His misdeeds hardly warrant palming Trump off on Florida

Please Congress. Can’t we forget about high crimes and misdemeanors and keep President Donald Trump ensconced in the White House? Far away from his newly declared home state?

Not that Floridians condone abuse of power or obstruction of justice. Or his 15,000 documented lies. Or his unseemly deference to Russia’s Vladimir Putin. His crimes against the environment. His offensive regard for women and immigrants. His self-dealing. His insulting “Gold Star” parents. His arm-wagging mocking of a disabled reporter. His Twitter feed.

But Florida, at least the southeastern stretch of the state that has endured Trump’s intermittent sojourns since 1985, would just as soon limit his disruptive presence. (As it is, he has popped up at Mar-a-Lago 100-plus times since taking office.) Keep him busy up in Washington where Nancy Pelosi can keep an eye on him. (Admittedly, Trump aversion isn’t universal. Floridians in the Panhandle and The Villages regard his abhorrent behavior with the kind of wild-eyed admiration expressed by fans of the WWE.)

Trump bought his way into South Florida’s collective consciousness in 1985, when he paid

$7 million for Mar-a-Lago, the 118-room Palm Beach mansion that once belonged to cereal heiress Marjorie Merriweather Post. He promptly went to court over the county’s property tax assessment, claiming the grand palace was really something of a dump.

Since then Trump has become a virtual Florida litigation factory, suing local governments and neighboring landowners, fending off lawsuits from his failed condo and hotel projects and from disgruntled members of his golf clubs. And from vendors, contractors and employees who claimed he stiffed them.

In 2016, counted 296 lawsuits involving Trump or his companies in Florida. (Among 4,000 Trump lawsuits nationally, most of them filed in New York and New Jersey, where four of his overleveraged casino ventures went bankrupt.)

In 1995, Trump sued Palm Beach County for $75 million, claiming that air traffic from Palm Beach International Airport disrupted “basically all outdoor activities, precluded normal conversation and greatly hindered the purposes of relaxation and tranquility” at Mar-a-Lago. He dropped the suit when the county agreed to lease him, at bargain rates,

214 acres of public land for an 18-hole Trump golf course. (That wasn’t the end of it. He sued the airport again in 2010 and 2015. Never mind that Trump’s own Boeing 757 was a regular offender of Palm Beach tranquility.)

Trump sued Palm Beach over zoning restrictions. And, in 2007, in the persona of a superpatriot, he sued because the town wouldn’t approve the 80-ft flagpole he wanted to display his giant, car-dealer-sized American flag. A few years later, he threatened to sue FPL over its “disgusting” utility poles near his golf resort in Doral, causing Freudian analysts to wonder what it was about Trump and poles.

When Trump wasn’t suing, he was threatening to sue. I received a nasty warning letter myself from a Trump lawyer in 2011 over a column describing the financial distress of condo buyers who had lost their money in the failed Trump International condo-hotel project on Fort Lauderdale Beach. They had assumed, as one might, that given the Trump name and the Trump brochures full of Trump photos and Trump assurances, that they were buying into an actual Trump property. Nope. They learned too late that they had put their savings into a Trump ruse. The project went broke in 2009 and the buyers discovered that Trump had only leased his name to a consortium led by Felix Sater, a mobbed-up Russianborn businessman who had been convicted in a $40 million stock manipulation scheme in

1998. (And, before that, for stabbing a stockbroker in the face with a broken margarita glass during a bar fight.)

South Florida, however, has also been the object of Trump’s famous largesse. For instance, in 2016, reporters discovered a sixfoot-tall portrait of Donald Trump hanging on a barroom wall at Trump’s Doral golf club. The Trump Foundation, in one of its more notable charitable pursuits, had paid $10,000 for the painting.

The Foundation’s most infamous expenditure was a 2013 illegal $25,000 campaign contribution to someone who should have known better, former Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi. Her office subsequently shut down an investigation into Trump University, his sham real estate training program that was eventually forced to pay out $25 million to former enrollees. Last month, Trump was ordered to pay a $2 million fine for misusing Foundation funds.

Bondi, by the way, now works for Trump’s impeachment defense team. Keep him in Washington, Pam. You know what we’ve been through.

USA Today

Fred Grimm, a longtime resident of Fort Lauderdale, has worked as a journalist in South Florida since 1976. Reach him by email at leogrimm@gmail.com or on Twitter: @grimm_fred