Ivana Trump on how she advises Donald — and those hands

IT’S Ivana Trump’s fault that Donald didn’t run for president sooner.
“Probably five years before our divorce, Reagan or somebody brought him a letter and said, ‘You should run for president,’” Donald’s first wife tells The New York Post at her opulent seven-floor Upper East Side town house, which she purchased for $2.8 million in 1998.

“So he was thinking about it. But then . . . there was the divorce, there was the scandal, and American women loved me and hated him,” she says, referencing Donald’s much-publicized infidelity with Marla Maples that led to the power couple’s 1991 split. “So there was no way that he would go into [politics] at that point,” Ivana says. “But he was always tooling around with the idea.”
No tooling now — now, Donald’s the GOP front-runner.
And Ivana, a self-proclaimed conservative who has mended fences with her ex, is along for the ride — acting as Donald’s cheerleader and, at times, adviser.
“I suggest a few things,” says Ivana, lounging next to her framed 1996 “Got Milk?” ad in the Louis XVI-inspired living room — the fireplace blazing on a 70-degree spring day.
The 67-year-old former model is sporting a mini Roberto Cavalli dress with sheer lace panels, an Ivana Trump necklace from her defunct QVC jewelry line (“Now I just prefer to take it easy,” she says of getting out of the accessories business) and her signature blond bouffant.
“We speak before and after the appearances and he asks me what I thought,” says Ivana, who tells him to “be more calm” and adds that she gave Donald the motto: “You think it, I say it.”
“But Donald cannot be calm,” she admits. “He’s very outspoken. He just says it as it is.” That’s exactly why she thinks The Donald — as she famously referred to him in a 1989 Spy magazine interview — would make a great president.
“He’s no politician. He’s a businessman. He knows how to talk. He can give an hour speech without notes . . . He’s blunt.” She adds that Donald would surround himself with “fantastic advisers, like Carl Icahn. Really brilliant minds. And he’d make a decision! Obama cannot make a decision if his life depends on it. It’s ridiculous.”
While Ivana says she’s not political — “I was born in a Communist country [Czechoslovakia] and I don’t like politics” — she frets that America has lost its prestige. “We have to get it back.”
The first step? Adopting Donald’s immigration policies. “And I’m an immigrant,” Ivana says.
“I have nothing against Mexicans, but if they [come] here — like this 19-year-old, she’s pregnant, she crossed over a wall that’s this high” — Ivana lowers her hand to 4 inches above her wall-to-wall carpeting. “She gives the birth in American hospital, which is for free. The child becomes American automatically. She brings the whole family, she doesn’t pay the taxes, she doesn’t have a job, she gets the housing, she gets the food stamps. Who’s paying? You and me.
“As long as you come here legally and get a proper job . . . we need immigrants. Who’s going to vacuum our living rooms and clean up after us? Americans don’t like to do that.”
Well, Trumps certainly don’t.
Ivana wasn’t always a Trump, though. Born Ivana Zelnícková, she grew up in what was then Czechoslovakia, and began skiing competitively at age 6. She says she was an alternate for the 1972 Czechoslovak Olympic ski team (there are disputes as to the validity of this claim). She was married from 1971 to 1973 to an Austrian skier, Alfred Winklmayr, and lived in Montreal, where she modeled and worked as a ski instructor.
In 1976, Ivana was in NYC for a fashion show and went with friends to Maxwell’s Plum, an Upper East Side pickup spot for real-life Mr. Bigs and the women who loved them. While waiting for a table, she felt a tap on her shoulder.
“[There’s] this tall blond guy with blue eyes. He said, ‘I’m Donald Trump and I see you’re looking for a table. I can help you.’ I look at my friends and said, ‘The good news is, we’re going to get a table real fast. The bad news is, this guy is going to be sitting with us.’ ”
After the meal, Donald paid the bill on the sly and disappeared.
“I said, ‘There’s something strange because I’ve never met a man who didn’t want anything from a woman and paid for it,’ ” Ivana says with a laugh.
When she walked outside, there was Donald, in the driver’s seat of his own limousine. “He drove us home and then we started to date,” she says.
Donald took Ivana to Aspen, Colo., not knowing her Olympian status. She feigned altitude sickness while Donald, a ski novice, took a lesson.
“Sure enough, 10 minutes later I was on the mountains and looking at him doing full turns, and it was not fun,” says Ivana.
“The second day, he was getting good. So he said, ‘Ivana, let’s go ski.’ I asked the instructor to put the ski boots on me like a beginner. Donald was like, ‘OK, darling, you can do it!’ I took off and he got so angry. He said, ‘I will never [ski] again for anybody! Even Ivana!’ So I play for his ego.”
After less than a year, the two married, in 1977, and went on to have three children together: Donald Jr., now 38, Ivanka, 34, and Eric, 32.
“I don’t think he’s feminist,” Ivana when asked of Donald’s stance. “He loves women. But not a feminist.” It was that love of women that led to the couple’s divorce. Ivana discovered that her husband was cheating on her with former beauty queen Marla Maples. As Ivana told Barbara Walters in a 1991 “20/20” interview, Maples stopped her at a restaurant in Aspen and told her, “I’m Marla and I love your husband. Do you?”
Ivana filed for divorce, claiming in her deposition that Donald raped her after he used her plastic surgeon for a scalp-reduction surgery to remove a bald spot. “Your f – – king doctor has ruined me!” Trump cried, according to the 1993 book “Lost Tycoon: The Many Lives of Donald J. Trump,” before forcing himself on her sexually.
Once the book was out, Ivana softened her remarks in a statement: “As a woman, I felt violated, as the love and tenderness, which he normally exhibited toward me, was absent. I referred to this as a ‘rape,’ but I do not want my words to be interpreted in a literal or criminal sense.”
While her ex’s campaign has thrust the family into the solar core of the public spotlight, she says the kids and she — and certainly Donald — are used to the heat. Plus, there are surprise benefits, like Donald’s recent weight loss, aided by his germophobia.
“He loves to eat. I told him, ‘Donald, you lost weight!’ because I can tell if he’s 225 or 215,” says Ivana. “And he said, ‘I don’t have time to eat! I shake so many hands!’ ”
Speaking of hands — and other body parts — Ivana says Donald does just fine in that department.
“If there was a problem there, Donald would not have five kids.”
This story first appeared in the New York Post.