PALM BEACH — On a sun-splashed Saturday in April, real estate and crypto investor Grant Cardone sat in the ballroom at Mar-a-Lago listening loto President Donald Trump speak to 500 or so people attending a digital summit.
Cardone recalled Trump was then whisked away in the presidential limousine, “The Beast,” to Palm Beach International Airport for the return flight to Washington, D.C., where he was to address the White House Correspondents Association dinner. Instead, later that night, Cardone watched Trump, still in his black-tie formal wear, talk to the nation after yet another assassination attempt.
“He had a full day that day,” Cardone said. “That’s all I’m saying.”
And a full 2025-2026 season in the Palm Beaches as well. Over the span of eight months, Trump made more trips — 17 — and spent more partial or full days — 67 — at his residence and private club here than during any preceding years in his presidencies.
Trump season at Mar-a-Lago one for the history books
Most significantly, more happened at the Winter White House this season than in any other stretch in Trump’s two nonconsecutive terms.
The president launched a war against Iran and a military raid into Venezuela to capture Nicolás Maduro and perp-walk him to a U.S. prison cell. The winter season’s sojourns were sandwiched by sequential record-breaking partial government shutdowns over funding disputes with Capitol Hill Democrats on Obamacare and immigration enforcement that Trump frequently railed about while in town.
Trump feted Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy at the Palm Beach club. He unveiled a new series of warships, the “Trump class” battleships, too.
Numerous visits took place in the shadow of the homegrown Jeffrey Epstein sex-abuse scandal, which unflatteringly spotlighted the decades-ago, pals-around-town chumminess between Trump and the deceased Palm Beach financier. Demands to release the investigatory files triggered a bitter falling-out with one of his most ardent backers, ex-Georgia U.S. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, in raging social media posts the president fired from Mar-a-Lago’s confines.
Trump quipped to children on Christmas Eve that NORAD was tracking Santa Claus to make sure he was not an “infiltrator” and announced a Christmas night barrage of rockets fired at Nigerian militants who the president said assaulted Christians. He dropped in at a flooring and tile store and to see a dentist. At the April crypto conference, it was proposed that the federal home loan financing agency should accept digital currencies as collateral.
The longest stay, 16 days spanning the Christmas and New Year’s holidays, concluded with the military’s surgical strike in Caracas to seize Maduro.
While members and guests played racquet sports and sunned themselves at the beach club, Trump spoke to reporters ushered into the club in silence so not to disturb the brunch crowd in the adjacent, chandeliered Tea Room.
In response to a question from The Palm Beach Post, Trump revealed Venezuela would stop oil subsidies to Cuba — megaphoning he was already eyeing another square on his global chessboard.
Trump’s executive peers in Palm Beach tell him ‘how it is’
At a national and hemispheric security conference in Miami on May 6, Rick de la Torre, founder of Washington-based Tower Strategy, mused at the preponderance of events in Palm Beach.
“I’m joking, but that’s where the real decisions are being made, in Mar-a-Lago,” he said with a chuckle.
While it is a stretch to say the Trump second presidency’s most consequential decisions were made at Mar-a-Lago, they were carried out from the Palm Beaches this season.
A former CIA station chief in Caracas, de la Torre says the Winter White House speaks to the unusual quality of this presidency: Trump, a real estate magnate, is ringed by a bevy of billionaires — 66 with residential ties to Palm Beach — and executives he trusts and respects as captains of their industries.
“What’s different about this administration is he knows everybody in Wall Street, in Houston. He knows the real players, the people who shape financial markets, energy markets,” de la Torre said. “And having that honest opinion, that honest discussion with them, is critical and that’s what helps shape his decision-making process.”
Franklin Roosevelt had a “kitchen cabinet” of informal advisers, and perhaps Trump has a “billionaire cabinet” giving him blue-chip advice. They are entrepreneurs and corporate executives Trump believes represent the top echelons of American business, and therefore represent the pinnacle of American work ethic, risk-taking and intellect.
It’s not, de la Torre said, that Trump is “short-circuiting the federal government” because the president does get the public sector’s perspective. Instead, he insisted, it’s that Trump can also turn to the private sector to avail himself of more augmented concentric circles of information.
“He talks to business leaders with the power and levers and capital and money,” de la Torre said. “And they tell him how it is.”
And often, they do so at Mar-a-Lago.
Watchdog group: Mara-a-Lago as ‘political nexus for one-percenters’
The Palm Beach social season evolved over the past century into a timespan from late fall to mid-spring. The balmy tropical climate lures the world’s rich and famous to this town, an 8-square mile stretch of mansions, private clubs, cultural societies and restaurant rows, for exclusive luncheons, invite-only dinners and lavish philanthropic galas.
The insertion of Mar-a-Lago, as the Winter White House, onto that landscape of wealth and influence — courtesy of nearly 70 in-season trips by Trump as the 45th and 47th president — has preoccupied those nongovernment organizations watching for conflicts of interests.
Jordan Libowitz of the Committee for Ethics and Responsibility said Trump’s estate is “the political nexus for the one-percenters.”
