You should research how Donald Trump bought Mar-A-Largo!
How Donald Trump Beat Palm Beach Society and Won the Fight for Mar-a-Lago
From the moment Donald Trump set eyes on Mar-a-Lago, the grand palace of old Palm Beach, he was on a collision course with one of the richest and most insular towns in America. Mark Seal chronicles how the president-elect created his “Winter White House” with brash ploys, lawsuits, and by turning Palm Beach’s exclusivity against it.
Standing at the bar at Mar-a-Lago, the outrageously ornate Palm Beach, Florida, mansion built by breakfast-cereal heiress Marjorie Merriweather Post in the Roaring 20s and turned into a private club in 1995 by Donald Trump, I awaited the arrival of the 45th president-elect of the United States. He was coming that mid-November weekend, as he had done so often for the past 30 years. But in so many ways he was already there.
Trump arrived in Palm Beach with his family in the 1980s, a snowbird who had flown in from New York. He was so impressed with the town, its beach, and its golf courses that he placed a security deposit on an apartment at the Breakers, the storied resort hotel and condominium complex overlooking the Atlantic.
“He was trying to put two penthouses together so there would be enough room for his kids,” the Breakers sales director later said. But “it couldn’t be done.”
One winter evening in 1985, according to an account Trump later wrote in Trump: The Art of the Comeback, he was being chauffeured to a dinner party when he asked the driver, “What’s for sale in town that’s really good?”
“Well, the best thing by far is Mar-a-Lago, but I guess you wouldn’t be talking about that,” the driver replied, probably thinking that no mortal could afford it.
“I asked him what Mar-a-Lago was,” Trump recalled.
Hearing the gilded story of the biggest house in the richest town, Trump ordered an immediate detour. He was driven through the quiet streets behind whose 12-foot hedges resided the historically understated gentry of America—Kennedys, Du Ponts, Fords, Pulitzers—until they arrived at an estate as grandiose as the aspirations of the Queens-born, 39-year-old real-estate developer in the limousine’s backseat.
From the street Trump stared across the 17 acres of grounds at a phantasmagoria of a home that humbled even him. Mar-a-Lago was named for its location, the property stretching from the ocean to Lake Worth. With interiors designed by Ziegfeld Follies scenic designer Joseph Urban, it was the fantasy of “an American in love with the artistic splendor of Europe . . . [with] Hispano-Moorish tiles of Spain; the frescoes of Florence; Venetian arches to introduce and frame water passages . . . and a ninety-foot castle tower for unimpeded panoramas of sea and sky,” according to a description in Town & Country. There were 128 rooms over 110,000 square feet, with 58 bedrooms, 33 bathrooms, a ballroom (where Mrs. Post held her celebrated square dances), a theater, and a nine-hole golf course.
“I immediately knew it had to be mine,” Trump wrote.
But it had been practically abandoned as a white elephant. Shortly before her death, in 1972, Mrs. Post left Mar-a-Lago to the U.S. government, with the intent that the estate be used as a winter White House for U.S. presidents. But Nixon preferred his friend Bebe Rebozo’s place, farther south, in Key Biscayne, and Jimmy Carter in the extravagant confines of Mar-a-Lago would have been like Donald Trump in, well, the peanut fields of Plains, Georgia. So Carter’s administration, faced with the estate’s $1 million annual taxes and maintenance costs, kicked it back to the Post Foundation in 1981, which didn’t want to shoulder the estate’s financial burden, either. The foundation put it on the market for $20 million.
At the time, Post’s three daughters gathered amid Mar-a-Lago’s splendor, fast falling to neglect and disrepair. Actress Dina Merrill (from Mrs. Post’s second marriage, to stock-brokerage founder E. F. Hutton) and her half-sisters, Adelaide Breevort Close and Eleanor Post Close (from their mother’s first marriage, to stockbroker Edward Bennett Close), made a decision that would lead to the changing of the guard at the historic house, according to Anthony Senecal, who, starting in 1959, worked at Mar-a-Lago for Mrs. Post as one of 35 dining-room footmen and later became Donald Trump’s butler there.
“Adelaide said, ‘I’m not going to put another dime of my own money into this place, and we’ll just sell it as is,’ ” remembers Senecal.
“And Dina Merrill said, ‘O.K., well, I’m with you,’ and then the other daughter said, ‘Well, yeah, I’m with you, too.’ ”
But real offers were slow in coming, until Trump took his detour on the way to the dinner party. “The estate manager gave him a tour of the house, and Mr. Trump told me later that he made the offer to the girls, by letter, I’m sure, of paying $25 million for the 17 acres, the house, and the furnishings,” Senecal says. “And they said no. They wanted more money.”
But soon, the wolf was not only at the door—he was also on the beach.
Trump offered $2 million for a beachfront lot in front of Mar-a-Lago—which Post’s foundation had sold earlier for $346,000.
While Trump didn’t buy the property until he closed on Mar-a-Lago, The Washington Post reported, “he decided to play hardball.
He said he bought the beachfront property directly in front of it through a third party and threatened to put up a hideous home to block Mar-a-Lago’s ocean view.” “That was my first wall,” he told the Post.
“That drove everybody nuts. They couldn’t sell the big house because I owned the beach, so the price kept going down and down.”
“So they decided to take Mr. Trump’s last offer, and sold him the house and the 17 acres and all the furnishings for less than $8 million,” says Senecal.
SO DONALD TRUMP BOUGHT A $25,000,000 MANSION FOR UNDER $8,000,000.
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