Amid the many scandals threatening to tear down the White House brewing barely beneath the surface, it is easy to lose sight of the audacious pay-to-play operation President Donald Trump is not even trying to conceal. Such was the case this past weekend, like three of the six weekends before it, when Trump flew south to Florida, to unwind at Mar-a-Lago, his private Palm Beach resort.

The retreat did little to ease the president’s frayed nerves, after a week in which Attorney General Jeff Session recused himself from the federal investigation into the Trump campaign’s alleged Kremlin ties after it was revealed that the former senator had not told the truth during about his own conversations with a Russian official. Trump, who was reportedly infuriated by the whole affair, awoke in his palatial South Florida club and began tweeting a series of unsubstantiated claims about Barack Obama, who he accused of wiretapping Trump Tower. Later, he calmed down enough to make the decision to go forward with a new, slightly tweaked version of his executive order banning immigration from several majority-Muslim countries.

It was not all work and self-created political crises. At times, the “Winter White House” had the air of a family reunion, with Trump’s daughter Ivanka, son-in-law and senior adviser Jared Kushner, and their three children all soaking in the Palm Beach sun alongside their patriarch. White House strategist Stephen Bannon flew down separately to meet his boss there, where he reportedly sat in on a working dinner with Jeff Sessions, Secretary of Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly, White House counsel Don McGahn, and Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross.

Sessions, perhaps more than anyone, embraced the slower pace of South Florida life after a trying week on the job. As the Palm Beach Post reported, Sessions greeted guests and shook hands as he made his way around the resort, giving paying members, once again, a front-row seat to the presidency.

Trump, too, was once again a willing, gracious host. He had, hours earlier, sparked a firestorm when he tweeted, without any apparent warning to his staff, that Obama had spied on him. His longtime friend and Newsmax C.E.O. Christopher Ruddy, who wrote that he spoken to the president twice on Saturday in Florida, said he hadn’t “seen him this pissed off in a long time.”

But ever the showman, Trump did not miss the opportunity to put on a good face for the members and charities who pay him tens thousands of dollars to patronize his business. The Palm Beach Post reported that the president wandered into a gala in the club’s ballroom held to benefit the Bascom Palmer Eye Institute, shaking hands and mingling with members.

This has become a pattern for Trump: he spends the weeks in Washington, heads down to Palm Beach for the weekends, where he plays golf during the day (so far, he has played eight rounds since he took office) and sits down for official business over dinner at night (including this weekend’s meal with Sessions, Ross, and Bannon, and, before that, his now infamous dinner with Japanese prime minister Shinzo Abe, during which guests snapped photos of the two leaders handling a sudden diplomatic crisis). Later, he usually meanders through various events, like weddings, and galas at the club to make paying members happy.

This unfettered access to a sitting president by a privileged few is unprecedented, particularly because Trump stands to financially benefit from those interested in the access he provides to himself and his Cabinet. Mar-a-Lago, from which Trump has not divested, doubled its initiation fee, days before his inauguration, to $200,000, and doubled its annual dues. But it’s a small price to pay for those lining up to rub elbows with the president and his advisers. “Everyone wants to be close to the president,” a new member recently told Politico, noting that dinner reservations are now all booked weeks in advance. Charities that book events at the venue are also experiencing a Trump bump. The Lincoln Day Dinner gala set for later this month, for example, sold out earlier this year. “That was without confirming a speaker,” the chairman of Palm Beach’s G.O.P. told Politico. “They want to be able to say ‘I had dinner at the president’s house.’ ”