Ivana Trump, at Rest in the Weeds

 

by Pa Rock

Citizen Journalist

Last week London's "Daily Mail" newspaper published photos of what it claimed was the grave of Donald Trump's first wife, Ivana,  the mother of the three oldest Trump "children:"  Ivanka, Don, Junior, and Eric.  Ivana had passed away at the age of seventy-three in her Manhattan apartment in July of 2022 following what appeared to be an accidental fall down a flight of stairs.  She was buried two weeks later near the first tee of Trump's Bedminster Golf Course at Bedminster, New Jersey, a favorite haunt of the Trump family and where Trump spent the better part of every August during his presidency.

Trump reportedly received a nice tax break for burying his ex-wife on his golf course in a one-and-a-half-acre section of land that he has set aside for a small, and very exclusive, cemetery.  So far, more than a year later, Ivana Trump is the only person buried in the new cemetery.

Actually, the word "cemetery" is a bit of a stretch.  A much larger section of the golf course has been roped off to keep tourists at bay, but during the recent Saudi golf tournament hosted  by Trump at Bedminster, the "Daily Mail" apparently sneaked a photographer under the ropes and out to take a few snapshots of Ivana's final resting place, and what that photographer found would have shamed most families, though obviously not the Trumps.  Ivana Trump's grave was overgrown with weeds and tall grass, and had not been landscaped, or even recently mowed, and a permanent tombstone had not been installed.

I first saw a meme on the internet about  the sad condition of Ivana's burial site last week.  It was a clever meme which paired the photo of her weedy grave with a beautifully kept grave of a member of another presidential family.  The other grave had a large stone marker and was a well manicured site that has been the final resting place of Richard Nixon's famous dog, Checkers, for the better part of seventy years.  Checkers' grave looked like a dignified spot where a decent person would be proud to bury their grandparent.  Ivana's grave looked like a spot where Checkers might take a dump, if a better spot was not available!

When I saw that meme, my first reaction was to disregard it as just a clever joke.  But yesterday "Snopes," the site that debunks phony celebrity stories and internet memes, came out with a story about the photos of Ivana's grave and said that the photos were real and her grave truly is overgrown with weeds and has not been properly maintained.

I don't think anyone really expected Donald Trump to show his first immigrant wife any more deference or dignity in death than he did while she was alive - because he is self-absorbed and focused solely on meeting his own needs.  But what is sad is that Ivana's children would tolerate such an outrageous disrespect of their mother.  That says almost as much about them as it does about about their egotistical father.