Palm Beach Has Never Been Richer. The Locals Aren’t Pleased.

 

Palm Beach Has Never Been Richer. The Locals Aren’t Pleased.

 

Donald Trump’s presidency has turned this Florida island into the nightlife headquarters of MAGA, but the town’s old guard — much of it Republican — doesn’t love the new vibe.

 

By David Segal

Reporting from Palm Beach, Fla.

June 22, 2025

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/22/business/palm-beach-trump-maga.html

 

behind elaborate landscaping. To learn what belongs to whom, and how much it cost, a guide is needed, and Dana Koch, who has been selling real estate here for 22 years, knows the area cold. He’s a veteran docent in a zoo where the creatures are billionaires and it’s difficult to see the cages.

 

“Howard and Beth Stern live here,” he said, pointing to a gate flanked by shrubbery. “This whole place, he paid about $50 million for it years ago. Now it’s worth $200 million.”

 

On it goes, an inventory of rich and famous people, a patter that rambles along, like Mr. Koch’s car, at about 10 miles an hour. Jon Bon Jovi lives there. That’s where Roger Ailes slipped in the shower and died. William Lauder built this, after buying Rush Limbaugh’s place for $155 million and tearing it down.

 

Some homes are identified by job (N.F.L. owner, sugar magnate) others by names, (Dr. Oz, Tom Ford, Charles Schwab). That lot once belonged to Jeffrey Epstein, whose place was razed. A new house is under construction, and the owners, Mr. Koch speculates, are going to apply for a new address.

 

These have been busy months for Mr. Koch, 52, who is not related to the famous Republican donors. (“Same name, different bank account.”) Palm Beach is, of course, home to President Trump’s private club, Mar-a-Lago. After the election in November, there was a “Trump bump,” with $100 million worth of property on Palm Beach going under contract in the span of a week. Late last year, the Fox News host Sean Hannity purchased a $23.5 million mansion in nearby Manalapan, then spent $14.9 million on an oceanfront townhouse in Palm Beach in January. (He’d previously spent $5.3 million for a townhouse here in 2021.)

 

The real surge happened later on, with sales of single-family homes rising by 67 percent in the seven months between November and May compared with the same period last year. This Trump-ward migration had little to do with Mr. Trump, real estate agents say. Most of these purchases were made by people waiting for post-election clarity about taxes, regulations and the direction of the economy, a quadrennial phenomenon.

 

But for years, Trump-adjacent celebrities and multimillionaires have been moving to the area, one of the world’s priciest ZIP codes. Sylvester Stallone, who once praised Mr. Trump as a “mythical character” at the America First Policy Institute gala on the island, spent $33.5 million for an oceanfront estate in 2020. The Citadel chief executive, Ken Griffin, a onetime Trump supporter turned critic, has reportedly spent years and $450 million snapping up 25 acres of parcels in what’s called Billionaires Row. Construction is now underway on a 50,000-square-foot home for his mother.

 

But the true economic — and cultural — impact of the second Trump administration here isn’t in the dust of construction sites. It’s the noisy influx of young Republican partyers, favor-seekers and pols who have altered the delicate social ecosystem of one of the richest enclaves in the world, home to more than 50 billionaires, according to a review of Forbes data by The Palm Beach Daily News.

 

The newcomers regard Mr. Trump as a living tourist attraction and Palm Beach as his buzzy natural habitat. They are now wedged into booths at recently opened private clubs and joyfully cannonballing into the island’s once-placid infinity pool.

 

An $85 Million Patch of Dirt

Palm Beach is an 18-mile sliver of land off the east coast of South Florida, shaped like a diver knifing through water, arms overhead. The start of its gilded age begins in 1894 when a Standard Oil partner named Henry Flagler opened the Royal Poinciana Hotel, and the area soon attracted others from his demographic who began building luxury estates of their own. This includes La Querida, a 15,000-square-foot mansion in the Mediterranean Revival style and built by an heir to the Wanamaker department store fortune. It was later sold to Joseph P. Kennedy, and remained in the family when his son became president.

 

“It was the original ‘Winter White House,’” said Mr. Koch, gesturing toward 1095 North Ocean Boulevard from behind the wheel of his BMW. He describes the properties with a mix of pride and ironic distance, a tone that says, “Sure, the numbers are insane, but isn’t this great?”

 

At one point, he drove by a single acre of undeveloped land. It looked like any other mundane patch of earth.

 

“I sold this for $85 million last year,” he said. “The dirt.”

 

Mr. Trump has played a key role in these stratospheric sums, though indirectly. During his first term, he signed the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017, which sharply limited the amount of state and local tax that could be deducted from federal taxes. For high-net-worth individuals, moving to a state with no state income tax, like Florida, was suddenly an idea worth many millions of dollars. Then came Covid.

