Donald Trump and his fiancée, Melania Knauss, pictured in April, 2004; the couple were married the next year, in Palm Beach. Photograph by Stuart Ramson / AP

I have an abnormally poor autobiographical memory, but I am certain that in January, 2005, I attended the wedding of Melania Knauss and Donald Trump. I was there as the plus-one of my wife at the time, who had spent a few days in Melania’s company while reporting a cover story for Vogue about Melania’s wedding dress—a Christian Dior cone of white satin, from which the beautiful bride and her fuming sixteen-foot veil materialized as if from a volcano. I had met neither Melania Knauss nor Donald Trump, but, according to the Tiffany-produced invitation, they requested the honor of my presence at their marriage, at the Episcopal Church of Bethesda-by-the-Sea, in Palm Beach, and thereafter at a reception at the Mar-a-Lago Club.

I mentioned this to a few friends, and only one—a poet—took issue with my intent to accept the invitation. Trump, in those days, was merely a self-publicizing real-estate guy who had recently scored a big hit with “The Apprentice,” in which he played the part of a judicious and masterly business magnate. I took the poet’s abhorrence to be more aesthetic than political, and, even if it were the latter, even if she had, in fact, given voice to a sense that a gathering of the very rich and powerful ought to be met with nothing but one’s rejection, there was no question, from an anthropological perspective, of not going. Claude Lévi-Strauss, who presumably hated partying and partiers, would have made the trip to the subtropics. But he wasn’t invited.

We flew south on the eve of the big day and checked into a cheap hotel in West Palm Beach. The next morning, we were told that we’d been expected at Mar-a-Lago itself. That had to have been an error. Even a palazzo like Mar-a-Lago has a finite number of guest rooms, and surely these were going to accommodate the happy couple’s innermost social circle, and surely my wife’s agreeable but plainly journalistic interactions with Melania could not have propelled her, plus me, into the sanctum sanctorum. But they had. Nothing less than a room in the main house was ours to occupy. Any lingering concerns about mistaken identity were removed when we discovered, in the bathroom, his-and-hers Mar-a-Lago Club bathrobes, each embroidered with the club crest and a monogram of our initials.

The wedding was not till the evening. In the meantime, guests were invited to make full use of the Mar-a-Lago Club’s spa facilities, including massages, and of the nearby Trump International Golf Club—the first example of the many client-entertainment, cost, and branding synergies that would characterize the occasion. (The Trump wedding, if it isn’t already, maybe ought to be taught as a case study at Wharton.) I chose to play a round of golf. Because it involves sport, I remember the circumstances reasonably well.

The golf course looked like the set of an old Tarzan movie: man-made knolls and lakes; fairways bordered by countless newly planted palm trees; and, at one par three, an unapologetically fake cliff tricked up with artificial waterfalls. Unexpectedly, the course’s most memorable feature was an immense and forbidding concrete building that loomed just out of bounds. This was the Palm Beach County Main Detention Center, somebody told me. Evidently, the detainees fell into the habit of screaming at the passing golfers, many of whom had paid hundreds of thousands of dollars for the privilege of joining the golf club, and it wasn’t until Trump donated some flat-screen televisions to the jail that things quieted down in there. Certainly, I heard no screams when I walked by.

My playing partners were two amiable guys in their sixties, who worked in real estate and chatted about the résumés of the pilots they employed. They were also in town for the wedding, although neither seemed to know Trump that well. It interested one of them that I was a writer. He told me that the thriller writer James Patterson lived nearby and often played this very course, and that he, the real-estate developer, had a thriller of his own all figured out. For the duration of several holes, he related its plot in great detail. It had something to do with—I may not have got this right—serial killers serially killing detectives who themselves serially killed serial killers.

The wedding started at seven o’clock. The gentleman sitting to my right was Pat O’Brien, then of “Access Hollywood” and “The Insider” fame. He appeared, when rising to his feet or kneeling, to be engaged in a tough physical struggle. Indeed, there reigned in the church a slight atmosphere of indignity, produced, it seemed to me, by the fact that lots of personalities had to squeeze themselves into rock-hard egalitarian pews, as if they were just a bunch of Joe Blows. This atmosphere was only intensified by the unmentionable incongruity of, on the one hand, the wedding’s V.I.P. and Ultra-High Net Worth ethos and, on the other hand, the ethos of the church, which recognized only one Very Important Being, of Incommensurable Net Worth.

The newlyweds looked very pleased and happy as they walked back from the altar; far was it for me, their friend, to poke a nose into what was going on in their hearts and in their brand-new, instantly opaque marriage. Melania looked lovely, and the fifty-eight-year-old Donald—as a friend of the family, I was bound to call him and his wife by their Christian names, even if Donald reportedly liked being called “Mr. Trump”—looked uncharacteristically bashful; bashful, that is, by comparison with his character on “The Apprentice.” My impression was that he was in awe of some of the people who clapped as he made his way down the aisle, specifically those who exceeded him in the matter of net fame. But there was no reason for awe. Donald’s high status in the tabloids and on TV was clearly respected by everyone. (His career as an educator was not yet visible: Trump University opened its doors later that year.) As for those very few who didn’t watch TV or read the tabloids, or respect these media, surely even these miseries bore the groom the respectful good will one naturally bears any person who has just committed himself, for the third time, to the noble and demanding sacrament of marriage. About his latest union, Donald had predicted, in People, “I think it will be very successful.”

We all headed off to the reception. Here was Simon Cowell, waving at the roaring, cordoned-off crowd of real people gathered on South Ocean Boulevard; over there, by the swimming pool, was Shaquille O’Neal; and hither and thither went Barbara Walters. I don’t recall seeing Senator Clinton and her husband, but they were definitely in the house. Paul Anka and Billy Joel I for sure laid eyes on. There were stars everywhere. Either they were walking slowly somewhere, glass in hand, or they were just standing there, glass in hand. When I eavesdropped on one star-to-star conversation, I overheard a discussion about the humidity or lack of it, or maybe the middlingness of it. Basically, they were just shooting the breeze with a lot of humbleness. It was extraordinary, and most extraordinary of all was that everyone was furtively rubbernecking everybody else. Imagine a room that is empty except for a large population of flies on the wall.