Three years ago, the Event Horizon Telescope Collaboration released the first image of the supermassive black hole at the center of our galaxy, Sagittarius A*. It was the second image of a black hole ever taken.
Albert Einstein could only theorize about the possibility of black holes, but his General Theory of Relativity illustrated what is now known to be true: They bend spacetime, creating extreme gravities that contort the universe around them.
Sagittarius A* is 27,000 lightyears away from Earth, but it shapes the orbit of the entire Milky Way Galaxy.
Palm Beach is 998 miles from Washington, D.C., but the island exerts unprecedented influence on the goings-on in the nation’s capital. The Florida enclave, once a sleepy town unfamiliar to most Americans, is President Donald Trump’s home away from home. Mar-a-Lago, Trump’s private club and residence on the island, is the center of his political universe. Where politicos, CEOs and donors stay in relation to the club clarifies who circles in Trump’s orbit — and how closely — without the help of a powerful telescope.
Mar-a-Lago: the center
Gilded Age barons like Vanderbilt, Rockefeller, Carnegie and Pulitzer established this seasonal getaway more than a century ago. Trump wasn’t a familiar name in Palm Beach then, but he is obviously its most famous resident today.
Already he is making more frequent trips than during his first term; he’s traveled there a dozen times in his first 100 days in office. Dinner reservations for Friday night at Mar-a-Lago book out well in advance of the president’s weekend getaways, a source familiar with the club said. Trump often arrives with the likes of Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos or Howard Lutnick.
“It’s honestly overwhelming when you’re there, the status in the room, it gets kind of crazy,” the source said. “Someone called it eater-tainment.”
Trump’s club looms large in the public imagination: an ornate mansion built by a cereal heiress, now a seat of American power. Mar-a-Lago is a primary venue for much of Trump’s fundraising, politicking and dealmaking. It is where world leaders and tech billionaires met with him during the 70-day transition. Events haven’t slowed down since Trump took office, and his most invested supporters still want to be right there.
“Within those four walls,” said Dana Koch, “those are the diehards.”
Koch is a top Palm Beach agent with the Corcoran Group and a former member of Mar-a-Lago.
The club fronts Florida’s A1A at the southern end of the island, adjacent to one of three bridges that connect it to the mainland. When the president is in town, Secret Security forms barriers around what is known as the Mar-a-Lago Security Zone, restricting access to the club and dozens of homes. It creates traffic headaches for locals, people not accustomed to long waits at red lights in a beach town that stretches just 16 miles long and not even a mile wide.
Dozens of homes are within the zone, and six have sold since the election, totaling $101.3 million in deals. Some buyers are requesting homes in the zone, attracted to both the proximity of the president and the added safety benefits, agents say.
Mar-a-Lago has guest suites for those traveling with the president, and nearby hotels like the Breakers and the Ben in West Palm Beach often catch the overflow. Trump and his family members also own at least four homes adjacent to the club: 1125 South Ocean Boulevard, 1094 South Ocean Boulevard, 124 Woodbridge Road and 121 Woodbridge Road.
Palm Beach: inner orbit
Rumors started to swirl about cabinet members buying nearby homes almost as soon as Trump’s victory was declared in November.
“Donald has a lot of high-level friends who want to be close to him,” said Margit Brandt, a top agent with Premier Estate Properties. Brandt has represented rental listings for Trump in the past; she declined to comment on whether she is working with any of the president’s friends on a Palm Beach home search.
So far, the talk of White House-related home sales turned out to be just that, talk. While the president’s win in November jump-started the busy season — pending contracts in Palm Beach surged 400 percent, year-over-year, in the weeks following the election — it wasn’t his inner circle snapping up properties.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Trump’s Secretary of Health and Human Services, has rented a house on the island, sources say. He frequents Green’s Pharmacy, a famed favorite of his uncle, an old school lunch counter serving omelettes and burgers. He is one of the few cabinet members spending time on the island.
“The bottom line is there’s been no big movement,” Blair Brandt, GOP fundraiser and husband to Margit; he’s also her chief brand officer. “There’s been a lot of people pulled out of Trump’s orbit in Palm Beach into the administration,” rather than the other way around, he added.
Among the few locals pulled into the cabinet is Dr. Mehmet Oz, celebrity physician and Trump’s head of Medicare and Medicaid. Dr. Oz bought his Palm Beach house for $18 million in 2015, according to published reports. It is the historic, 1.2-acre oceanfront estate known as Louwana, next door to the 3.2-acre Casa Amado Daren Metropoulos bought for $148 million last summer.
A friend of RFK Jr., the duo recently played tennis in Palm Beach with Serbian champ Novak Djokovic, shortly before they launched their Make America Healthy Again initiative.
“Palm Beach has always been titans of industry, but not always people who jump off the page at you,” Blair Brandt said, noting how the small town has become much more of a scene in this political era.
