The snooty enclave of Palm Beach, Florida, got their blue blood boiling over the thought that Former President Donald Trump dares to actually live at his Mar-a-Lago resort. They don’t want him running some kind of shadow government in exile from their back yard.
Trump not welcome this season
The money loving socialites of southern Florida have declared that the former first family is out of fashion this season. They went so far as to bully Palm Beach city officials into sicking lawyers on Trump.
They were under the mistaken impression that the legal agreement between the town, the resort, and the former president prevented him from actually “living” there. They were wrong.
The legal review concluded that the Mar-a-Lago agreement “does not expressly prohibit him from residing there.” The town’s lawyer put a memo up on their website.
According to attorney “John “Skip” Randolph,” their zoning ordinance “permits only bona fide employees to reside in private clubs.” There is no doubt at all that Donald Trump is a “bona fide employee of the club” he owns.
In Ohio, they’re fighting to create a state holiday in honor of Donald Trump, while in the town which hosts a tax-avalanche producing world-renowned resort they censure and abuse the golden goose.
Randolph got a letter from the family legal team last month which set the record straight that the Donald is definitely an “employee of the resort and therefore clearly entitled to reside there.”
The town won’t accept it
Even though the law is crystal clear, Palm Beach residents refuse to accept the results. They plan to bring it up to kick it around some more at the next Town Council meeting.
They already posted the agenda documents on the town website. Trump bought the property in 1985, the records explain, which was the former estate of Marjorie Merriweather Post.
Donald Trump turned Mar-a-Lago, once known as “the winter White House” into a members-only club in 1993.
When it changed from a private residence into a revenue-generating business, “he had to agree to certain limitations, based on guidelines presented as deal-breakers from Palm Beach.” Some of the poison pills he had to swallow were agreeing to have “no more than 500 members.”
Other restrictions included “rules concerning parking and traffic, and club members could not spend more than seven consecutive days at Mar-a-Lago, or no more than three weeks total a year.” That’s the one they were using to exclude the deplorable-in-chief from his own property. The town lawyer agrees that the naysayers don’t have a legal leg to stand on but that hasn’t stopped the complaints.
Randolph said the whole issue “hinges primarily on whether former President Trump is a bona fide employee of the Club.” He determined beyond a doubt “that town zoning code for private clubs allows ‘a private club may provide living quarters for its bona fide employees only.’ Also, the town code definition of employee “includes sole proprietors, partners, limited partners, corporate officers and the like.” That would include the former President.