The Utter Bliss—and Impending Angst—of Donald Trump’s Palm Beach

On Saturday night, after helping raise more than $5 million at the Norton Museum of Art’s annual gala in West Palm Beach, a number of local bigwigs retreated in their black cars and convertibles across the Royal Park Bridge, back to the half-mile-long sliver of land that is Palm Beach proper. During my whole trip, I rarely heard the place referred to as anything other than “the island”—to distinguish it from the mainland, a place for parvenus that’s still attached to the rest of Florida.

It was nearly eleven at night, historically way past bedtime in what’s still a deeply cosseted vacation town and a highly torqued community of billionaires—and their ilk—who value peace and quiet. But if you had the means to gain entry, there was one private members club that was not just open; it was host to an all-out rager of the point-oh-oh-one percent.

And no, not Mar-a-Lago. President Donald Trump was indeed at his beach club on the island Saturday night, taking a break from his whiplash rearrangement of the US government by having an early dinner with the ultra-conservative actor Jon Voight. Those on the gala committee probably could’ve gotten into the president’s beach house if they’d wanted to. Instead, everyone went to a place called Carriage House.

Founded in 2022, as an influx of new residents poured in from pandemic-lockdown-affected Chicago, New York, and Los Angeles, Carriage House seems like a Zero Bond for the Palm Beach set, with its clubby booths, backlit liquor bottles, gold-lined tabletops, leopard-print pillows, Tracey Emin neons on the walls, and Michelin-adjacent cooking only available to members. This being the island, it takes a few extra digits on the bank statement to walk in the door. Sure, the one-time initiation fee for Mar-a-Lago is now $1 million, with an additional $20,000 or so due annually, but if you’re a mega-wealthy industrialist who’s trying to have dinner in proximity to an incredibly transactional president every weekend, that seems like a pretty good deal. The Breakers, as of last year, is reportedly $550,000 a year, but that includes access to tennis courts, golf courses, and see-and-be-seen club dining.

Carriage House offers no bath, no tennis, no golf, essentially just a restaurant and a clubby bar—and it will reportedly cost you around $400,000 a year.

“This place has exploded over the last 10 years,” one member, who moved his family to Palm Beach from Aspen nearly a decade earlier, told me. “It used to be just old people, and now you’ll be at dinner across from a hedge fund manager or a Cabinet secretary.”

A few booths away, Charles Stewart, the CEO of Sotheby’s, was surrounded by his directors, celebrating the fact that chairman Oliver Barker had just auctioned off a painting by Rashid Johnson for $850,000 to Terry Taylor, the very private car dealership billionaire who owns the last significant house designed on the island by Addison Mizner, as well as a $45 million private jet with his initials—“TT”—engraved across the empennage. Cocktails and ramekins of french fries appeared like magic as women with sculpted faces wobbled through the room in skyscraper heels.

So no, we weren’t at Mar-a-Lago. But for the entirety of my 24 hours in the president’s official place of residence, it was clear that the president was never far from mind. Especially after an art gala that was co-chaired by collector and patron Amy Phelan, who’s married to Trump’s pick for secretary of the Navy, John Phelan.

“It’s kind of the center of the world right now,” another Aspen–to–Palm Beach resident told me.

ABBA’s “Gimme! Gimme! Gimme! (A Man After Midnight)” was playing on the stereo, loudly, as another member of the crew leaned over to me.

“Now it’s the literal center of the universe,” they said.

It sure looks like that. Even if the capital remains in Washington, Trump is planning to be at his winter White House most weekends. With the supply of houses on the island basically nonexistent, anyone seeking proximity will most likely be doing so from West Palm Beach, just across the bridge.

Elon Musk was at one point rumored to be looking at the $100 million penthouse owned by the heirs of Sydell Miller, as the family offloaded her art at Sotheby’s last year and is now parting ways with the real estate. Musk later used his social media platform, X, to deny that he was buying the property, but no matter. Even if Musk isn’t moving in there, a number of luxury buildings are being erected by Trump mega-donor Stephen Ross, whose company, Related, was a major underwriter of the Norton gala. Units cost as much as $10 million a pop, and some locals I spoke with speculated it might be an easy sell to a domestic technocrat or foreign sovereign wealth fund rep looking for a little Trump proximity.

