Year after year, Trump staged extravagant end-of-the-year events, greeting the guests and, later in the evening, speaking effusively about life past and present. By 2005, the celebration had moved into the newly gilded Donald J. Trump Ballroom, and Trump’s rococo message reached even new heights. That year, he was on the arm of his very pregnant bride, whom he paraded around like a broodmare, having Melania stand up “so you can all see what I’ve done to her.”

On the last night of 2016, when president-elect Trump walked into the ballroom to greet the 800 guests for his final New Year’s Eve as a civilian, he knew immediately that he was entering a different world. Part of it was that Hollywood and the music industry had turned their back on him. In previous years, guests had included Woody Allen, Serena Williams, Martha Stewart, and Rod Stewart, but that evening few people of note turned up. The celebrity roster began and ended with two men whose glory years were in the previous century, Sylvester Stallone and Fabio. No entertainer of contemporary significance was about to risk his or her career being associated with Trump.

One of the reasons Trump loved Mar-a-Lago was because he felt so comfortable there. He didn’t know the names of most of the members, but he knew their faces, and he felt right around them. That night, however, as he looked out on his golden ballroom, there were hundreds of faces he was seeing for the first time. People had finagled all kinds of ways to be at Mar-a-Lago, including a good number of new members—mainly conservative Republicans—making one of their first appearances at the club.

“I want to thank my members,” Trump said, speaking to the crowd and spotting the faces he knew. “I don’t really care too much about their guests, because the ones I really care about are the members. I don’t give a shit about their guests. I just love my members.”

There was something unsettling about his rude dismissal of about half the people in the ballroom, and his discordant comments were not over. In the back of the room stood a number of reporters. “It was dishonest media,” he told the crowd that cheered his every sentence. “In fact, a lot of them are back there…the dishonest media. The dishonest media, right? Are they dishonest? They are the world’s most dishonest people…They are really garbage.”

Much of the crowd loved his attack, and some of them would have happily tossed the journalists out. And yet, as exhilarated as many of them may have been, politics had entered Mar-a-Lago on the most celebratory and non-political of evenings, and it had entered it in an ugly way. It would stay and Mar-a-Lago would never again be the same.

Trump is all for charging whatever the traffic will bear. For this New Year’s Eve gala, the club decided to raise the prices as high as they had ever been, with the exception of the millennium bash. Members learned they would be charged $650 plus service fees, while their guests would pay $1,000 plus service charge and tax, for a grand total of around $1,240. The sweetest part of it for Trump is that Mar-a-Lago keeps the service charge—none of it goes to the harried wait staff.

Those individuals who thought they won the lottery when they wrangled invitations will be big-time losers when the president proves conspicuously missing, staying in the White House during the government shutdown. There have been all kinds of last-minute cancellations. Since it’s within seven days, there’s no refund, but the only reason these people were coming was to be with the president, and they quickly made other plans.

As far as Trump’s presence in the club, for some members the bloom is off the rose and the petals are falling. “Trump will be most missed by those who monitor the bottom line,” says one longtime member. “People are cancelling their dinner reservations in droves, though in some ways it’s a more pleasant club when Trump isn’t here. There’s not the massive security getting in and out, and the atmosphere is more casual and easy-going. But New Year’s Eve will not be the same without Trump.”