The neighbors of Donald Trump’s Palm Beach Mar-a-Lago resort have made it clear that like the rest of us, they don’t want him around.
Even as Trump refuses to officially concede the presidential election to Joe Biden (not that it matters), he appears to be prepping privately for a move to Florida, and it looks like he plans to make the resort his full-time home.
His would-be neighbors, though, have issued a formal letter to the town of Palm Beach as well as to the Secret Service, asserting that Trump can’t legally live there thanks to an agreement he signed in the 1990s prohibiting the club from being used as a private estate or a residential hotel.
The current residency controversy tracks back to a deal Trump cut in 1993 when his finances were foundering, and the cost of maintaining Mar-a-Lago was soaring into the multimillions each year. Under the agreement, club members are banned from spending more than 21 days a year in the club’s guest suites and cannot stay there for any longer than seven consecutive days. Before the arrangement was sealed, an attorney for Trump assured the town council in a public meeting that he would not live at Mar-a-Lago.
Trump has made these sorts of deals before, where he promises not to live at a resort in exchange for a massive tax break, only to then reportedly treat it as a private residence for himself and his family. In that massive New York Times exposé on Trump’s decades of tax evasion, they reported that Trump got a $21.1 million tax deduction for conservation pledges he made about his Seven Springs resort in Westchester County, New York. Part of the deal was that the Trumps couldn’t use it as a personal residence, which they then did. Eric Trump, not the best secret-keeper in the world, described it a few years ago in an interview as their “home base.”
Trump has spent an estimated 130 days at Mar-a-Lago during his presidency, breaking down to far more than 21 days a year. And earlier this year he already changed his place of residence to the club’s address.
Trump might have thought these agreements are just technicalities serving as tax loopholes, but the Mar-a-Lago neighbors aren’t taking things so lightly. Their letter recommends the city tell Trump preemptively that he can’t move in, in order to save him the embarrassment of moving in and then being kicked out later.
Yes, what a shame that would be. How terribly embarrassing if we all got to watch that happen.
(via Washington Post, image: Joe Raedle/Getty Images)
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