Amid Split from Ivana, Donald Trump Once Told Joan Rivers He Wasn't Sure He'd Marry Again — Then He Did (Twice)
Donald Trump was in the midst of a very public divorce from Ivana Trump and a steamy affair with a much younger Marla Maples — and decades away from even running for the presidency — when he appeared on The Joan Rivers Show in September 1990.
“Do you think you will ever get married again?” the comedienne asks Trump in the hour-long episode, which is set to re-air Monday night on the TV network Decades.
“I don’t know. It really depends on what happens with life,” Trump tells Rivers. “I really don’t know. It’s sort of a difficult right now in terms of that.”
As with so much else in Trump’s life, however, the truth was stretchier than he made it sound: Three years after airing his ambivalence about another union, he and Maples had a daughter, Tiffany — and got married.
By 1997 they separated, and the next year Trump met Melania Knauss, the model who would become his third wife.
Rivers, who died in 2014, relished ribbing Trump about his legendary womanizing during his interview — this 26 years before the surfacing of a leaked Access Hollywood recording where he told Billy Bush that he could “grab” women “by the p—-. You can do anything.”
In his 1990 sit-down, Rivers says to Trump, joking: “If you had slept with every woman they [the media] claimed you slept with…”
He deadpans in reply: “I’d be dead. One way of the other, from whatever or from whatever.”
“You have a big smile on your face,” says Rivers.
“Happy but dead,” he replies.
Adds Rivers: “But you did fool around, seriously.”
Other topics they dish about include the effects of the divorce on Trump’s three children — the oldest, Donald Trump Jr., was then 12 and struggling with the split — and his political aspirations.
Says Trump at the time: “I don’t think I’ll be running for public office.”
During the show, Trump’s mother, Mary, calls in. Rivers asks her what kind of child Donald was.
“Well, he was a good boy,” his mom says. “Always very aggressive. Always.”
When an audience member asks Trump if he thinks he is an easy man to have for the next woman who comes along, he says:
“I think I am much easier than people think I am. I believe people think I would be impossible and I really think I’d be a lot easier than impossible, and in many respects very easy. “
Decades will air The Joan Rivers Show on Mondays through Fridays (6 pm ET).
This week the network will also air Rivers’ interviews with Ivana Trump on Tuesday and Thursday and with Marla Maples on Wednesday.
