The perks of being a Mar-a-Lago member
Donald Trump is known to wander the grounds, handing out $100 bills, as a whole line-up of hopeful con artists pay court to him.
When Donald Trump was president he called Mar-a-Lago on Palm Beach Island his “winter White House”, and besides the usual crowd of retired financiers and businessmen, you might hope to see world leaders dining with the proprietor on the terrace.
He was not the first to call it that. Marjorie Merriweather Post, who was the richest woman in America and built it in the 1920s, bequeathed it in 1973 to the government, hoping that it could become a presidential retreat.
The government found it too expensive to keep up and gave it back to the Post Foundation. Trump bought it with its furniture in 1985 for $8 million and turned it into a private club.
Post is said to have used up all of the gold leaf in the country merely to decorate the enormous living room, which was hung with 16th-century Flemish tapestries. Trump modified the coat of arms that had been granted to Post’s third husband, a diplomat, by the British state, replacing the Latin word “Integritas” with “Trump”. He added a 20,000 sq ft ballroom, above which is an office from where he would occasionally make addresses, as president, seated behind a desk.
Originally there was also a library, “panelled with centuries-old British oak and filled with rare first-edition books that no one in the family ever read”, Trump’s butler Anthony Senecal told The New York Times in 2016. It was later turned into a bar.
Trump would arrive by night and rise before dawn, after four hours’ sleep, to receive a bundle of newspapers. Later he would ride out to his golf course. He was also known to wander the 20-acre grounds peeling $100 at a time from a roll in his pocket to hand to a gardener.
When Trump became president the fee to join the club was doubled to $200,000. Members were rewarded with some extraordinary tableaus on the terrace. From his table on a Saturday night in 2017, a retired investor named Richard DeAgazio saw Trump at dinner with Shinzo Abe, prime minister of Japan at the time. They were discussing a North Korean ballistic missile test and reviewing documents by the light of an aide’s mobile phone.
The journalist Michael Wolff, who visited Trump at Mar-a-Lago last year, said he seldom went to the office but preferred to conduct business in the gilded living room and reception area. “He sits on these couches in the lobby where everybody can see him,” Wolff told The Times last year. He suspected that for Trump, “there is no difference between being in the White House and being in Mar-a-Lago. Essentially he does the same thing. Politicians pay court to him. Mar-a-Lago members pay court to him. A whole line-up of hopeful con artists pay court to him. That’s what happened in the White House and that’s what’s happening now.”
Trump and Melania sit at a table on the terrace, ringed by a rope that is “not really to keep people away,” he said. “It’s actually the opposite. To kind of compel people to come close.” There might be 50 people dining on the terrace “and everybody is coming up to pay court ... [like] the bride and groom, receiving their guests.”
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