AfriPulse
“Hey, we have a lot going on with Iran right now, so we’re not going to do the auction,” Damien Stuck recalls hearing. The Tampa-based artist, known for his maximalist MAGA paintings, got the news from the organizer of a charity gala at President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort. Stuck’s work has earned him several invitations to the Palm Beach members club, in this case for a party in the ballroom to raise money for a local nonprofit focused on “faith-based” efforts to help foster children and combat child trafficking. Trump was meant to sign a Stuck painting that would then be auctioned off.
At one point in the evening, the president waltzed out into the ornate chamber to bask in the crowd, as he so often does. “Trump came in there and the whole room just bombarded him,” Stuck says. Wearing a suit and white “USA” hat, the president arrived around 9 p.m. and danced to Lee Greenwood’s “God Bless the USA”—briefly.
“I gotta go to work,” he informed the revelers. “Have a good time, everybody.”
At that point, Trump returned to a side room at Mar-a-Lago, the one cloaked in black drapes, to oversee the largest military operation in two decades: the opening strikes of a war with Iran. A few hours later, US and Israeli bombs began to fall, killing the country’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, dozens of top Iranian officials, and, by Tuesday, more than 1,000 civilians, including 181 children under 10, according to HRANA.
“I sell Art at Mar-a-Lago with the President while he bombs evil dictators,” Stuck wrote in the caption of his Instagram post for the evening, “We are not the same pimp.”
Photos released by the White House captured the scene as the attacks unfolded: Trump, ball cap on, his face the familiar color and texture—ochre and moist. Chief of Staff Susie Wiles and Marco Rubio, who serves as both secretary of state and national security adviser, sat to his left. CIA Director John Ratcliffe sat to his right. On an easel, a map of the Middle East, with American flag pins denoting US military positions. Red diamonds showed a wide range of targets within Iran.
The room is what’s known as a “sensitive compartmented information facility,” or SCIF, which was erected at Mar-a-Lago to allow the president a space to discuss classified information. It appears to be the same room from which Trump monitored the raid that captured Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro in January. A White House source explained to Vanity Fair that Mar-a-Lago security is handled by the Secret Service, which has also set up secure communications capabilities at the club. Typically, presidents would conduct these operations from the Situation Room of the White House, but according to multiple sources close to the president, he vastly prefers the comforts of his South Florida resort.
“The whole fucking place is his man pad,” explained one longtime friend of Trump’s. “He feels so in control in Mar-a-Lago. That is where he launches some [of the] most important geopolitical activities.” Trump, who seems afflicted with an intense aversion to being alone with his thoughts, also appears to enjoy the incessant stimulation that Mar-a-Lago provides.
“A relaxing night for you and me might be a quiet dinner with friends or at home with family,” said one Mar-a-Lago member who has known Trump for years. “For him, a relaxing night is to sit out and have 500 people watch him.” When Trump is at the resort, as he is many weekends, his presence is all-consuming. “He’ll walk over to get a Diet Coke at the bar,” the old friend said. “Secret Service lets him go. But every eye in the whole fucking restaurant follows every fucking step he takes.”
It’s not an exaggeration to say that many members pay for the privilege of being around Trump. “He’s surrounded by people he likes to impress and he likes to give a show to. That’s almost a membership perk,” said Michael Wolff, a journalist who has spent time with Trump at Mar-a-Lago and written several books about him. “It’s a surreal feeling that such major world events are being discussed and taking place at the same club that we were at,” said Rosalyn Yellin, a Palm Beach socialite and star of Netflix reality show Members Only, a Real Housewives knockoff. She has been a Mar-a-Lago member since 2021 and attended the gala on Friday night. “The energy was electric in the room,” she told me. Yellin said she’s been at the club during other spectacles, including when Javier Milei, the unruly president of Argentina, visited.
It is an extreme demonstration, nightly, of what Gore Vidal called “that peculiarly American religion, President-worship.” Except in this case, the president is a deeply unpopular figure who just launched a deeply unpopular war in the Middle East. No matter. At Mar-a-Lago, Trump is God, and his worshippers have paid a hefty tithe (memberships were ratcheted up to $1 million in 2024). “Trump could shoot someone at Mar-a-Lago and they’d stand up to applaud him for it,” said the old friend. “He walks on water at Mar-a-Lago.”
