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Donald Trump and Mar-a-Lago are a joint package. He purchased the the opulent 20-acre estate in 1985 along with his then-wife, Ivana Trump. It became the ultimate symbol of 1980s excess and the TV show, Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous was quick to film the business entrepreneur living out his American dream. When he was elected president in 2016, the property shifted to become his self-named “Winter White House.” Along with that fancy moniker came a parade of powerful people in and out of the historic residence that was built by socialite Marjorie Merriweather Post in the 1920s. But the former president didn’t just have the movers and shakers in the Republican Party waltz in for free, they had to pay to gain access to him.
Mary C. Shanklin, author of American Castle: One Hundred Years of Mar-a-Lago, shares with SheKnows not only how Trump cooked up a lucrative scheme that would not only line his bank account, but would also exclusive access to some media outlets who were willing to play the questionable game, including the Christian Broadcast Network. The religious news channel, founded by Pat Robertson, found itself with “exclusives with the leader of the free world” after spending $150,000 to host events at the Palm Beach, Florida estate, per The New York Times. Throw a couple of events at the club, and suddenly the organization had full access to the president.
Shanklin explains that this possibility became a reality, thanks to a suggestion from one of his attorneys. “He was in so much debt” in the early 1990s that “creditors were coming and devouring his assets,” but there was one property he cherished the most — “he always clung onto Mar-a-Lago.” Trump’s first thought to save even a portion of the land was to “subdivide” the estate and build homes on the property. She reveals, “The town wouldn’t go along with that, so it was an attorney of his who came up with the idea for the club. It really was a new thing for Palm Beach to open its doors in a more democratic way, shall we say.” That smart suggestion became a crucial turning point in Trump’s financial comeback.
Mar-a-Lago now generates about $54 million for Trump, according to The Washington Post, and his four-year presidency might have something to do with that. A 2020 New York Timesreport on Trump’s “lucrative revenue stream” revealed that his namesake properties became the perfect backdrop for “people who wanted something from the president” and Mar-a-Lago was a huge part of that financial formula. “I think no matter what you say about him, I feel like he’s an astute businessman in the sense of building his brand,” Shanklin says, “And certainly that that’s taken him a long way.”
Immediately after Trump’s inauguration in 2017, Mar-a-Lago’s club initiation fees jumped from $150,000 to $200,000 and annual dues landed at just under $20,000, per CNN. As Trump’s former national security aide bluntly put it to The New York Times, “People know and expect him to be at Mar-a-Lago, so they’ll bring a guest or come with a specific idea. With that access, you could pitch your ideas. With this president, he’d actually listen and direct his staff to follow up.” Spending a lot of money to acquire time with the then-president benefitted plenty of rich donors and their companies, but it also resulted in some debatable ethics breaches that Trump should have been accountable.
That leads Shanklin to Trump’s current legal dilemma with the New York business fraud civil case with “these valuations [of his real estate portfolio] and whether they are exaggerated and inflated.” She follows the courtroom events daily because she believes that the current chapter of Mar-a-Lago is tightly tied to Trump’s success or failure — and his presence in this lifetime. “I think you have to look at the market value for Mar-a-Lago and understand that he’s not a young guy.”
At 77 years of age, Trump is still kicking around and running for president, but Shanklin does think about the future of the glamorous estate envisioned by Post 100 years ago. “If you no longer have him there, if you no longer have that access, if you can no longer have the photos with him, and those bragging rights, then how much does that diminish people’s willingness to pay $200,000 to join?” she questioned. “If you’re not getting all those revenues and everybody doesn’t want to pay all that money… Well, maybe it’s not worth the $387 million that he says it is.”
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