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With the 2024 U.S. election results just around the corner, Donald Trump and Kamala Harris are at the top of many Americans’ and Canadians’ minds.
By now, it’s pretty widely known that current Vice President Kamala Harris has a strong connection to Canada, after she moved to Montreal from California when she was just 12 years old.
However, it’s perhaps less well-known that former U.S. President Donald Trump has his own surprisingly personal link to Montreal, which means both Harris and Trump’s paths to power have roots in the city.
According to a report from The Montreal Gazette, Trump’s unexpected connection to Montreal runs back to October 1976. At the time, the city was still glowing from hosting the Summer Olympics.
A young Donald Trump took a trip north, showing up unannounced at a fashion show where Czech model Ivana Zelníčková, whom he’d met earlier that summer in New York, was walking the runway. Ivana later shared in her autobiography “Raising Trump” that she was taken aback when she saw him in the audience.
“I was walking the runway in a fur coat when I noticed a tall blond man in the audience,” she wrote, according to the Montreal Gazette.
“He’d somehow found out about it and come to Montreal to surprise me. It made me slightly uncomfortable that he had information about me that I hadn’t given him—a hangover from a communist childhood, perhaps—but I was flattered.”
Trump’s surprise appearance in Montreal ignited a romance that led to their marriage and ultimately made Ivana and Donald one of the most talked-about couples of the 1980s. Together, they built a sprawling business empire that became a cornerstone of Trump’s public image and set him on the path to the presidency in 2016.
Together, Ivana and Donald became parents to three children: Donald Jr., Ivanka, and Eric, forming the family that have played a central role in Trump’s political image.
With the U.S. election approaching, it’s interesting to note that no matter who wins, whether it’s Kamala Harris or Donald Trump, Montreal will have played a part in shaping their lives—even if it’s just a tiny part!
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