Such buyers would still, it’s worth noting in Palm Beach, be on the mainland. While returning me to my hotel in West Palm, my Uber driver looked back at the island and said, with reverence, “They will never change it.” As one art world source, a third-generation Palm Beacher, said: “We’d only ever leave the island if we had to buy shoes.”

The barbarians at the gates aside, for the most part Palm Beach has long embraced Donald Trump, at least quietly—and then, suddenly, boldly. You are still not going to see MAGA hats at La Goulue, Le Bilboquet, or Café Boulud—but that’s mostly because you won’t see any hats; you can’t wear a ballcap inside. But as long as they abide by the dress code, Trump people are welcome at the swankiest places on high-end Worth Avenue, as evidenced by the fact that Donald Trump Jr. was reportedly recently spotted making out with socialite Bettina Anderson in a corner booth at Buccan, the hot spot next to the Ferragamo store.

“Tables adjacent to me were flaunting their Mar-a-Lago memberships, and they didn’t used to do that,” said my third-generation source, speaking about a recent dinner at a classic island spot. “People are loud and proud.”

In late 2021, I went to Palm Beach to report on a slew of art-related happenings, and happened to go by the restaurant Cucina, a place to which some young Trump supporters had ventured from Mar-a-Lago, where they’d been in conversation with the exiled king himself, at the end of a year that started with January 6. I didn’t make it back to the restaurant on this trip, but sources said its light-up signs now read “FUCK KAMALA” and people clap when they see MAGA hats.

Not that everyone is a die-hard Trump supporter. Sure, the place has a ton of Republicans, but the island is still home to people of the old money, ancien régime stripe. The kind of Republicans who might not enjoy seeing someone as goofy and uncouth as Musk buzz-sawing the Washington establishment and making puerile jokes about it on X as he goes.

When Trump first arrived in Palm Beach after buying Marjorie Merriweather Post’s island-spanning property in 1985, he was viewed by locals with a mix of intrigue, embarrassment, and scorn. What has shocked the old guard recently is the infiltration of pro-Trump gear at Green’s Pharmacy, one of the oldest businesses in town, right across from the Paramount building and St. Edward Catholic Church. When I sat down for breakfast, the two-egg special’s usual price of $9.99 had been crossed out in favor of $10.99—thanks, eggflation!—but the meal was still cheaper, probably, than any other breakfast in town.

Something else was different. Behind the counter one could buy a black hat with the following written in gold cursive: “Mar-a-Lago Palm Beach.” And there were also packs of breath mints emblazoned with a bloody Trump rising up after being shot, as well as other packs of mints with Trump’s face and the text: “Make your breath great again.”

“Aren’t they fantastic?” said the cashier.

Ahead of the Norton Museum’s gala on Saturday night, John and Amy Phelan gave a tour of their collection in Palm Beach on Friday afternoon for select gala-goers, led by Lindsay Taylor, the director of the Phelan Collection. The house, on the southern part of the island and a five-minute drive from Mar-a-Lago, has Jeff Koons’s painting Saddle in the kitchen, a Willem de Kooning over the fireplace, and a massive Lawrence Weiner installed on the entrance to a freestanding discotheque they built on the property. (That’s gotta be a first for a prospective secretary of the Navy.)

It was only the start of a full-on art tour of shows throughout town. Sure, many of the snowbird outposts of major NY galleries have closed up shop in recent years—adieu to the locations of White Cube, Lehmann Maupin, Pace, Lévy Gorvy Dayan, and others—but Beth Rudin DeWoody still has the Bunker Artspace, and it’s still one of the most incredible places to see art in South Florida, or anywhere. Every year she and her staff stage up to a dozen shows across two massive floors of a West Palm warehouse, featuring hundreds of works of art—all culled exclusively from her 10,000-piece-strong personal collection.

