Donald Trump’s ex-wife Ivana would be the best choice for a US ambassador to the Czech Republic, the central European country’s president said, after speaking to her by phone on Wednesday.
The fact that Ivana Trump, the US president-elect’s first of three wives, expressed interest in representing the US in her native country, “made me very happy,” President Milos Zeman said in a press statement. “The US couldn’t send a better ambassador to Prague.”
Born Ivana Zelnickova in 1949 in what was then Czechoslovakia, she fled the Communist-ruled country in 1973 and lived in Canada for two years before moving to New York, where she met Trump. The two married in 1977 and had three children - Donald Jr, Ivanka and Eric - before an acrimonious divorce in 1992. Ivana Trump told the New York Post on November 13 she would ask her ex-husband for the Prague posting.
A 2015 photo shows Ivana Trump attending the Angel Ball 2015 at Cipriani Wall Street in New York City. Photo: AFP
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Donald Trump talks with his former wife Ivana during the US Open tennis tournament in 1997. Photo: Reuters
Zeman said Ivana’s appointment would be a boon for US-Czech relations and give the NATO member of 10.7 million a direct link to the White House. He has clashed publicly with current US Ambassador Andrew H. Schapiro, a former Harvard Law School classmate of Barrack Obama, who criticised Zeman for attending a Russian military parade in Moscow last year along with leaders of China and North Korea.
