Melania Trump’s Infamous ‘I Really Don’t Care’ Jacket Was a Dig at Ivanka Trump, New Book Claims

Former First Lady Melania Trump baffled the entire nation back in 2018, when she wore the infamous "I really don't care, do you?" jacket to a migrant children's shelter, weeks after her husband, then president Donald Trump, decided to separate undocumented immigrants from their children. 

Amid the whole controversy, Melania claimed that the message was intended for "fake news media" and "left-wing critics," a new book claims the message was intended for Ivanka Trump, The New York Post reported. Melania “spent her four years in the White House waging a war against Ivanka Trump,” according to New York Times reporter Katie Rogers' book American Woman: The Transformation of the Modern First Lady, From Hillary Clinton to Jill Biden.

The two were involved in an “internal power struggle” over the position of first lady, which the first daughter had attempted to fill after her stepmother postponed her move to the White House in 2017, per Vanity Fair. According to Rogers, Ivanka wanted to reorganize the East Wing to serve "the entire first family, not just the first lady." Melania was not amused by Ivanka's wish, nor by Donald Trump's statement to the media that Ivanka would be "helping [Melania] and working with her."

“She was aware that her husband had suggested that his eldest daughter would be helping to share the responsibilities of being first lady, and this was not a development that pleased her,” Rogers writes.

Therefore, it seems like Melania was prepared to use fashion to show Ivanka where she could go by the time she traveled to McAllen, Texas, in 2018. It's hard to understand why someone would assume, upon seeing a picture of the First Lady clad in a jacket with an offensive slogan inscribed on the back, that "she truly put Ivanka in her place," New York Magazine writes.

According to Rogers, the two “were locked in a quiet competition for press coverage” at the time. The writer was informed by sources that Melania was completely preoccupied with keeping tabs on how the public saw her, and that she searched through “every mention of her name in the press and often trawled Twitter to see what the press, her critics, and her supporters were saying about her.”

Despite them both being close associates of Donald Trump—Ivanka serving as an unpaid advisor in her father's West Wing—the pair mostly avoided one other. Early in his administration, Donald Trump told reporters that his daughter Ivanka would be “helping her and working with her” while Melania fulfilled her duties as first lady. This was his attempt to get Ivanka to step up alongside Melania. “She was aware that her husband had suggested that his eldest daughter would be helping to share the responsibilities of being First Lady, and this was not a development that pleased her,” Rogers wrote.