The president’s second wife claims she played a pivotal role in linking Donald Trump and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. on the homestretch of their 2024 campaigns.
Marla Maples, 61, said Kennedy called her after Trump, 78, was nearly assassinated at a rally in Pennsylvania on July 13. Kennedy, she said, was adamant he had “to get a message through to Donald.”
Maples told The MAHA Podcast she obliged Kennedy’s request—even though she was on a cruise in Alaska—and took down a message, promising it would reach her ex-husband even amid the chaos of that evening.
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“I’ll get it to him ASAP,” she recalled telling Kennedy. “And if I don’t get it to [Trump], Tiffany will get it to him.”
Maples first heard of shots breaking out from her daughter, Tiffany, 31, whom she shares with the president from their marriage between 1993 and 1999. Their relationship began when Trump was still married to his first wife, Ivana. Trump later met his current spouse, Melania, 54, amid divorce proceedings with Maples, and the first couple eventually wedded in 2005.
Maples recalled feeling the “pain” in Kennedy’s voice as he talked about Trump’s near-assassination but stopped short of revealing what Kennedy, then still an independent presidential candidate, said in his message to Trump.
Maples said Kennedy’s message reached Trump and the two met together the following day. She posted Thursday to her Instagram story that those days were “a very emotional time.”
Kennedy’s official MAGA endorsement did not arrive until Aug. 23, when Trump paraded the 71-year-old on stage at a packed Arizona rally hours after his former foe gave a rambling news conference to call off his candidacy.
The MAHA Podcast host Del Bigtree, who was Kennedy’s communications director, said there were some doubts in Kennedy’s inner circle that he would be embraced by MAGA. Those worries were immediately dispelled after Kennedy took the stage with Trump in Arizona, however.
“When we walked in that stadium and it’s all Trump fans, and we’re saying to each other, ‘How do you think Bobby is going to be received here?’” Bigtree recalled. “Like, we don’t really know. And then, as soon as President Trump mentions Bobby’s name, Robert Kennedy Jr., I mean, the place went crazy... We all had tears in our eyes, like—who knew that MAGA and the Republican Party was our people?”
Trump watching his supporters embrace Kennedy was akin to a father watching his son score a goal in soccer, Bigtree said. It was in that moment Bigtree said he realized Trump was not the “egomaniac” he had previously believed.
Maples said she still gets “tears in my eyes” when she thinks back to that moment. She said she hoped for a Trump-Kennedy connection way back in 2015, during her former spouse’s first run at the White House, but had to wait eight years.
“There are so many of us that were supporting Donald, that love Bobby, and our hearts were a bit torn, you know,” she said. “And so the dream was always, can they come together?”
Maples, a former actress and model, has long been a health nut. She founded the Global Wellness Forum, an organization that claims it “unites and empowers groups and activists worldwide, amplifying their efforts to promote health, sovereignty, truth, and transparency.”
Beyond just politics, Maples said she hopes the Kennedy-Trump alliance may convince the president to eat healthy food for once in his life.
“I am so grateful because I’ve tried for years to pull away the Diet Coke, no burgers, no McDonald’s,” she said. “And I’m like, I don’t have to do a thing now, you know, it’s Bobby’s got this covered... He’s listening to Bobby, he’s listening to the [MAHA] movement.”
Maples, a northwestern Georgia native, raised Tiffany in Southern California. Like many in Trump’s orbit, however, she has since relocated to Florida and is among the most public-facing cheerleaders of his administration. Her frequent appearances at his South Florida estate this winter even earned her the nickname the “Belle of Mar-a-Lago.”
Maples will also want to be in Florida to spend time with her grandchild, too, as Tiffany—who announced her pregnancy in October—is expected to give birth in the coming months. Tiffany has lived in Miami with her 27-year-old husband, Michael Boulos, since she graduated from Georgetown in 2020.
