The FBI’s August 8, 2022, search for stolen national security documents cemented Mar-a-Lago’s place in American history, but Donald Trump’s “Winter White House” has a controversial life-story, populated by an amazing cast of characters, that goes back 100 years–told here in a definitive biography. Moments before the Roaring Twenties flickered off and the world sunk into the Great Depression, socialite heiress Marjorie Merriweather Post constructed the estate she named “Mar-a-Lago” (Spanish for “sea to lake”), to the tune of $4 million (about $68 million today) and four years of labor–a 118-room mansion in a conflated Spanish, Portuguese, and Venetian design over a coral reef in Palm Beach County, Florida, the most hurricane prone land in the continental United States. Baptized by the 1928 Okeechobie hurricane, which killed over 2,500, many of them Black laborers, Mar-a-Lago became a winter haven where corporate titans, socialites, and nobility gathered. But the honeymoon didn’t last long. The Great Depression and the unraveling of Marjorie Post’s marriage to investment broker E.F. Hutton from mutual adultery left Mar-a-Lago mothballed season after season.Much of Post’s time over the decades was consumed by trying to figure out how to offload Mar-a-Lago–viewed as a white elephant due to its extraordinary maintenance costs–without letting it fall into the hands of rapacious developers who sought to subdivide the property, as was the fate of nearly all of Mar-a-Lago’s neighboring estates. And for a brief shining moment, the National Park Service stepped in to acquire Mar-a-Lago, one of the last official acts of the LBJ administration, a maneuver championed by the First Lady herself, Lady Byrd Johnson. But preserving a capitalist shrine really wasn’t in the purview of the Park Service, which turned the keys back to the Post family. The years passed as the local Palm Springs citizenry squelched every opportunity to transfer the property or put it to civic use…. But then, a white knight seemed to appear–a real estate developer and casino mogul from the outer boroughs of New York City named Donald J. Trump! Trump, as is his wont, primarily used bank financing for the $10 million purchase price, reportedly only putting up $3,000. With his casino empire sliding into bankruptcy and desperate to cover Mar-a-Lago’s monthly $300,000 nut, Trump reneged on his assurance not to sub-divide the estate. Thwarted in court by the locals, he threatened to sell the estate to Rev. Sun Myung Moon’s Unification Church, but eventually settled by turning Mar-a-Lago into a for-profit club. Years later, as Trump’s “Winter White House,” Mar-a-Lago finally became a financial dynamo through the doubling of club membership dues and over-the-top fees for guests to hobnob with the President–and possibly even eavesdrop on discussions of national security. In American Castle , Pulitzer Prize finalist Mary Shanklin–using previously untapped interviews, documents, and recordings–brilliantly captures the complete 100-year rise, fall, and outrageous resurrection of Mar-a-Lago.

American Castle: One Hundred Years of Mar-a-Lago PDF

The list of books you might like