During Trump’s first term, the Washington-based watchdog group raised red flags about the lack of transparency and ease of access to the president at Mar-a-Lago for those with significant interests before the government.
In one highly publicized episode, for example, three club members were found to have influenced policies at the Veterans Affairs department.
This White House term, however, the concerns are “just so much worse,” fears Libowitz.
“That was more of a ‘wow’ thing back then. It seems like now there’s a new story every week of someone else who has influence, or getting the president’s ear,” he said.
Libowitz pointed to reporting in May that the head the Food and Drug Administration, Dr. Marty Makary, was forced out of the post after intense pressure from a variety of corners, including the vaping industry, and Trump allies.
The principal intersection of business and government in the prior administration may have been the Trump family’s former hotel on Washington’s Pennsylvania Avenue, Libowitz said, but now it’s the for-profit private club in Palm Beach.
“Everything seems to have moved south to Florida, and I guess a little further outside of the D.C. sphere and more into the Trump business sphere,” he said. “They can just kind of waltz into the club, and you’re right there with the president and with the people who surround him in the Oval Office. You’ve got that direct line.”
Opulent gala and profit-making: The Mar-a-Lago optics
The Palm Beach season at Mar-a-Lago kicked off in October at the annual Halloween party, an opulent gala dubbed the “Great Gatsby” ball.
Social-media images and videos from festive partygoers clad in Roaring Twenties attire clashed with the persistent kitchen table struggles of middle- and working-class Americans — compounded for millions by the suspension of food assistance during the government shutdown. By the time the season ended, the Iran war closure of the Strait of Hormuz had surged gasoline prices to $4.67 a gallon for everyone in Trump’s adopted home county.
Throughout the season, though, Trump was celebrated locally with a renamed roadway and airport while polls showed his popularity crashing with the U.S. public.
People’s struggles with the cost of living further, and awkwardly, juxtaposed against the personal fortune Trump is said to have amassed while serving in the White House. Forbes’ March report put Trump’s net worth at $6.5 billion, almost three times what it was when he won the 2024 election.
“What we’re seeing now is on an entirely different scope and scale,” said Eric Petry at the Brennan Center for Justice. “The level of profiteering and the monetization of government power is unlike anything we’ve seen before. I mean, whatever number, whatever metric we’re using, the scope here is just unbelievable.”
In May, it was revealed the president benefited, too, from purchases of stocks in companies that he subsequently praised during public comments. In a statement, the Trump Organization said such financial dealings are managed by third-party financial institutions without input from the president or his family.
One case Petry highlighted was the investment by entities in the United Arab Emirates in the Trump family’s cryptocurrency enterprise before the president took office. The UAE subsequently received permission to purchase sensitive AI microchips key to artificial intelligence development.
“The administration claims that these were completely separate negotiations,” Petry acknowledged. “But it’s reasonable for the American people to wonder if this government is selling access to these really sensitive microchips for personal profit. All of this, at the very least, raises at the minimum optics concerns.”
The “optics” were weaponized in the irrevocable chasm between Trump and one of his most vocal “Make American Great Again” movement diehards, Greene. She had been a frequent fixture at Mar-a-Lago events, including a February 2024 appearance at a gold-themed, designer tuxedoes and gowns ball in which she warned that Democrats were “coming after your money.”
Blistered as a “traitor” in one social-media post rifled off from Mar-a-Lago, Greene snidely clapped back calling Trump “a billionaire president of the United States.”
Trump touts the Mar-a-Lago ‘treatment’
Real estate investor Steve Witkoff stood out of camera view, nodding approvingly at Trump’s Venezuela raid victory lap at Mar-a-Lago on Jan. 3.
Witkoff, whose company’s Palm Beach County holdings include The Belgrove resort, has been a central figure along with Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law, in Trump’s peace campaigns from Gaza to Ukraine to Iran.
Trump has often praised business-universe allies, like Witkoff, for aiding in his political winning. In a May 1 speech in West Palm Beach during his final visit this season, Trump gave sugar titan Pepe Fanjul a shout-out, as well as to businessman Bill Pulte, who leads the federal housing finance agency.
“With the support of many people in this room, a lot of them, we had the most successful first year of any administration in history,” he said.
The president also waxed about the “amazing” refurbishment of the White House, which he said he “fixed.” Trump has added gold decor to the Oval Office, a paved patio over the former Rose Garden and demolished the iconic East Wing for an ornate ballroom.
Trump then said what seemed like allegorical symbolism in the 1600 Pennsylvania makeover and his inclusion of executive and billionaire peers for roles, support and guidance in governing.
“I gave it the Mar-a-Lago treatment,” he boasted.
Antonio Fins is a politics and business editor at The Palm Beach Post, part of the USA TODAY Florida Network. You can reach him at afins@pbpost.com. Help support our journalism. Subscribe today.
This article originally appeared on Palm Beach Post: Trump at Mar-a-Lago: A Palm Beach social season for the history books
Reporting by Antonio Fins, Palm Beach Post / Palm Beach Post
USA TODAY Network via Reuters Connect
By Antonio Fins, Palm Beach Post | USA TODAY Network