Others in Trump’s Palm Beach orbit include his allies at Fox News, hosts Bret Baier and Sean Hannity, who were also already planted on the island before the election. Baier and his wife Amy Baier upsized to a 6,700-square-foot home for $37 million in 2023, selling their smaller home for $13.5 million a few months later. Hannity has for years owned a townhome at Sloans Curve, but in the months following the election bought the townhouse next door and a lakefront home down the road in Manalapan, upping his total real estate spend in the area to $43.7 million.
Billionaire hedge funder John Paulson hosted a fundraiser for Trump in April of last year at his Palm Beach home, the oceanfront mansion at 1840 South Ocean Boulevard, which he bought for $109.6 million in 2021. The Republican National Committee reported raising $50.5 million that night.
Other Palm Beachers and Trump boosters include sugar barron Pepe Fanjul Sr.; father of the payday loan industry, Allan Jones; and MSD Capital co-founder and Trump’s pick for Secretary of the Navy, John Phelan.
Duke Buchan, whom a profile in the Wall Street Journal described as the president’s “secret weapon” for fundraising and the man responsible for a surge in megadonors in the 2024 campaign, bought his oceanfront home on the island for $6.3 million in 2012. Buchan, CEO and founder of Palm Beach-based Hunter Global Investors, has been rewarded for his efforts. In Trump’s first term he served as ambassador to Spain, and now he’s been nominated to do the same for Morocco.
Palm Beach: outer fringes
Boys are from Mars, girls are from Venus, and ambassadors are from Jupiter — at least in the Trump administration.
While Palm Beach captures the public imagination as headquarters for the president’s MAGA movement, in truth the faithful are spread across an area in northern Palm Beach County dominated by gated communities and golf courses.
At least 16 current and former Trump administration ambassadors own homes in Palm Beach County, many of them in a town called Jupiter. Still, it came as a surprise when the president posted to Truth Social on Christmas Eve his nomination for John Arrigo to the ambassadorship of Portugal. He described Arrigo, an unknown in the world of international affairs as “a highly successful entrepreneur in the automotive industry, and a champion golfer.”
Arrigo is a former car dealer. South Florida residents might recognize him from his starring roles in green screen commercials for his family’s Arrigo Auto Group. He’s taken on parts such as Santa Claus, a fireman and an ’80s-styled aerobics enthusiast, delivering his lines with verve.
John Arrigo lives at 18258 Perigon Way in Jupiter, a 3,600-square-foot waterfront home he bought for $1.3 million in 2013, records show. The Arrigos, who started their dealer group in 1989, expanded to sell Alfa Romeos, Fiats, Jeeps, Rams, Dodges and Chrysler vehicles. They cashed out in 2020, selling their dealerships in West Palm Beach, Tamarac and Margate for $90.5 million.
Arrigo is a longtime member of both Mar-a-Lago and Trump International Golf Club in West Palm Beach, according to a Vox article. Public records show he has donated at least $10,000 to Trump and the RNC.
He is waiting on his Senate confirmation, but so are most of Trump’s Jupiter diplomats. It’s a crowd that includes Kimberly Guilfoyle, who has been tapped as the ambassador to Greece. She and her ex-fiancé Donald Trump Jr. own a waterfront 12,000-square-foot mansion in the gated community Admirals Cove.
Eric Trump and his wife Lara are in the area, too. They live in a 7,700-square-foot home in Trump National Golf Club Jupiter, one of 18 Trump Organization-owned golf courses around the country.
Agents say the gated communities in broader Palm Beach County have proven popular with buyers looking for proximity to Mar-a-Lago who don’t necessarily want to be on the island.
“Mar-a-Lago has become the epicenter of big social events,” said Senada Adzem, an agent with Douglas Elliman based in Boca Raton. “A lot of clients want proximity to that southern part of Palm Beach.”
And for those with international political ambitions, there are still plenty of ambassador roles open.
Miami: galaxy’s edge
The celestial bodies twisting about in space do not follow perfectly circular orbits; they are elliptical. As they rotate, they move closer or farther away from the center of mass, setting their course. The farthest point of orbit is known as apogee.
Much has been said and written about the differences between Trump’s first and second presidencies, but a key metric is who is close and who is far.
The president’s daughter, Ivanka Trump, and her husband, Jared Kushner, were key figures in the first administration, both serving as senior advisors in the White House.
This time around, they aren’t in D.C. nor are they in Palm Beach.
The couple bought a 1.3-acre waterfront estate on Indian Creek Island near Miami for $24 million in 2021, where their neighbors include DJ David Guetta, Jeff Bezos and Lauren Sanchez.
The First Daughter is no longer setting policy, but rather planning baby showers and embarking on sunset horseback rides on remote beaches. In a recent Instagram post about her vacation, she wished peace to her followers.
