US What goes on after dark at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago

Anyone with enough money can become a member at Trump’s Florida base, but who is watching the interlopers?

At a certain point in an average evening at Mar-a-Lago, the lights go down and the volume goes up, as the proprietor and former president of the United States turns DJ for the night.

A member of the Mar-a-Lago private club said Donald Trump had assumed the role of social ringmaster, deciding to bring a disco vibe to the Palm Beach resort after dark.

“About 9.30pm every night, he’s s sitting at his table, whether on the e patio or inside, and they bring a laptop over and he starts picking songs, and he starts being a DJ for the night, but it’s sort of funny because he picks like the same 10 songs every night,” the club member said.

The Trump playlist is of a certain era, when he was a regular clubber in New York. The signature tune is Village People’s YMCA, alongside The Greatest Love of All by Whitney Houston, and a few Elton John numbers.

“Sometimes he dances to it,” the club member said. “He will be at his table and he’ll dance while sitting.”

Towards the end of the evening, Trump will play a hymn, How Great Thou Art, which topped the charts when Elvis Presley sang it. It was a favourite of Trump’s father, Fred, a sentimental way of drawing a Mara-Lago soiree to a close.

What might have otherwise seemed no more than a characteristically bizarre twist for a post-presidential career looks more significant now it is known that while the lights were low, the music was playing, guests were tipsy and the host was otherwise engaged, there were thousands of government documents, many highly sensitive, and at least one containing nuclear secrets, sitting nearby. And all of this was unfolding in a venue described by former intelligence officials as a priority target for foreign spies.

“Without hou any question the former president de and those in his circle will be very ve important targets for any foreign eig intelligence service. They will be looking lo at: how do we get into that circle?” said Douglas London, a 34-year CIA veteran and the author of The Recruiter: Spying and the Lost Art of American Intelligence.

London added: “He’s brought in really questionable people with various skeletons in their closets, financial or personal or political, who have vulnerabilities a foreign intelligence service could exploit.”

When Trump bought Mar-a-Lago for $10m in 1985, it had 58 bedrooms, an adjoining ad golf course and three bomb b shelters. s He said at the time he thought ht of the purchase as a “statement” rather ther than somewhere he could imagine living, iving, but the high-end Floridian lifestyle grew on hi him.

In the 1990s, after a string of bankruptcies, he tried to squeeze cash out of the property, attempting to split it into plots, but he was blocked by the planning board. The board also tried to veto his plan B, to turn the estate into a private club, but he outmanoeuvred his opponents by cultivating individual members and pointing out that most of the other clubs in Palm Beach did not admit Jews or black people.

There were few African Americans in the area who could afford the $100,000 fee, which was doubled in 2017, but plenty of wealthy Jews. They became the bulk of the membership, the majority of them Democrats.

When Trump succeeded Obama as president, and Mar-a-Lago became the “winter White House”, the ambience began to change. Trump had no time for the official presidential retreat at Camp David, which he thought too rustic. Also the Trump Organization made no money from him staying there. Mar-a-Lago was another matter.

His presidency became one of the club’s attractions. It was another label under the Trump brand. Paying guests were able to witness real-life scenes such as Trump huddling with Shinzo Abe, then Japan’s prime minister, and Xi Jinping, China’s president.

After Trump was defeated in 2020, he decamped to his Florida retreat, taking boxes full of secret documents and a new clientele. The crowd that hung around the Trump International hotel in Washington followed him.

“The new members of the club are a little bit Maga [Make America Great Again, a Trump electoral slogan],” a longtime member reflected. “It’s very eclectic, a lot of foreigners, people that have made money in cryptocurrency, Oklahoma, fracking money.”

Frank Figliuzzi, a former FBI assistant director for counter-intelligence, said: “Typically once a president becomes former president, there’s a scale-back in resources at

Security risk

Even during the Trump presidency, there were holes in security at Mar-aLago. A teenager, Mark Lindblom, slipped past guards and entered the club through a tunnel from the beach. Two Chinese women were caught trespassing. One of them had four mobile phones, an external hard drive, five sim cards and a “signal detector” gadget for locating hidden microphones or cameras.

the Secret Service, but that really is something that doesn’t lend itself to the Mar-a-Lago environment because of the obvious threats there.”

Each year the club hires 80 to 90 foreign workers, all of whom are vetted. The problem of the club members and their guests is far greater.

“Who are these members? Who’s vetting them? If you have the requisite money and you plunk it down, it appears you’re a member,” Figliuzzi said. “And now here come your family members and guests and their cousins and their in-laws. And is it really possible for the Secret Service to even begin to think that they could vet the guest side of the house?”

A Russian-speaking Ukrainianborn woman, Inna Yashchyshyn, was able to mingle with club members and Trump himself last year, posing as Anna de Rothschild, a Monaco-bred scion of the banking family.

But perhaps the biggest question mark is hanging over the resort’s wounded and vengeful owner and DJ. No one knows what plans he had for his stolen trove of state secrets.

“Whatever he selected was because he had some intent to do something with it,” London said. “The question is: what were his intentions? But none of it is going to be a happy story. None of it is going to end well, in terms of the impact on national security.”

‘The new members of the club are a little bit Maga. It’s very eclectic’