Mar-a-Lago

• 1. Introduction

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  Mar-a-Lago means "sea to lake" in Spanish, and the name is a plain description of the land. The estate stretches across Palm Beach Island in Florida, from the Atlantic Ocean on the east to the Lake Worth Lagoon on the west. It holds 126 rooms and about 62,500 square feet of building on 17 acres. Few private houses in America have drawn so many people through their gates, or so many arguments. Why would a nation refuse a mansion left to it in a will? How does a seaside resort end up hosting foreign leaders, lawsuits and a federal search warrant? The answers begin with a fortune built on breakfast cereal.

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• 2. Cereal Fortune

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  Marjorie Merriweather Post, heiress to the Post Cereals business and later the wealthiest woman in the United States, paid for the house with her husband Edward F. Hutton. They built it during the Florida land boom of the 1920s. She hired Marion Sims Wyeth as designer and Joseph Urban for the interior design and exterior decorations. Post spent US$7 million, and the house was finished in 1927.

  Hutton and Post used it as their winter residence, typically staying from mid January to late March. Post hosted dinner parties, charity events, concerts and costume balls. She even hosted a circus.

  The parties slowed in 1935, when Hutton and Post divorced. Post then married the Washington lawyer Joseph E. Davies, who was appointed ambassador to the Soviet Union. Mar-a-Lago was closed for five seasons. Post made only brief visits in the early 1940s and did not stay at the estate from 1941 to 1948. In April 1944 the house became a training center for returning servicemen.

  Post came back in 1948 and began hosting again. Since 1957 the estate has traditionally held the International Red Cross gala. In 1961 a pavilion with a 30 by 50 foot dance floor was built for square dance evenings. Those evenings belonged to a style of Palm Beach life that was already fading by the 1960s.

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• 3. Stone and Tile

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  Three boatloads of Doria limestone crossed from Genoa to face the walls of Mar-a-Lago. The fossil-bearing stone was chosen because it ages quickly and carves well. It appears in the exterior wall facing, in some interior structures, in arches, and in the Barwig sculptures.

  The style is Spanish Revival. The house is a Mediterranean-style villa, adapted from the Hispano-Moresque architecture that was popular in Palm Beach at the time. A two-story central block holds the family quarters, while lower wings and buildings hold the service areas. Post chose this arrangement to keep the main house from looking too massive and to separate the family and service areas from the rooms used for entertaining. A seventy-five foot, tile-roofed tower rises above it, with bedrooms, baths and an observation deck that looks out over Palm Beach.

  About 20,000 roofing tiles and 2,200 black and white marble floor blocks came from a Cuban castle. The entrance hall, patio, cloisters and some rooms use Spanish tiles from a collection of nearly 36,000 gathered by Henry O. and Louisine Havemeyer. The Havemeyers believed the tiles came from a villa of Charles V in Guadix. They were actually 20th-century imitations.

  The house has 58 bedrooms, 33 bathrooms, 12 fireplaces and three bomb shelters. Its dining room holds a 29 foot table topped with pietra dura marble. In 2012 members of the Florida chapter of the American Institute of Architects ranked Mar-a-Lago fifth on their list of Florida Architecture: 100 Years. 100 Places.

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• 4. From Gift to Purchase

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  "An excellent picture of winter resort life in Palm Beach prior to the Depression." That was how a Department of the Interior report described Mar-a-Lago when the estate was designated a national historic site in 1969. By then social tastes had changed, and many mansions built in the 1920s had been demolished.

  Post died in 1973 and willed the 17 acre estate to the United States government. She hoped presidents and visiting foreign dignitaries would use it as a Winter White House. Richard Nixon preferred the Florida White House in Key Biscayne, and Jimmy Carter was not interested. The government soon found that maintenance cost far more than Post had provided, and that the property was hard to secure. An act of Congress, numbered 96-586 and dated the 23rd of December 1980, returned it to the Post Foundation.

  The estate was listed for sale at $20 million. Post's daughters, including Dina Merrill, did not maintain it while they waited for a buyer. Interest was so low that demolition was approved. In 1980 the property was also declared a National Historic Landmark, for exemplifying "the baronial way of life of the wealthy who built mansions in Florida during the Florida land boom of the 1920s."

  Donald Trump, then known mainly as a businessman and real estate investor, first offered the Post family $15 million. They rejected it. He then bought the land between Mar-a-Lago and the ocean from Jack C. Massey, the former owner of KFC, for $2 million. Trump said he meant to build a house there that would block Mar-a-Lago's beach view. Competing interest in the estate declined.

  Trump bought the property in 1985 for $7 million. Different sources put the combined cost at around $10 million. The minimum acceptable bid had been $20 million, and the interior furnishings alone had been appraised at $8 million.