 

“It’s not just the billionaires who moved here,” said Holly Meyer Lucas, a real estate agent in South Florida. “It’s the sons of billionaires, the daughters, the family office staff. The ripple effect has kept prices soaring for years.”

 

Mr. Koch slowed down to point out a six-bedroom house on a 10,000-square-foot plot that was acquired for $26 million in January 2021. Five months later, it was flipped for just under $42 million. Now it’s worth at least $60 million, he said.

 

It was nearly 3 p.m. by then, and a modest bit of traffic had formed in the Royal Poinciana Way Historic District, near a statue of Henry Flagler.

 

“It’s called the ‘trade parade,’” he said of the mini snarl of vehicles. “There’s been so much turnover on these properties that we have a very large number of contractors and subcontractors who start leaving this time of day.”

 

For decades, Palm Beach was a redoubt of old-money families, with names like Whitney and Harriman. When Laurence Leamer, author of “Mar-a-Lago: Inside the Gates of Power at Donald Trump’s Presidential Palace,” first arrived in Palm Beach in the mid-1990s, he didn’t understand why so few neighbors would speak to him. That December, he brought home a Christmas tree.

 

“There were all these people in black tie, on their way to their clubs, and they thought, ‘Oh, God, so Larry isn’t Jewish after all,’” he said in a phone interview. Everyone quickly became a lot friendlier.

 

A strain of country-club antisemitism had been embedded in Palm Beach for years, many residents say, and it surfaced, inevitably, in the country clubs. Only one, the Palm Beach Country Club, was dominated by Jews. This quiet prejudice reached a head in the mid-90s, when Jews began moving to the island in large numbers, to the subdued consternation of many old-line Palm Beach residents, who wondered why these people didn’t stick to Miami.

 

‘A Lot of Name-Dropping’

Enter Donald Trump. He’d bought Mar-a-Lago in 1985, and turned it into a membership club a decade later. He welcomed anyone who could afford the $25,000 initiation fee.

 

“It became an overwhelmingly Jewish club,” Mr. Leamer said. “The Jews didn’t want to admit it because they didn’t want to say they belonged to Catskill South. But that’s what it was.”

 

It was also, soon enough, the hoppingest spot on the island. At the time, Mr. Trump owned casinos and had pull with the best entertainers in the industry. Billy Joel performed. So did Tony Bennett, Celine Dion and Rod Stewart.

 

“And Trump was a wonderful host,” Mr. Leamer said. “He would stand at the door, greet everyone. He didn’t do this to change the world. He did it to make a buck. But who cares? The results were terrific.”

 

Mar-a-Lago has evolved. After 2016, and the start of Mr. Trump’s first term, locals who had flocked to it for a quality meal and a bit of networking found it was soon overstuffed with people they didn’t like. Getting a reservation for dinner became a chore. Many in the old guard quit, replaced by the new contingent, even after the initiation fee was doubled to $200,000 in 2017.

 

Today, the initiation fee is $1 million, according to Bloomberg, and the Moorish mansion is busier than ever. Those on the inside say an evening there is a singular delight.

 

“It’s a lot of name-dropping, a lot of clout chasing. Everybody’s trying to get close to the president and his inner circle,” said Melissa Rein Lively, founder and chief executive of America First PR, which she describes as America’s No. 1 anti-woke public relations firm. She visits the club from South Beach Miami.

 

The MAGA crowd at Mar-a-Lago and around the island is something new and, like everything that is new in a place that has a style of its own, not exactly welcome.

 

“It’s like new convertibles, fake nails, fake boobs, fake hair, fake eyes and big jewelry,” said Celerie Kemble, an interior decorator who grew up in Palm Beach and prefers her memories of a place all about bare feet and sand-filled cars. “These people are dressing up to get coffee.”

 

The differences are not just aesthetic. Hundreds of nonprofits descend on Palm Beach annually for what’s known as “the season,” from late November to early May. The calendar is jammed with opportunities to dress up and write a check.

 

But giving to nonpolitical local causes, like museums and hospitals, is not a high priority for many of Mr. Trump’s most ardent followers here, according to Mr. Leamer. Or for Mr. Trump. While a candidate in 2016, he shut down his personal foundation after it was revealed that he’d used money from it to settle legal disputes against his businesses.

 

He’d also spent $10,000 in foundation cash for a portrait of himself, now hanging at Mar-a-Lago. It works in a setting where Mr. Trump gets some of his most boisterous ovations. At dinners and galas at the club, Secret Service agents tell guests to stay in their seats when the president walks in and please, ladies and gentlemen, do not take any photographs.

