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Membership at Mar-a-Lago has long been viewed as a cheat code to getting an audience with the club’s owner, former president Donald Trump. The cost of that access is about to get a lot more expensive for new members,
During a wide-ranging interview with Bloomberg Businessweek in — which covered everything from Trump’s line of Non-fungible tokens (NFTs), to a possible stint as Treasury Secretary for JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon, to defending Taiwan — Trump briefly spoke about the cost of membership at his Palm Beach, Fla., club.
According to Trump, when he opened Mar-a-Lago in 1994, members paid an initial $25,000 fee to join. The fee grew to $200,000 before it was cut in half in 2012 after the Bernie Madoff scandal, which was linked to many wealthy people in Palm Beach. In 2017, just days after Trump’s inauguration as president, the fee had bounced back to $200,000 — and it’s only grown since then.
Bernd Lembcke, Trump’s longtime club manager, said during Bloomberg’s interview that memberships now start at $700,000, or more than triple what they cost at the early onset of Trump’s presidential tenure. In October, just a month before voters go to the polls, that fee will grow by $300,000.
“In October we are going up to $1 million [per membership] because we have four memberships to sell, so we are not desperate,” Lembcke said.
The Palm Beach Post has reported that annual dues have run for just shy of $20,000. Total memberships at Mar-a-Lago are capped at 500.
Mar-a-Lago, which was sometimes referred to as the “Winter White House” under Trump, has been an easy way for the rich and powerful to connect with the former president.
“The Mar-a-Lago club has turned into a pay-for-access to the president club, with a president with almost no knowledge of governmental policy,” Robert Weissman, the president of the pro-transparency group Public Citizen, told The Guardian in 2019.
For example, when Trump was president, he was set to deport Chinese billionaire Guo Wengui, a self-exiled critic of the Chinese Communist Party wanted by Beijing. However, after his staff informed him that Wengui was a Mar-a-Lago member, he nixed the deportation, according to Vox. Wengui on Tuesday was convicted by a U.S. jury of engaging in a massive multiyear fraud.
At least four Mar-a-Lago members were tapped by Trump for ambassador jobs, including ambassador to South Africa and handbag designer Lana Marks and Robin Bernstein, who served as an ambassador to the Dominican Republic. Trump’s dentist, Albert Hazzouri, wrote him a note on Mar-a-Lago stationary addressing him as “King” and supporting a proposal related to veteran’s care, ProPublica reported. Trump subsequently forwarded the note to his secretary of veteran affairs.
The club has also been the source of a series of national security issues, including a recently dismissed case over Trump storing classified documents at Mar-a-Lago.
When Trump met with the late Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe in 2017 for dinner at the club, they met with aids in full view of other diners, according to CNN. Club members took photos of the world leaders discussing national security topics, reading — and shining flashlights on — documents, and heard the president speaking on his cellphone.
At least two women have been either arrested or accused of trespassing on the club’s property. Yujing Zhang, a 33-year-old businesswoman from Shanghai, was arrested for trespassing in 2019. When she was brought into custody, she had four cellphones, a laptop, a thumb drive, and an external hard drive.