Standing at the bar at Mar-a-Lago, the outrageously ornate Palm Beach, Florida, mansion built by breakfast-cereal heiress Marjorie Merriweather Post in the Roaring 20s and turned into a private club in 1995 by Donald Trump, I awaited the arrival of the 45th president-elect of the United States. He was coming that mid-November weekend, as he had done so often for the past 30 years. But in so many ways he was already there.

He was there in the minds of his club’s 500 members, who love the place enough to pay a $100,000 initiation fee, plus $14,000 in annual dues. He was there in the Trump wines we were drinking, from the Virginia vineyards run by his son Eric. And he was there in the adoring eyes of the bartender, who motioned to two portraits on the library bar’s walls, telling me, “That’s Marjorie Merriweather Post on the left and Mr. Trump—I mean, Mr. President—on the right.”

The portraits couldn’t be more different: Mrs. Post’s is small and plain, while Donald J. Trump’s, by Palm Beach artist Ralph Wolfe Cowan, is monumental. Clad in tennis whites, with a ray of heavenly Palm Beach sun beaming over his left shoulder, Trump is depicted as a bronzed, blond-haired god, or, as a plaque at the bottom of the frame proclaims, “The Visionary.”

Most of all, though, Donald Trump was there as the protagonist of the newest chapter in Palm Beach’s history: the loud, new-money outsider who came to town—one of the richest and most insular towns in America—and, through the titanic force of his personality, forced the scandalized Old Guard to bend to his will. And it begins, really, with the word “no.”

Not one “no,” but a barrage of them. Starting with the unanimous “No” vote of the town council when Trump appeared before it, in April 1992.

Trump arrived in Palm Beach with his family in the 1980s, a snowbird who had flown in from New York. He was so impressed with the town, its beach, and its golf courses that he placed a security deposit on an apartment at the Breakers, the storied resort hotel and condominium complex overlooking the Atlantic. “He was trying to put two penthouses together so there would be enough room for his kids,” the Breakers sales director later said. But “it couldn’t be done.”

One winter evening in 1985, according to an account Trump later wrote in Trump: The Art of the Comeback, he was being chauffeured to a dinner party when he asked the driver, “What’s for sale in town that’s really good?”

“Well, the best thing by far is Mar-a-Lago, but I guess you wouldn’t be talking about that,” the driver replied, probably thinking that no mortal could afford it.

“I asked him what Mar-a-Lago was,” Trump recalled.

Hearing the gilded story of the biggest house in the richest town, Trump ordered an immediate detour. He was driven through the quiet streets behind whose 12-foot hedges resided the historically understated gentry of America—Kennedys, Du Ponts, Fords, Pulitzers—until they arrived at an estate as grandiose as the aspirations of the Queens-born, 39-year-old real-estate developer in the limousine’s backseat.

Inside Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago



1 / 11 Chevron Chevron By PETER LANGONE/LICKERISH/CPI. Donald Trump in the Mar-a-Lago living room in 2009.

From the street Trump stared across the 17 acres of grounds at a phantasmagoria of a home that humbled even him. Mar-a-Lago was named for its location, the property stretching from the ocean to Lake Worth. With interiors designed by Ziegfeld Follies scenic designer Joseph Urban, it was the fantasy of “an American in love with the artistic splendor of Europe . . . [with] Hispano-Moorish tiles of Spain; the frescoes of Florence; Venetian arches to introduce and frame water passages . . . and a ninety-foot castle tower for unimpeded panoramas of sea and sky,” according to a description in Town & Country. There were 128 rooms over 110,000 square feet, with 58 bedrooms, 33 bathrooms, a ballroom (where Mrs. Post held her celebrated square dances), a theater, and a nine-hole golf course.