 

This rarely works.

 

“It’s like you’re asking kids not to eat sugar, right?” said Andrés DePew, a 27-year-old entrepreneur who founded a chapter of the Conservative Political Action Conference in his native Colombia.

 

Mr. DePew has posted many images of his own from Mar-a-Lago, part of an Instagram feed crammed with parties, dinners with other young, photogenic conservatives. Clad in Ralph Lauren and Dolce & Gabbana, he looks pensive and thrilled at the same time. On one memorable night, he met Mike Tyson and Russell Brand (“Great guy”) along with Michael Flynn, a former U.S. national security adviser; Bo Loudon, an 18-year-old conservative influencer; and one of the Real Housewives of Beverly Hills. For dinner, he likes Renato’s, an Italian restaurant that doesn’t skimp on old-world flair. On Worth Avenue — one of the great gold-plated retail strips in the world, with Gucci, Louis Vuitton, Bottega Veneta and many others — he’s a fan of Maus & Hoffman, a men’s wear store that sells an Italian hopsack blazer for $3,295.

 

Sales of clothing, jewelry and everything else behind glass here were up 30 percent from December to May compared with the same period last year, said Marianna Abbate of the Luxury PR & Hospitality Group, which polls Worth Avenue retailers. She said that the vast majority of the shoppers lived elsewhere, in the relatively less well-heeled West Palm Beach, which is just across the bridge, and points south, down I-95.

 

For revelers in search of more rarefied, less politicized air, there’s the Carriage House. It’s one of a relatively new style of private club catering to a younger audience seeking a bit of New York City’s always-on energy. The Carriage House doesn’t have a golf course or a beach. It’s a lunch, dinner and drinks venue that offers a group of people “carefully curated to reflect the Club’s sophisticated yet playful atmosphere,” as it says on the website. A membership reportedly costs $400,000.

 

Meals are extra.

 

Put Off, but Not Going Anywhere

Republicans outnumber Democrats in Palm Beach County two to one, according to data from the Supervisor of Elections. If the resistance to the MAGA tide has a spiritual home here, it is Leta Austin Foster & Daughters, a twee little store that sells bedding, children’s clothing, gifts and interior design services near Worth Avenue. In June 2020, the only person to show up at a Black Lives Matter protest in front of Town Hall was Ms. Foster, then 80. Many retailers boarded up their stores, braced for vandalism that never happened.

 

Ms. Foster’s daughter India grew up on Palm Beach, and one recent afternoon she sat on a staircase in the store and mused about the changes she’s seen over the years. On the plus side, the place has gotten younger. When she moved back in 2006, after living in San Francisco, she looked up some stats and found that less than 1 percent of the island’s population was under 35 years old.

 

“Here’s a young person,” she said to a 20ish customer, and everyone else within earshot. “This never happened before.”

 

But many of the members of Gen Z and plenty of millennials she meets grate on her. One guy told her that he is “part of the new world order.” So as gorgeous as Palm Beach is, India Foster isn’t sure she can handle the rightward tilt of the place for the rest of her life. (And at least for her business, the influx of young MAGA types has not helped the bottom line.)

 

Still, in interviews with a dozen people, only one had imminent plans to move away: a Republican.

 

J. Richard Knop was sitting in the den of his home when Mr. Koch stopped by to show what $21.9 million will now buy you on the island. (Answer: a five-bedroom, six-and-a-half-bathroom house on a 6,500-square-foot lot, with a pool and plenty of bougainvillea.) Mr. Knop’s life circumstances had changed, he said, and he has moved in with his fiancée, who lives in Northern Virginia. It will bring him closer to Washington, where he spent years as a lawyer and deal maker in the defense industry.

 

Mr. Knop was an investment banker for defense contractors, and did multimillion-dollar deals with former employees of the Defense Department, the C.I.A. and elsewhere who’d left government to create their own companies.

 

“My career was in the swamp,” he said with a smile.

 

The MAGA day-trippers notwithstanding, many Republicans here still tend to be the variety that gets their news from The Wall Street Journal, not Newsmax. Some of them are deeply put off by Mr. Trump’s assault on corporations, Mr. Leamer and others said, along with his bullying of law firms, his slamming of European allies. But they will benefit from much of the president’s agenda, like tax cuts for the rich, and their beloved island will continue to prosper, whether they like him or not.

 

“I think this town is a little bit aghast at itself,” said Ms. Kemble, the interior decorator. “But the fact is, everybody here is safe because of their money.”

 

David Segal is a business reporter for The Times, based in New York.