factory anyway.) You weren’t allowed to go into business for yourself, open up a store, or launch a new company out of your garage. Even if you worked incredibly hard and got a big promotion, you’d have the same salary, so no one bothered. Following your bliss? Doing what you love? If that happened, it was purely accidental. No one had jobs in careers like decorating or design—or real estate. The government controlled all development and housing.
Our house was in a government compound, a two-story utilitarian box with a family upstairs and a family downstairs. These identical concrete cubes were laid out on a grid with nothing to differentiate one from the other. Each house had a tiny yard. Until I was ten, I shared a room with my parents, sleeping in a crib and then in a little bed my father built. When I was older, he built a room for me in the crawl space between the staircase and the ceiling. Nowadays, you might very generously call it a “loft.” It was tiny, not roomy enough for anything but sleep, but I made it my own by putting my drawings on the walls. I didn’t do much reading up there because books were hard to come by, and I didn’t have time for fairy tales.
The other girls in school, the ones whose fathers were loyal party members, wore store-bought clothes. All of my dresses and tights were hand-sewn by my mother. Party members received more tickets for meat, flour, and sugar than we did and never had to resort to trading on the black market if the necessities ran out before the end of the month. We were never hungry or deprived, though, because my parents were industrious. Dad, whom I called Dedo, brought home carp and catfish he caught in the lake nearby. Mom, whom I called Babi, was a genius at foraging and storing food. My grandmother taught her to bury apples and carrots in pots full of sand to dig up all winter long. She hunted for chanterelle and porcini mushrooms in the woods, picked raspberries and blueberries to preserve in jars, and canned pears and peaches. Fresh produce in winter was nearly impossible to find. Before Christmas, you would stand in line for eight blocks to buy an orange. My father once waited for hours to get me a banana, but when he brought it home and I tried it, I didn’t even like it. For my birthdays, my mother baked a cake with vanilla icing and fruit, a rare wintertime treat.
It’s hard for Americans who grew up in the fifties and sixties to imagine life without TV, rock ’n’ roll, and drive-in movies, but we didn’t have anything like that for entertainment. Elvis? Marilyn? The Beatles? We had no clue they existed. It was called the Iron Curtain for a reason. No one got out, and nothing from the West filtered in. For fun, I played with dolls that Mom made, needlepointed tablecloths and napkins, and hung out with my best friend, a huge German shepherd named Brok with a bark like a rifle shot. I would pull his tail, put my hands over his eyes, and ride him like a horse in the yard, and he didn’t care. He adored and protected me. If anyone came near me, he’d snarl and scare the hell out of them.
We had some music and books, but only what was approved by the Czech and Russian communists. Even my sc
hoolbooks were censored. I knew America existed because the large landmass was right there on the world map, but I didn’t know anything about life there. All Western ideas, especially American culture, were completely banned. We lived in a pure state of just knowing family, approved arts and literature, and sports. I didn’t know what I was missing, or that there was even anything to miss.
The communists banned religion, too. My parents were raised Catholic, but if the police saw you go anywhere near a church, they would punish you by making your life harder in not-subtle ways, like stopping you on the street, coming to your house for an inspection, or withholding food tickets.
Despite our modest, careful existence, we were rich and generous with love. My parents, both drop-dead gorgeous, were madly in love with each other. They kissed all the time, but I was never embarrassed by it. I was a real daddy’s girl, always hugging Dedo, crawling onto his lap, and holding his hand. Ivanka and Donald’s relationship growing up reminded me of mine with my father. I thought it was totally unfair for the media to dig up old photos of them and distort their affection into something offensive. People ask me what I think of Donald’s comments about how beautiful Ivanka is, and I just wave them off. His spontaneous comments have, at times, gotten him into hot water, but there was nothing inappropriate about how close they were and are. When she was younger, Ivanka sought out his attention, going to his office to see him at every chance, calling him repeatedly from a janitor’s closet at school. I was the same way with Dedo. I wished I got to spend more time with him, but he always seemed to be leaving to catch the first of two buses he took to his job every day. He worked incredibly hard to give us whatever he could and to prepare me for a life where no one handed you a thing. I trusted him completely to protect me and always put me first. Both my parents treated me, their only child, like a princess. In theory, I would have liked to have had brothers and sisters, but, because I had to entertain myself, I grew up to be independent and self-sufficient.