“All of those people are, to say the very least, uncritical,” said Wolff. “So all of the affirmation that he wants, he can get.” A number of sources I spoke with also suggested that the demographics of his South Florida resort—older, richer, and neoconservative in their politics—are more inclined to support the kind of aggressive foreign interventions he’s pursued while down in Florida, from the Maduro operation in Venezuela to the attack on Iran. “When he goes down there, he gets all these old, fucking wealthy people,” the friend explained. “No one’s going to lose a kid or get shipped off. And they want to blow shit up and blow people up. That’s old-school Republicanism right there.”
A member of the Secret Service patrols the grounds of Mar-a-Lago, Trump’s tropical Situation Room
Joe Raedle/Getty Images.
Presidents have typically kept homes outside of Washington, and many wartime decisions have been made from the woodland retreat of Camp David. What distinguishes Mar-a-Lago, though, is the frequency of Trump’s visits and the fact that it isn’t a private home but a members club that hosts massive galas open to anyone with a ticket. Never in history have civilians—imagine, say, Tallahassee’s HVAC king, a West Palm Beach esthetician of moderate renown, the used-car czar of Fort Lauderdale—been able to wander around, slightly sloshed, and bump into the commander in chief as he plots the launch of a war in the Middle East.
We expect our presidents to return to the White House as quickly as possible in times of crisis, like when George W. Bush pushed his staff to take him back to Washington on September 11, 2001. But Trump doesn’t share that desire.
“That idea of top secretness is kind of a bother to him, an annoyance,” Wolff explained. “It inhibits his message. And Mar-a-Lago is more open than the White House.” And so in the next 42 hours after the Iran strikes, Trump remained at his club, fielding calls from world leaders and reporters. He seemed to be workshopping both his justification for the war and his plan for what comes next in real time.
“I don’t want to disrupt his weekend plans and all that, but you can’t wage war working from home,” said John Bolton, who served as Trump’s national security adviser in his first term. “The president should be in the White House at a time of crisis, either sitting in the Oval Office or sitting in the Situation Room.” (The Situation Room wasn’t empty during the strikes: Vice President JD Vance and Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, whom one source close to the president dismissed as “the B team,” remained in Washington.)
In a statement to Vanity Fair, the White House defended the use of Mar-a-Lago for military operations: “The United States is fully equipped with the most powerful and capable operational abilities that allows President Trump to securely communicate and conduct official business from anywhere in the world at any time, no different than he has at the White House,” said spokesman Davis Ingle. “Only the uneducated and uninitiated fail to understand that.” And Trump’s allies, like Eric Bolling, have no qualms: “Trump has proven Mar-a-Lago isn’t just his home or a resort,” the commentator told me. “It’s his go-to command center.”
The night after the new war began, Trump attended a $1 million-a-plate fundraiser for his super PAC, MAGA Inc., naturally held among the educated and initiated of Mar-a-Lago. He reasoned to his aides that he should attend “because he had to eat dinner anyway,” according to a source who spoke to The Wall Street Journal . Video from the event posted to social media showed Trump wandering around the resort’s living room, surrounded by people cheering and clapping. “Thank you so much. Thank you so much,” one woman says. “Thank you for everything,” says another. “God bless.”
“He feels like he’s the supreme leader of everything from Mar-Lago,” the Trump friend said. “He’s got wealthy, powerful people treating him like he’s God. He’s blowing shit up and taking Maduro and blowing Iran up and killing ayatollahs because that’s what he loves. He loves people either loving him or fucking fearing him. He’ll take either one.”
All this adulation may be good for the ego, but one wonders if it’s good for judgment. “I have never had more compliments on something I did,” Trump said this week in the Oval Office, referring to a war that, according to polls, is about as popular as airborne rabies. But the buzz inside his club is undeniable.
“There is a lot of excitement at Mar-a-Lago,” said Yellin, the Palm Beach socialite. “To think that such a major world event was done from Mar-a-Lago is something that people are talking about.”
But then I asked Yellin if members are happy about the war. There was a long pause.
“I don’t know because I don’t talk about that with—I really don’t talk about politics or things like that with people.” The spectacle was more than enough.
Life After Getting Fired for Posting About Charlie Kirk
Margaret Qualley on Gossip, Surrender, and Life With Jack Antonoff
The New Epstein Files Are Reopening the Pizzagate Box
Source: VanityFair | Read the Full Story…
