Mar a Lago Trump's $200m 'Winter White House'

The 20,000 sq ft ballroom has walls inlaid with $7 million worth of gold leaf, there are gold-plated basins in the Ladies and a library panelled with ancient English oak, its rare books as untouched as the day they were put there.

The Tsars had their Winter Palace in St Petersburg, while Louis XIV had Versailles. Donald Trump — just as smitten by grandiose splendour and autocratic power — has Mar-a-Lago.

Valued at $200 million and set in 20 acres on the billionaires’ playground of Palm Beach in Florida, the Jazz Age chateau was built by a breakfast cereal heiress who left it to the nation as a winter get-away for U.S. presidents.



They never used it, perhaps sensing that its almost obscene opulence might not go down well with voters?

Instead, they opted for the far more basic Camp David, a rural getaway outside Washington that Sir Winston Churchill witheringly described as ‘a log cabin with all modern improvements’.

But then Mar-a-Lago was bought by Mr Trump . . . and the rest was somewhat inevitable. The U.S. President has dubbed this pleasure palace — part Trump family home, part jaw-droppingly expensive private members club — the ‘Winter White House’.



Since then — in what may be a hint that he intends to come here all year round — Trump officials have started calling it the ‘Southern White House’.

It has become the de facto Court of The Donald, the place where he flies in most weekends to mix business with pleasure in a manner that is causing alarm among those who see serious conflicts of interest in the arrangement.

After some of Mar-a-Lago’s nearly 500 plutocratic members posted social media pictures of themselves rubbing shoulders with the President and his entourage, questions are being asked if any back-scratching deals are being made there out of sight of voters?

Since the club doubled its joining fee to $200,000 as soon as Trump became President, the White House’s insistence no one is trying to profit from anyone else has provoked hollow laughter.



Palm Beach is all about money. The manicured community of luxury apartment blocks and mansions reputedly has more millionaires than palm trees, and boasts one of the highest concentrations of wealth in the world.

The lives of the immensely rich old men and their much younger wives who live there revolve around charity lunches and balls, as well as see-and-be-seen trips to the handful of ridiculously expensive, members-only social clubs such as the Everglades, the Bath & Tennis Club and Mar-a-Lago.

In his memoirs, Mr Trump describes Mar-a-Lago ‘as close to paradise as I’m going to get’. What he doesn’t say is that his journey to becoming the ‘King of Palm Beach’ has been far from easy.

In fact, the town, whose WASP [White Anglo-Saxon Protestant] elite prides itself on being Old Money looked down its nose at the brash property developer from the moment he bought Mar-a-Lago, employing his characteristically ruthless business tactics to do so. The 110,00 sq ft Mediterranean-themed mansion was built in the Twenties by Marjorie Merriweather Post, heiress to a breakfast cereal empire, at a cost in today’s money of nearly $94 million.

She lavished vast sums on the estate (Spanish for ‘Sea-to-Lake’), bringing in a famous Viennese theatre designer, stone from Genoa, 36,000 antique Spanish tiles and 16th-century Flemish tapestries.

Workers used up America’s entire stock of gold leaf to gild the main living room with its 42ft high ceiling.

It had 128 rooms including 58 bedrooms and 33 bathrooms, a ballroom, theatre and golf course.

Ms Post left it to the government on her death in 1973 but, costing $1 million a year to maintain, it was later handed back to her daughters.

The smell of mildew and neglect was hanging over the estate by the time Mr Trump and first wife, Ivana, bought it in 1985 for a knockdown $8 million (with furnishings).

He got it so cheap after claiming (incorrectly) that he had bought a neighbouring beachfront property on which he threatened to build an eyesore house that would block Mar-a-Lago’s ocean view.

‘That drove everybody nuts,’ he boasted later. ‘They couldn’t sell the big house because I owned the beach, and so the price kept going down and down.’

Palm Beach’s snootiest ‘Old Money’ club, the Bath & Tennis, reportedly refused to offer the Trumps membership, a slight that some believe fuelled his decision, when strapped for cash in 1995, to turn Mar-a-Lago into a club of his own.



Mr Trump made a point of inviting Jews, blacks and gay couples as members — all of them unwelcome at some older clubs.

He claimed stars such as Steven Spielberg, Elizabeth Taylor and Diana, Princess of Wales had joined, but later admitted he had offered them free membership (which almost none took up).