Melania Trump waited at the bottom of the stairs leading down from Air Force One on Friday afternoon, just after her husband, President Donald Trump, landed on the tarmac at Palm Beach International Airport. The caped sleeves of her cherry-red Givenchy mini-dress blew back as she embraced her husband, whom she hadn’t seen since his inaugural weekend two weeks earlier. And what a tumultuous couple of weeks it had been for him. As Melania decamped to her Trump Tower triplex in Manhattan in order to keep life as relatively normal as possible for their son, Barron, the president has been under siege in the Oval Office.

His first fortnight in the White House has been dogged by a shocking number of reports of incompetency and infighting in the West Wing; millions of people have protested his election outside his door and across the globe; the press has repeatedly questioned his administration’s relationship to the truth and come down on his enduring fixation on the election results, which came in months ago, and inaugural crowd sizes, which were far smaller than his press secretary claimed. Most troublesome for the new administration was the rollout of an executive order that temporarily bans immigration from seven majority-Muslim countries and halts refugees from entering the United States. The order, which Trump called “extreme vetting” necessary for national security, immediately sparked global protests, confused airport officials, and angered agency officials, who said they did not feel that they were given enough time to tweak the plan. Within hours, a handful of judges across the country had deemed that such an order violated the law. A week later, a federal judge in Washington state temporarily shut down the ban in order to fulfill “its constitutional role in our tri-part government.”

On his third weekend into the job, Trump decided it was time for a little vacation. Along with his chief of staff Reince Priebus, chief strategist Steve Bannon, and Melania, Trump made his way to the so-called “winter White House”—his Palm Beach crown jewel, Mar-a-Lago. Upon arrival, there were streams of protesters awaiting him, along with a press corps ready to hurl questions about the judge’s ruling. But there was also a nice coterie of friends and boot-lickers eager for a weekend of golf, a Versailles-themed ball, and a chance to hobnob with the leader of the free world. Trump may have been aware of the price of power—or at least the proximity to it. Just weeks before his inaugural, the club reportedly doubled its initiation fee, to $200,000.

The Trump brand has, of course, enjoyed a renaissance after his electoral win in November. In an on-the-record sit-down with The New York Times in November, Trump noted, “The brand is certainly a hotter brand than it was before. I can’t help that.” That connection has raised all sorts of ethical questions, particularly because Trump has refused to release his tax returns, which would at least give a fuller picture of the scope of his businesses. The American people could then judge for themselves if he had conflicts of interest. But even without the documents, the extent of Trump’s conflicts are abundantly clear. Take, for example, the newly opened Trump Hotel in Washington, five blocks down Pennsylvania Avenue from the White House. The Trump Organization leases the Old Post Office Building from the Government Services Agency, an division that falls under his purview as president, which makes him both tenant and landlord—the sort of deal that presumably even Trump could have never fathomed possible.