Why Donald Trump's Exes Hated Him So Much

There is a single headstone on a golf course in Bedminster, New Jersey, near the first tee. Ivana Trump is buried there, on land her ex-husband owns. The story everyone remembers is the 1990 divorce war — the tabloid headlines, the Aspen confrontation, the woman who supposedly hated him. Then look at what she signed. A statement printed in the front of a 1993 biography, softening a sworn deposition. An endorsement in 2016. A grave on his property. Two of his three ex-wives went quiet because contracts required it. One of them didn't. Her name was on paper first. The paper is where this story actually lives. Not the shouting, not the headlines, not the restaurant scene in Aspen that everybody can still describe. The paper. Because here's the thing about the anger people remember. It was real. It was also, in every documented case, converted into an agreement — an agreement drafted by his lawyers, signed by her hand, and enforceable long after the feeling that produced it had burned out. Ivana Trump spent roughly eighteen months in 1990 and 1991 as the most famous wronged wife in America. She spent the next thirty years as something much stranger: his most reliable public character witness. She died on July 14, 2022, after a fall at her townhouse on East 64th Street in Manhattan. The funeral was at St. Vincent Ferrer on Lexington Avenue, and the children she had with him — Donald Jr., Ivanka, Eric — spoke about her from the pulpit. Then the body went to New Jersey. Not to a family plot, not to a Manhattan cemetery, not back to Czechoslovakia, where she was born. To the grounds of Trump National Golf Club Bedminster, a property he bought in 2002, where he had already spoken publicly for years about wanting to be buried himself.