Best-connected. On any given weekend, you might catch President Donald J. Trump’s son-in-law and top Mideast dealmaker, Jared Kushner, by the beachside soft-serve ice-cream machine, or his reclusive chief strategist, Stephen Bannon, on the dining patio. If you are lucky, the president himself could stop by your table for a quick chat. But you will have to pay $200,000 for the privilege—and the few available spots are going fast.
Virtually overnight, Mar-a-Lago, Trump’s members-only Palm Beach, Florida, club, has been transformed into the part-time capital of US government, a winter White House where Trump has entertained a foreign head of state, health-care industry executives and other presidential guests.
But Trump’s gatherings at Mar-a-Lago—he arrived there Friday afternoon, his third weekend visit in a row—have also created an arena for potential political influence rarely seen in US history: a kind of Washington steakhouse on steroids, situated in a sunny playground of the rich and powerful, where members and their guests enjoy a level of access that could elude even the best-connected of lobbyists.
Membership lists reviewed by The New York Times show that the club’s nearly 500 paying members include dozens of real-estate developers, Wall Street financiers, energy executives and others whose businesses could be affected by Trump’s policies. At least three club members are under consideration for an ambassadorship. Most of the 500 have had memberships predating Trump’s presidential campaign, and there are a limited number of memberships still available.
Members
WILLIAM I. Koch, who oversees a major mining and fuels company, belongs to Mar-a-Lago, as does billionaire trader Thomas Peterffy, who spent more than $8 million on political ads in 2012 warning of creeping socialism in the United States.
Another member is George Norcross, an insurance executive and the South Jersey Democratic Party boss, whose friendship with Trump dates to the president’s Atlantic City years, when Norcross held insurance contracts with Trump’s casinos, and Trump wrangled with the state’s Democratic leaders over tax treatment of the properties. Yet, another member is Janet Weiner, part owner and CFO of the Rockstar energy-drink company, which has spent hundreds of thousands of dollars lobbying federal officials to avoid tighter regulations on its products.
Bruce Toll, a real-estate executive who cofounded Toll Brothers, one of the nation’s largest homebuilders, and who is still active in the industry, owns a home nearby and frequently sees Trump at Mar-a-Lago, he said. While they did not discuss any of Toll’s specific projects, he said, the two would occasionally discuss national issues, such as Trump’s plans to increase spending on highways and other infrastructure projects.
“Maybe you ought to do this or that,” Toll said of the kind of advice that Trump got from club members.
Unfair
TRUMP’S son Eric, in an interview on Friday, rejected suggestions that his family was offering access to his father and profiting from it.
First, he said, only 20 to 40 new members are admitted per year, and second, the wealthy business executives who frequent the club, among others, have many ways to communicate with the federal government if they want to.
“It assumes the worst of us and everyone, and that is unfair,” Eric Trump said.
Hope Hicks, a White House spokesman, said the president had no conflicts of interest, a reference to the fact that federal law exempts him from provisions prohibiting federal employees from taking actions that could benefit themselves financially.
“But regardless, he has not and will not be discussing policy with club members,” she said in a written statement.
Mar-a-Lago, she added, is “one of the most successful private clubs in the world,” and it “was intended to be the Southern White House, and the president looks forward to hosting many world leaders at this remarkable property.”
Administration priority
KOCH—the estranged brother of his better-known siblings, Charles G. and David H.—owns a home in Palm Beach and hosted a fund-raiser for Trump during the campaign. His company, Oxbow Carbon, is among the world’s largest sellers of petroleum coke, an oil byproduct and would be a significant beneficiary of the Keystone XL pipeline, construction of which is a Trump administration priority.
Brad Goldstein, a spokesman for William Koch, said he did not know whether the two men had ever discussed policy matters. “If I did know,” Goldstein added, “the answer would be that I decline to comment.”
Historically, of course, US presidents have often been rich men with mansions, who sometimes conducted the people’s business in weekend haunts of the wealthy: the Bush compound in Kennebunkport, Maine, for example, or the Kennedy family home in Hyannisport, Massachusetts.
‘The gang’
PRESIDENT Dwight D. Eisenhower joined the elite Augusta National Golf Club before he was elected, frequently hanging out there with a group of affluent businessmen who became known as “the gang,” which included top executives from Coca-Cola and an oil company, an investment banker and a lawyer-financier-lobbyist.
But Trump’s weekend White House appears to be unprecedented in US history, as it is the first one with customers paying a company owned by the president, several historians said.
“Mar-a-Lago represents a commercialization of the presidency that has few if any precedents in American history,” said Jon Meacham, a presidential historian and Andrew Jackson biographer. “Presidents have always spent time with the affluent,” he added. “But a club where people pay you as president to spend time in his company is new. It is kind of amazing.”
Increasing cash flow
CHRISTOPHER Ruddy, chief executive of Newsmax Media and a longtime donor to and a friend of the president, said Trump had always conducted what amounted to informal focus groups on a variety of topics, but that face time with him since the election had become restricted to family and old friends.
“It’s a myth to think that anybody could just join the club and go speak to the president,” Ruddy said, adding that the Secret Service has instituted a de facto rope line around the president’s table in recent weeks, which several other club members confirmed.
But the weekly gatherings at Mar-a-Lago have drawn some scrutiny from Democrats in the Senate, who called for Trump to release a list of all of the members.
“Your winter White House will provide an audience with you for those who can afford it, not to mention an increasing cash flow into your family-run organization,” Sens. Sheldon Whitehouse, D-R.I., and Tom Udall, D-N.M., wrote in a letter sent to Trump this month. “Instead of draining the swamp, it appears you’re bringing Washington right to the swamps at Mar-a-Lago.”
Brief interlude
ONE longtime member is Richard LeFrak, a fellow New York developer and one of Trump’s closest friends, who, in turn, has recruited some of his own friends to join. Jeff Greene, a Senate candidate in Florida in 2010, said he had joined at the urging of LeFrak.
But Mar-a-Lago, where Trump’s old New York circle blurs easily into his presidency, is a place where the president of the US might seek guidance on a major government project the way another New Yorker might ask around for a good orthopedist.
When LeFrak paid a visit to Trump at Mar-a-Lago last weekend, he appeared a little startled when Trump, in a brief interlude during the conversation, told him that the Department of Homeland Security was quoting a price of more than $20 billion for the proposed border wall with Mexico.
Image credits: Stephen Crowley/The New York Times