Trump's Marriage to Ivana, Wife #1 ---Scams from the Great Beyond -The Presidential Edition

 Donald Trump's Marriage to Ivana, 

the first of three wives.  


I write in mid-September, 2020.  I am furiously working on a book called "Scams from the Great Beyond --The Presidential Edition," a sequel to my two other "Scams from the Great Beyond" books (available at Amazon and elsewhere). Consider it my small and quixotic contribution to the effort to save America and perhaps the planet from our current president. Now in the editing stage, the editor advised to simply remove the biographical chapter as it was growing equal in length to half the book. 

Excerpts are now offered as blog essays. My loss becomes your gain. Here we share a brief history of Trump's relationship with Ivana, his first of the three wives. He cheated on all three of them. 

  



Trump’s first wife, Ivana was an immigrant, as, of course, is his third wife. His second wife, Marla Maples, was from Georgia, which although a part of the USA, to people from New York City seems distinctly foreign and exotic, making her kind of sort of an immigrant.               
                Ivana and Donald met In 1977. For years she was a partner in several of his business projects. They had three children. There are two stories that are shared about how they met. The first, most widely believed story involves Trump introducing himself to her while in a line to enter Maxwell’s Plum, a trendy and expensive singles bar located on Manhattan’s East Side where Ivana and friends were also waiting in line. He wound up paying for the night’s drinks for her and her friends and sent her a dozen roses the next day. [1]

                The second story, the one Trump prefers and shares in “The Art of the Deal,” is that they met at the 1976 Montreal Olympic Games. Trump likes to include Ivana’s love and ability as a downhill skier in this story, mentioning that she was an alternate for the Czech skiing team at the 1972 Sapporo Japan Winter Olympics.[2] She was, he said, expert in slalom and downhill. Nevertheless, Ivana has repeated and told it herself as well.[3] However, Czechoslovakia had no Olympic ski team that year, [4] and in 1989, 1989, Petr Pomezný, Secretary General of the Czechoslovak Olympic Committee, told Spy magazine that they could find no record of Ivana having any connection with the Czechoslovakian ski team under any of her names. [5]

                Like so many others in Trump’s family, Ivana is an immigrant, and since her ex-husband has been using issues of immigration and immigration fraud as such a campaign issue, we should look at how she came to be standing in line waiting to enter a trendy singles bar in Manhattan in the late 1970s anyway. It seems that she had been working as a model in Canada and was in Manhattan that evening working at a show to promote Canadian furs, probably without proper American work papers. Which raises several questions.

First, how did she leave Communist Czechoslovakia, not an easy thing to do? She did this by marrying an Austrian ski instructor named Alfred Winklmayr. This allowed her to obtain an Austrian passport and leave Czechoslovakia. The marriage was a sham, never consummated, they both say, and done strictly for immigration fraud. When Winklmayr moved to California where he became a ski instructor, he did not bring Ivana. She then obtained a divorce on the grounds that he had allegedly abandoned her.[6] 

Ivana herself says in her autobiography that they stayed married for two years to “fool the government and divorced in 1973 as soon as it was safe to do so.”

When her boyfriend, a well-known Czech playwright, died in a car accident in 1973, she moved to Montreal and Canada where she lived with George (Jiři) Syrovatka, a many she’d dated off and on since 1967. There’s a great deal of mixed statements regarding Ivana’s relationship with Syrovatka. They both seem to have stated they were married at one time or another and both then later denied it. One source reports Syrovatka was the one who arranged her sham visa marriage to Winkalmayr.[7] Another source describes him as her “former fiancé,” and they have stayed together for years.[8] No record of any marriage was found by journalists who have looked.[9]

Which is all quite interesting because it raises questions as to what sort of visa she was using to live and work in Canada. There is no record of her ever becoming a Canadian citizen, so this is quite important. Even more interesting is the question as to whether or not her Canadian visa, no matter how it was obtained, allowed her to work as a model in a fashion show that weekend in Manhattan? It looks unlikely and if she did not have a visa that enabled her to work in the USA then that means she was an illegal undocumented foreign worker stealing American jobs. Really. [10]

                Soon after marriage, Donald put his wife Ivana in charge of managing several important aspects of his businesses, apparently feeling that as a model and downhill skier she had the appropriate transferable skills to manage a business and workforce. While reports are that she was not good at managing employees and had several weaknesses, she did design uniforms for the doormen at Trump Towers which included large busbees, you know, those tall furry hats, s as well as the cheerleaders for the New Jersey Generals, Trump’s USFL football team. [11]

                Donald and Ivana’s wedding was officiated by Norman Vincent Peale, author of   “The Power of Positive Thinking” and Dutch Reformed Minister. [12] Peale and his self-confidence developing, self-help strategies and techniques is widely credited as a major influence on Trump who attended Peale’s church in Manhattan with his parents while growing up. [13]

                They had three children, Donald Jr., obviously named after his father, and Ivanka, named after her mother, (“Ivanka” is reportedly the diminutive of “ivana”)[14]  They have a third son, named Eric, and despite extensive effort, I have not been able to learn where his name came from. My guess is that it is interesting.

Finally, my books . . . 

Yeah, I've written books. Please check them out and see if they interest you.



  



[2] Pages 18-19, Schwartz, Tony and Trump, Donald. “Art of the Deal.” ( 1987, Warner Books, New York )

[3] Page 78-79, Kranish, Michael and Fisher, Marc. “Trump Revealed -The Definitive Biography of the 45th President.” ( 2016, Scribner, New York)

[4] “Ivana Trump,” Wikipedia, accessed August 29, 2020, and confirmed in several other sources as well. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivana_Trump

[6] “Ivanka Trump says her mother immigrated legally—that may not be true,” by David Gilmour, August 3, 2018.

https://www.dailydot.com/layer8/ivanka-trump-ivana-legal-immigrant/

[7] “6 Things You Need to Know About Donald Trump's First Wife, Ivana,” by Prachi Gupta, March 16, 2017
https://www.cosmopolitan.com/politics/a56426/ivana-trump-donald-trump-first-wife/

[8]  “Just friends? Ivana Trump models a series of short floral frocks as she steps out with her first love during a trip to Prague,” by Erica Tempesta. June 21, 2017. DAILYMAIL.COM

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-4626348/Ivana-Trump-steps-love-Prague.html

[10]  For more on Ivana Trump, one interesting source is an old article in Spy magazine, a New York City based publication that in the 1980s took great fun poking at Donald Trump. See, van Meter, Johnathan (May 1989). "That's Why the Lady is a Trump". Spy. Sussex Publishers, LLC. ISSN 0890-1759 – via Google Books at

https://books.google.com/books?id=xaCC4gI-zJkC&lpg=PA98&q=trump%20master%27s%20degree&pg=PA86&v=onepage#v=onepage&q=trump%20master's%20degree&f=true

[12] Page 81. Kranish, Michael and Fisher, Marc. “Trump Revealed -The Definitive Biography of the 45th President.” ( 2016, Scribner, New York)

[13] For instance, see “How Norman Vincent Peale Taught Donald Trump to Worship Himself, The magnate’s biographer explains the spiritual guide behind his relentless self-confidence,” by Gwenda Blair. October 06, 2015. Politico.
https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/10/donald-trump-2016-norman-vincent-peale-213220 


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