When Donald and Melania Trump come out to the predinner standing ovation on the Mar-a-Lago patio around 7:30 p.m., it’s time for the Pledge of Allegiance. “Then everybody claps,” says Mar-a-Lago member and former The Real Housewives of New Jersey member Siggy Flicker. “We do ‘U-S-A, U-S-A.’ People start crying. It’s just beautiful to be out there in the garden. There’s beautiful lighting and everybody’s all around and it’s just a magical place. The energy at Mar-a-Lago right now is like nothing I’ve ever experienced.”
Then, over scallops and octopus and braised cabbage, the lobbying begins. Since Donald Trump won the election last week, Mar-a-Lago has been overtaken by billionaire advisers and MAGA believers planning to influence the second Trump term. In the past week, Flicker says she has seen formal and informal advisers on the gilded Palm Beach property, including Elise Stefanik, Tucker Carlson, Tulsi Gabbard, and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. “I was just there on Friday having dinner with Kash Patel,” she says of the former Defense staffer rumored to be in consideration for a top job at the CIA or FBI. Elon Musk is there pretty much all the time, sitting at Trump’s table at dinner.
The billionaire X and Tesla owner is around so much he’s even got his own intro music. “I don’t know if you know this, but Trump DJs Mar-a-Lago from his iPad,” says Melissa Rein Lively, another frequent presence at the club these days. “So he has a walk-on song for Elon Musk, which is ‘Space Oddity.’”
Since Election Night, Rein Lively has been at Mar-a-Lago as much as possible, lobbying for her dream job as the White House press secretary. The founder of an “anti-woke PR firm” who gained prominence in conservative circles after a viral incident in which she is alleged to have destroyed a mask display at a Target, Rein Lively has extended her stay in Palm Beach by five nights in order to be where the action is. She says she keeps running into Tulsi Gabbard, the once-Democratic congresswoman and former presidential candidate who is now advising the second Trump transition. “Me and Tulsi have this joke going,” she said, “because we’re like, ‘Hey, besty girl.’”
Despite the impressive security footprint since the assassination attempts — and the porous reputation of the estate in Trump’s first term — there are very few restrictions for Mar-a-Lago members and their guests. This may be a perk for a club that advertises a $1 million up-front fee plus $20,000 annually. “I have about a half a dozen friends that are members, so it’s actually not very difficult for me to get into Mar-a-Lago at all,” says Rein Lively. “Sometimes I have multiple dinner invitations for the same night. I screwed up the other night and one of the members was pissed because I promised them I would sit at their table and then there was — and I hate to say this, but this is the way that it works — there was another table that was more influential. So, of course, I ditched the first table and sat at the second table, and the member who invited me to the first table was livid because you’re really not supposed to do that. It really pisses off the director if you do not have your table correctly sat in full and all the people don’t show up on time; it really messes things up over there.”
These are just the beginning of the upcoming administration’s power plays at Mar-a-Lago, where Trump spent 142 days during his first term. “Why would you join now? You join now because you want to get close to Trump and you want to get some deal or something. You’ll be there for four years. When he leaves office, you don’t give a damn,” said author Laurence Leamer, who wrote a book on Trump’s most famous resort that he says got him banned from the club. “It’s a dinner club, and you only go when Trump is there. You probably go once a week for four months in a season. You do that for four years, do the math — you’re spending $18,000 a meal to just get in there. It’s the most expensive meal you’re going to have, but is it worth it if your company gets a $2 billion deal from the federal government? It’s the best money you ever spent.”
With influence comes inconvenience. Leamer, who lives in Palm Beach, says that traffic has been dreadful since Trump has decamped to the Winter White House. “The island is cut in two,” he says. “It takes you another half-hour or more to get from one side of the island to the other.”
Unless you’re in the curtained-off room with Trump and his chief of staff, it can be difficult to know who among his loyalists is successfully currying favor with the impulsive president-elect. Rein Lively has a theory that the dinner seating is a tell-tale ranking system of sorts. “Everybody’s calculating, everybody’s cutthroat,” she says. “Everybody wants to know who everybody’s talking to and what they said and where they’re sitting and why they’re sitting and who’s sitting with who. One night, it was raining and they had brought all the tables inside. So you could really tell by the way that the tables were sat who was the most important. And I found it very flattering that my chair was close to the president. And Elon gave me a high five last night.”
It’s both fun and hard work for a Republican basking in Trump’s win — so much sun and golf and martinis and all that work to benefit from proximity to celebrity, power, and money. “It’s House of Cards on the lido deck,” Rein Lively said.
