Trump got $17M payout after 2005 hurricane
Little evidence of major damage to Florida club
PALM BEACH, FLA. •Donald Trump says he received a $17-million insurance payment in 2005 for hurricane damage to Mar-a-Lago, his private club in Palm Beach. But The Associated Press has found little evidence of such large-scale damage.
Two years after a series of storms, the real estate tycoon said he didn’t know how much had been spent on repairs, but acknowledged he pocketed some of the money. He transferred funds into his personal accounts, saying that under the terms of his policy “you didn’t have to reinvest it.”
“Landscaping, roofing, walls, painting, leaks, artwork in the — you know, the great tapestries, tiles, Spanish tiles, the beach, the erosion,” he said of the storm damage. “It’s still not what it was.”
Trump’s description of extensive damage does not match the versions of Mara-Lago members and even Trump loyalists. In an interview about Mar-a-Lago’s history, Trump’s longtime former butler, Anthony Senecal, recalled no catastrophic damage. He said hurricane Wilma, the last of a string of storms which barrelled through in 2004 and 2005, flattened trees behind the estate, but the house itself only lost some roof tiles.
“That house has never been seriously damaged,” said Senecal, discussing Mar-a-Lago’s luck with hurricanes. “I was there for all of them.”
Just over two weeks after Wilma, Trump hosted 370 guests at Mar-a-Lago for the wedding of his son Donald Jr.
Wedding photographs by Getty Images showed the house, pools, cabanas and landscaping seemingly in good repair.
Valuations for Mar-a-Lago are subjective, but Forbes estimated the 110,000-squarefoot property’s value at $150 million in its most recent appraisal of Trump’s net worth. Tim Frank, Palm Beach’s planning administrator at the time of the hurricanes, said $17 million in work would have required “dozens, maybe scores of workers.”
Palm Beach building department records showed no permits for construction on that scale after the storms.
Trump declined to provide the AP with records about the insurance claim or answer specific questions about damage at Mar-a-Lago.
“If there were $17 million dollars of damage, we sure as hell would have known about that,” said Frank. “I would have known if there was anything in the magnitude of $100,000.”