She’s such a voracious collector that the frequent New Yorker cartoonist Guy Richards Smit submitted a drawing in 2023 in which a gallerist is showing her team a strategy slideshow on a projector, with the PowerPoint “summing up the gallery’s entire business plan in one easy-to-remember phrase…‘BETH RUDIN DEWOODY.’” The original is now on view at the Bunker, along with shows dedicated to snakes, paintings from the ’60s, and surveillance.

Also in West Palm Beach is a pop-up by Paula Cooper Gallery—the Chelsea mainstay that had a space on Worth Avenue from 2020 to 2023—that runs through the high season. Down the street, Sarah Gavlak moved her gallery into a new space off-island after years of showing at the Royal Poinciana Plaza, while Acquavella, the gallery run by the eponymous, Palm Beach–dwelling family, still has its space in an open-air shopping mall.

The most crucial art concern in the Palm Beach vicinity is unquestionably the Norton, which has gone from local curio to established art powerhouse in less than a decade. In 2018, Citadel CEO and mega-collector Ken Griffin announced that he would make a $16 million donation to the museum, the largest single gift in its history, to be used for, among other things, the construction of the space designed by Lord Norman Foster. Then in 2022, he moved his hedge fund, Citadel, from Chicago, where he’d feuded with Illinois governor JB Pritzker, to South Florida—and, as we revealed in this column in 2022, yanked his collection off the walls of the Art Institute, instead installing the works at the Norton.

Walking through the museum this weekend, I found that nearly all of the masterpieces in Griffin’s collection—de Kooning’s Interchange, an untitled Robert Ryman, Mark Rothko’s No. 2 (Blue, Red and Green) (Yellow, Red, Blue on Blue), and Jackson Pollock’s Number 17A—were in a space that abutted the contemporary galleries, still listed as belonging to a “private collection.” A room away, there was a massive Cy Twombly painting, Untitled (Camino Real), that was shown by Larry Gagosian as part of an exhibition of Twombly’s last paintings, staged at his Beverly Hills gallery in April 2012. The work belonged to financier Donald Marron, and when the collector died in 2019, the $450 million trove of art the UBS chairman had amassed over six decades was sold off by Gagosian alongside William Acquavella and Marc Glimcher. Now the Twombly work is hanging in the Norton. According to a source, it’s Griffin’s. (Griffin was not immediately available for comment.)

The first sign that the museum’s Saturday evening fundraiser was not your typical gala was the sight of Fox News host Bret Baier, whom, it’s safe to say, I’ve never encountered on the art circuit before. He walked in past the somewhat more expected guests, collectors with homes in South Florida: Neil and Kimberly Bluhm, Don and Mera Rubell, Steve and Lisa Tananbaum, Ronnie Heyman, DeWoody, and Jane Holzer, the former Warhol superstar who was raised on the island and maintains a big chunk of its valuable real estate. Sotheby’s had sent a battalion of deal closers from New York and London, among them: former auction house CEO Tad Smith, who is now a big crypto guy. I’ve never been in a room with so many diamonds, with so many faces tastefully augmented, with so many overheard conversations about whether they had just come back from Paris for the shows, or whether the jet was flying back to the city or the Hamptons.

The night’s honoree, Rashid Johnson, introduced me to Mariët Westermann, the director and CEO of the Guggenheim, where the artist will have a show later this year. Guggenheim deputy director and chief curator Naomi Beckwith, who oversaw the show, was there as well.

“Look at this structure!” said Bruce Gendelman, the chair of the Norton board, as he took to the stage, gesturing to the surroundings.

The gala was being held in a tent to accommodate the 800-person shindig, a first. The structure was built and designed by David Monn, the event designer behind Trump’s preinaugural dinner in 2017.

“I think this thing could rival the Sphere!” Gendelman said.