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• 5. Club Life

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  Trouble with bankers in the early 1990s pushed Trump toward a drastic idea. While negotiating with them, he tried to divide Mar-a-Lago into smaller properties, which alarmed Palm Beach residents. The town council rejected the plan. In 1995 he instead turned the estate into a private club, fighting what he saw as excessive restrictions along the way.

  The renovations stayed largely true to the original style. They added a 20,000 square foot ballroom, and the grounds now include five clay tennis courts and a waterfront pool. Trump's wife at the time, Ivana Trump, managed the property. The new club hosted concerts by Celine Dion and Billy Joel. Michael Jackson and Lisa Marie Presley had spent their honeymoon there in 1994, and a biography says they first kissed there. In 2005 Trump married Melania Knauss at Mar-a-Lago, with Bill and Hillary Clinton among the guests.

  Membership has been priced as a statement. The initiation fee was $200,000, and it was cut to $100,000 in 2012, reportedly after the Bernie Madoff scandal hurt demand among wealthy Palm Beach residents. It returned to $200,000 in January 2017, with $14,000 annual dues. Overnight guests paid up to $2,000 a night. In 2024 the fee rose from $700,000 to $1 million, with annual dues of $20,000.

  In January 2017 the club was nearly at its limit of 500 paying members and admitted twenty to forty new ones a year. Members that year included oil executive Bill Koch, financier Thomas Peterffy, developer Richard LeFrak and NFL coach Bill Belichick. The list has long been kept secret. The 2020 book The Grifter's Club used old membership records to confirm that Jeffrey Epstein had been a member until 2007. The records list his account as "Account closed 10/07" rather than "Resigned."

  The club's reputation has had setbacks. After Trump's remarks on the August 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, six nonprofit organizations canceled gala events there, including the American Red Cross and the American Cancer Society. Florida inspectors noted 15 infractions in January 2017, among them unsafe seafood, insufficiently refrigerated meats and cooks without hairnets. A state spokesman said they were corrected on site. Since 2013 the club has faced 51 health code violations.

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• 6. Winter White House

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  On the weekend of the 10th-the 12th of February 2017, Trump and his wife Melania hosted Japanese prime minister Shinzo Abe and his wife at Mar-a-Lago. It was the first time the property had entertained an international leader, a task traditionally done at the White House. A North Korean missile launch struck that same weekend, and Trump and Abe conferred in full view of the other diners.

  Trump called the estate his "Winter White House" and sometimes his "Southern White House." His first visit as president came on the weekend of the 3rd-the 6th of February 2017, when he hosted the Diamond Red Cross Ball. He watched Super Bowl LI the next day at the Trump International Golf Club in West Palm Beach. During the third weekend visit, he interviewed candidates for National Security Advisor. On the 20th of February 2017 he named General H. R. McMaster to succeed Michael Flynn, who had recently been terminated.

  On his visit of the 6th-the 9th of April 2017, Trump hosted Chinese president Xi Jinping for the first two days. At Mar-a-Lago, the decision to strike a Syrian airfield was made. A Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility operated on the grounds, linking Trump to the White House Situation Room and the Pentagon. It was removed after he left office. An informal group called the Mar-a-Lago Crowd, which oversaw many activities of the Department of Veterans Affairs, met at the club often.

  After the fourth weekend visit, on the 3rd-the 5th of March 2017, questions arose about the access that paying members had to the president. Democratic senators asked for the visitor logs and the member list. The "Mar-a-Lago Act" was introduced to require publishing logs of visitors wherever the president does business. After a lawsuit, a judge ordered in July 2017 that the logs be released in September.

  A promotional blog post caused another stir. On the 4th of April 2017, ShareAmerica, a State Department website, described Mar-a-Lago's history. The U.S. embassies in the United Kingdom and Albania shared it. On the 24th of April, senator Ron Wyden, Nancy Pelosi and former ambassador Norman Eisen questioned the use of government resources to promote Trump's private property. By the 25th, all three posts were gone. ShareAmerica wrote, "We regret any misperception and have removed the post."

  The visits kept coming. Trump returned for Thanksgiving in 2017 and spent a tenth presidential visit there at Christmas. In 2018 he visited eight times before the club's seasonal closing in May, including a summit with Abe on the 17th-the 18th of April. He canceled his Christmas 2018 trip because of a federal government shutdown. On the 7th of March 2020 he hosted Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro for a working dinner. Bolsonaro's press secretary later tested positive for COVID-19, after attending along with Vice President Mike Pence, Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner.

  Whenever the president was in residence, the Palm Beach region became a zone of temporary flight restrictions with a radius of 30 nautical miles. The Coast Guard and Secret Service secured the ocean and lake approaches, and the Secret Service cordoned off nearby streets. Palm Beach County Park Airport, also called Lantana Airport, was shut for three consecutive weekends by the third weekend in February 2017, and nearby businesses suffered heavy losses.

