THE KING OF PALM BEACH
From the moment he laid eyes on the grand palace Mar-a-Lago, Donald Trump was determined to buy it. Laurence Leamer reveals how it became Trump’s spiritual home and helped shape the man who would become the most unlikely of presidents.
From the moment he laid eyes on the grand palace Mar-a-Lago, Donald Trump was determined to buy it. Laurence Leamer reveals how it became Trump’s spiritual home and helped shape the man who would become the most unlikely of presidents.
Most of Donald Trump’s new Palm Beach neighbours were older and had the glories of their careers largely in the past, but 39-year-old Trump was a phenomenon of the moment. A man of unbridled ambition, he owned casinos in Atlantic City, a football team in the fledgling United States Football League and, on the West Side of Manhattan, he was planning to construct the tallest building in the world (a project that never came to fruition).
The way Trump saw the world, you had to get bigger and bigger and higher and higher or you were headed down to the abyss. From his first appearance on the Forbes list in 1982 — credited wrongly with $100 million — he kept pushing and pushing until, in 1985, Forbes gave Trump a worth of $600m, a figure far beyond reality. That $600m became his signature, his crucial identity as he arrived in Palm Beach.
Two weeks after Trump signed the contract for Mar-a-Lago, a front-page story in the Palm Beach Daily News listed “Who’s Who in Palm Beach”. The newspaper was a must-read for most people on the island.
Although Trump had yet to spend a night at Mar-a-Lago, he was the only person the paper placed in the three major categories. The $600m credited to Trump by Forbes tied him for the fourth-richest person on the island, in a group of “Super Rich”, all of whom were decades older than he was. Money talked loud and clear. Palm Beachers pretended that what mattered in their seasonal paradise was a person’s class and culture but they looked with laser intensity at the new arrival, figuring where he stood in the hierarchy of wealth and how warmly he should be greeted.
The paper also named Trump one of the