The ruthlessly opportunistic business leaders paying $1 million each for the chance to catch President-elect Donald Trump’s eye are like cold, barren planets revolving around a not-so-distant orange sun.
That’s the main takeaway from a surprisingly candid piece in the Daily Mail describing exactly how palms are greased and influence is jockeyed for at Trump’s private Palm Beach club, Mar-a-Lago.
“It’s the new Davos but with much warmer weather,” investor and Shark Tank star Kevin O’Leary writes.
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He then goes on to describe how he’s skipping the World Economic Forum in the Swiss Alpine resort of Davos next week because the most powerful men and women in the world will all be at Mar-a-Lago. To get in, you have to either buy a membership—currently priced at $1 million—or be invited by an existing member.
Once there, you’re seated by the “most powerful woman in America that you’ve never heard of”: dining room maître d’ Carmen De Oliveira, who decides where everyone sits for dinner.
Every night, Trump and his most important guests sit at a round table in the middle of the patio. About a dozen other dining tables are arranged around the central table, with Trump’s Cabinet nominees, senators, ambassadors, governors and “First Buddy” Elon Musk sitting at the nearest tables.
For everyone else gamely paying to play at Mar-a-Lago, depending on whether Carmen knows and likes you, she decides how close you sit to “the center of the universe, the sun,” O’Leary wrote.
“If you’re lucky, you may even catch Trump’s eye. And if he recognizes you, you’ll get a few minutes with him,” he continued.
Thanks to his friendship with Mar-a-Lago member Bill Pulte, O’Leary has had the chance to hang around with the likes of Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni and Danielle Smith, premier of the Canadian province of Alberta, in the past couple of weeks.
O’Leary freely admits he’s been lobbying to buy the video app TikTok as the Supreme Court debates whether to uphold a law banning the app in the U.S. unless its owner, the Chinese tech company ByteDance, agrees to sell to an American company.
“Everyone that I need to speak to about my plans—from Secretary of State nominee Marco Rubio to incoming national security adviser Mike Waltz—is there at Mar-a-Lago,” O’Leary wrote.
That makes Mar-a-Lago the “Winter White House,” he concluded.
Notwithstanding the fact that the real White House—also known as the “People’s House,” where all Americans are encouraged to “feel a sense of inclusion and belonging,” according to its website—doesn’t charge dinner guests a seven-figure entry fee. Yet.
