By Holly Peterson | Photographs by Saul Martinez for WSJ
Beyond the discreet gates of frou-frou hotels and patrician country clubs, a tsunami swells from Mar-a-Lago’s gilded lobbies. The flotsam includes MAGA partyers in rinse/repeat celebration mode and a stream of Black SUVs for Donald Trump and his entourage. These centipede-like motorcades shut down traffic instantly, regularly and without warning.
New security measures, introduced after the assassination attempts over the summer, have made travel by air, land and sea in Palm Beach a testing affair whenever Trump’s in town. The president-elect now crosses blockaded bridges like Brezhnev’s Soviet convoys speeding through Moscow’s emptied thoroughfares.
For blue-blood locals who have crafted an otherwise frictionless existence here, these daily disruptions are maddening. Hell hath no fury like a blue-haired lady in a magnolia Lilly Pulitzer dress insisting on order.
ILLUSTRATION: PETER ARKLE
“The number one topic at any meal is parking and traffic,” says Tom Quinn, a partner at the Venable law firm in Washington, D.C., and a fixture on the Newport-Palm Beach axis, who’s owned a home here for five decades. “Wealthy people are used to paying their way out of travel inconveniences. When they can’t, they blow their top.”
Yachts are now foiled by drawbridge delays. Private fliers to Palm Beach will have a painful choice: either submit to a TSA check or divert to another airport. Anyone who insists on having their Maybach drive straight to the Gulfstream steps will find themselves landing in nearby Lantana. One macher explained to me the tragedy of this compromise: “Stepping from car to plane is the number-one sweet moment of feeling like the most legit bigshot of all. You gotta consider that.”
Palm Beach sits at the center of a narrow barrier island, 18 miles long and three-quarters of a mile wide at its thickest. Grand estates on some of the slimmest stretches are bookended by Lake Worth lagoon and the Atlantic. Marjorie Merriweather Post, the heiress, magnate, and one-time wealthiest woman in America, built her lavish estate here in the 1920s and named it “Mar-a-Lago,” Spanish for “sea to lake.” Trump bought it in 1985 for $8 million, a song.
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