  Intruders tested the perimeter. On the 30th of March 2019, Chinese national Yujing Zhang was arrested and charged with unlawful entry and making false statements to federal law enforcement officials. More Chinese nationals were arrested for trespassing in December 2019. Zijie Li tried to enter the property at least three times in 2024. In August 2022 the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reported that a woman who used a fake name and claimed to be a Rothschild heiress had visited for a year, posing for photos with Trump and Senator Lindsey Graham.

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• 7. Disputes and Valuation

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  On the 3rd of October 2006, Trump raised a 20 by 30 foot American flag on an 80 foot flagpole at Mar-a-Lago. Town zoning rules limited flagpoles to 42 feet, and the Palm Beach town council fined him $1,250 for every day the flag stayed up. Trump sued the town, then dropped the suit in exchange for the town waiving its fines. Mediation let him keep a pole 10 feet shorter, in a different spot. He also donated $100,000 to veterans' charities, and the town changed its ordinances to allow out-of-town club members.

  An earlier fight with the town came in November 1996. Trump asked the council to lift restrictions that limited media photography, filmmaking, land sales, membership and traffic at the club. The council said no. In December 1997 he filed a federal lawsuit alleging that the town discriminated against his club because it accepted Jewish and African-American members, and because town officials had financial stakes in competing clubs.

  Aircraft noise produced a series of suits against Palm Beach County. The first, in 1995, settled in 1996, with the county agreeing to change flight patterns so the noisiest jets flew over a wider area. As part of the settlement, Trump leased 215 acres from the county and built the 18-hole Trump International Golf Club there. A 2010 suit against a second commercial runway was dismissed. In January 2015 he sued for $100 million. In November 2015 a judge dismissed four of six claims. Trump dropped the case after winning the presidency, since a no-fly zone was likely. In January 2017 Palm Beach exempted Mar-a-Lago from its ban on landing helicopters on residential properties, including Marine One.

  In September 2019 Mar-a-Lago became the primary residence of Donald and Melania Trump. That was disputed, because a 1993 use agreement with the town limited guests, including Trump, to no more than three non-consecutive weeks a year. In December 2020 neighbors sent a demand letter asking the town to tell Trump he could not live there. In 2021 the town's attorney concluded that the zoning code allowed employees to reside at private clubs, and that Trump's paperwork listed him as an employee. His listed duties included greeting guests and recommending candidates for membership.

  Numbers about the property's worth disagree sharply. Trump received a $17 million insurance payment after the 2005 hurricane season, though his former butler Anthony Senecal said the house had never been seriously damaged. In 1995 Trump agreed to a deed that bars any use other than as a social club, and in 2002 he agreed to a conservation easement preventing further development. In 2022 Forbes estimated the estate at around $350 million. A New York court found that from 2011 to 2021 Palm Beach County assessed it at $18 million to $27.6 million, while Trump's financial statements said $427 million to $627 million. New York Attorney General Letitia James alleged in 2022 that a fair value was $75 million, not the $739 million claimed.

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• 8. After the White House

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  Fifteen boxes of material were retrieved from Mar-a-Lago in January 2022 by the National Archives and Records Administration. Trump had taken a large volume of presidential records there on leaving the White House in January 2021, though such records fall under the Presidential Records Act. The boxes included documents clearly marked as classified, and the Department of Justice restricted details about their contents.

  On the 11th of May 2022, the Justice Department sent Trump a grand jury subpoena for any further documents marked classified. A later subpoena asked for surveillance footage from the club. On the 8th of August 2022, FBI agents presented a search warrant and searched Trump's residence at Mar-a-Lago. The Secret Service facilitated access, and one of Trump's lawyers was present.

  Trump had gone to live at Mar-a-Lago at the end of his term, and set up an office under the Former Presidents Act. Republican candidates, including Trump, kept holding fundraisers there. The New York Times labeled his influence over the party the "Mar-a-Lago machine." The estate hosted watch parties for the 2022 elections on the 8th of November 2022 and for Super Tuesday on the 5th of March 2024. During his 2024 campaign Trump hosted Benjamin Netanyahu there.

  On the night of the 2024 presidential election, Trump's official watch party was at the Palm Beach County Convention Center, where he gave his victory speech. At Mar-a-Lago he hosted a more exclusive watch party and several private dinners. Guests included his extended family, close friends and club members, along with Elon Musk, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Dana White and Vivek Ramaswamy. Foreign guests included Nigel Farage and Eduardo Bolsonaro. After the election, Mar-a-Lago became the base for his second transition, as the president-elect chose nominees for his administration.

  The perimeter that guards the estate was breached again in February 2026. An armed man was fatally shot after getting past the security line. Trump was not at Mar-a-Lago at the time.

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