Norton director Ghislain d’Humieres introduced Johnson, who gave a speech and then proceeded to work the room, happily chatting with the museum’s donors and curators. Apart from Johnson, one of the more celebrated artists of our time, the most popular guy at the gala had to be John Phelan, still awaiting confirmation. Several tables called him over for group pictures, and he took unsolicited advice from those who fashioned themselves politicos. Some just wanted to offer their support for Trump’s pick to lead the Navy.

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“I’m excited for me—and for my country,” said one older gentleman.

“Well, I’m excited to hear that,” Phelan responded.

As the gala was winding down, with an 85-year-old and deeply tanned George Hamilton starting to dance to a band playing Earth, Wind & Fire songs, Lindsay Taylor, the curator for the Phelans, led me over to the couple. Amy met her future husband in 2000, when he was investing tech billionaire Michael Dell’s vast fortune at MSD Capital—and she was a few years removed from the Dallas Cowboys cheerleading squad. I asked her husband if he was planning on getting a place in the capital for the new gig.

“You know, I’ve just been staying at hotels,” he said.

I told him I was a Washington native and that I had just written a story about new DC hot spots during the transition—maybe he wanted some restaurant recommendations?

“Oh, that would be amazing, thank you,” Phelan said.

And then Taylor had a restaurant recommendation of her own, a local place.

“I wish I could have taken you to Mar-a-Lago. It’s just a little tough because he’s in town, so it might be tough to schedule,” she said, with no need to specify.

“The cheeseburger by the water is…” she said before performing a chef’s kiss. “It’s the best cheeseburger.”

The Rundown

Your crib sheet for the comings and goings in the art world this week and beyond…

…After all that’s gone down in Washington this week, you’re probably thinking to yourself: Does Elon Musk buy any art? The answer, effectively, is no, he does not! The extent to which he’s involved in the art world mostly centers around who and what’s getting shot to the cosmos on SpaceX rockets, as the first paying customer of his commercial shuttle service was Yusaku Maezawa, who bought a Basquiat skull painting for $110.5 million in 2017. The Japanese collector wanted to bring a few artists with him, but since he pushed the lunar voyage to 2024 and then canceled that outing, it’s unclear whether the trip will happen. Musk did manage to launch 125 Jeff Koons sculptures into space last year on his Falcon 9 rocket. But when it comes to artwork that Musk actually owns, the only hint we have is a picture from the depths of the COVID lockdowns, when Kanye West visited what appeared to be Musk’s former Bel Air pad and Grimes snapped a picture of the men in front of Hajime Sorayama’s Sexy Robot Floating. At the time the pic went viral, sources pointed out that, the previous November, a show at Jeffrey Deitch’s gallery in LA had six editions of the same sculpture, with the same cage around it.

…Maurizio Cattelan’s Comedian, also known as the banana on the wall, will be the star of the Super Bowl commercial Meta’s airing this Sunday. In the spot, Chris Pratt is checking out the art at Kris Jenner’s apartment when a peckish Chris Hemsworth takes Comedian off the wall and eats it. “That’s a $6.2 million banana!” Pratt says. They then ask the Meta AI system installed in their Ray-Ban sunglasses a bunch of questions, and that’s when I kind of lost interest. I’m just hoping Cattelan walked away with a bag.

…RxArt, the great nonprofit that commissions contemporary artists to make work for pediatric hospitals in order to cheer up sick kids with great art, celebrated its 25th anniversary with a gala at The Grill that honored its founder, Diane Brown. What’s even cooler is that dozens of the RxArt artists were present—Derrick Adams, Eli Sudbrack, Will Boone, Julia Chiang, Will Cotton, Ann Craven, Michele Oka Doner, Marcel Dzama, Sam Falls, Trenton Doyle Hancock, Daniel Heidkamp, Shara Hughes, Ewa Juszkiewicz, Koons, Tomokazu Matsuyama, Ryan McGinley, Jason Middlebrook, John Monti, Laura Owens, Nicolas Party, Hayal Pozanti, Rob Pruitt, Mary Temple, Mickalene Thomas—and the legendary photographer Timothy Greenfield-Sanders shot pics of each them before the event, and got a group shot as well.

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