Cerabino: Trump tears down social walls in new Mar-a-Lago book

The way that part-time Palm Beacher Laurence Leamer sees it, to understand President Donald Trump, you’ve got to understand the connection he has to his Florida oasis, Mar-a-Lago.

“Mar-a-Lago is his spiritual center,” Leamer said. “It’s the one place where he is most himself. He’s largely friendless, but he has created this fantasy world here where he can be surrounded by people who tell him how great he is.”

Leamer, who 10 years ago wrote the scandal-happy “Madness Under the Royal Palms: Love and Death behind the Gates of Palm Beach,” has written a new Palm Beach book, this one centered on Trump, his Palm Beach home and his brash conquest of the town’s social order.

“Mar-a-Lago: Inside the Gates of Power at Donald Trump’s Presidential Palace” will be published Tuesday.

“I tried to write a fair book about him, but he probably won’t see it that way,” Leamer said. “Obviously, something will set him off.”

Leamer’s book uses scores of clippings and interviews to paint a breezy history of the 34 years that Trump has owned and transformed one of Palm Beach’s most recognizable landmark properties.

In it, Leamer credits Trump for redefining success on the island.

“In Palm Beach, Trump had helped banish to the hinterlands the old elite who fancied that without class and manners, wealth was meaningless,” Leamer wrote. “Since time immemorial, philosophers and religious savants have said money does not bring happiness, but they had not met Donald J. Trump.

“Money is everything, and don’t you forget it.”

The book is far from a tribute.

Pettiness abounds. Lawsuits fly. And more than one slinky young woman decked out in evening wear gets tossed without her consent into the Mar-a-Lago swimming pool by Trump just so he can see what she looks like climbing out with her wet clothing clinging to her.

The book touches on the well-worn hot spots -- the spats over the size of his flagpole, the flight path of jets landing at Palm Beach International Airport, and the county jail that marred the vistas from his golf course.

But Leamer has also polished off some gems that have been buried and deserve some new light.

For example, in the early 1990s, when the town prevented Trump from getting out from under the debt of Mar-a-Lago by turning the property into mini-mansions, Trump threatened to retaliate by selling his home to the Rev. Sun Myong Moon, the leader of cultish Unification Church.

Trump said he would sue the town and then sell Mar-a-Lago to “some interesting people who aren’t your usual Palm Beachers.”

Then he used a staffer to reach out to the religious leader to make his threat seem more credible to his Palm Beach neighbors.

Leamer wrote: “In the whole history of Palm Beach, nobody had ever threatened the town government in such a belligerent way as Trump.”

The book demonstrates that the kind of retaliatory posture Trump uses today to deal with political enemies in the White House was something he had employed for decades in his Florida house.

It details his personal attacks against the less-than-fawning Shannon Donnelly, the society writer for The Palm Beach Daily News, and tells what happened to Joseph Vicsconti, a charter member of the Mar-a-Lago Club who dared to ask for a refund of his $25,000 initiation fee once he realized the club wasn’t for him.

“It’s turning out to be The Donald Trump Club, which I don’t want to be part of,” Visconti had said.

Trump refused to give him a refund.

“Obviously, he needs money,” Trump is quoted as saying. “It’s our policy that we don’t give money back. I can’t be extorted.”

Leamer wrote: “When Visconti sued to have his $25,000 returned, Trump countersued for $1 million, claiming that Visconti had made ‘false and defamatory statements.’ Visconti caved and agreed to an undisclosed settlement.”

Nobody is spared a retaliatory attack from Trump. When Aylene Massey, who lived across the street from Mar-a-Lago, complained about the volume of the club’s loudspeakers in a letter to the mayor, Trump dashed off his own letter to the widow.

“After you asked to come to the Beach Boys concert and then brought with you a group of 16 people and after giving you and your friends a tour of the club, your letter was highly insulting,” Trump wrote.

He fought with the nearby Bath & Tennis Club over its loading dock. He fought with his soon-to-be-fired celebrity chef over his version of Caeser salad. He fought with a club member who dared to complain about the shoe cleaner at the tennis courts, and the West Palm Beach chandelier company he refused to pay in full.

A couple of my columns, and Trump’s gripes about them, are recounted too.

Leamer leans heavily on now-retired National Enquirer reporter Wayne Grover to flesh out Trump’s early adoption of using the supermarket tabloid as his own personal self-promotion arm

“The National Enquirer was key to establishing Trump’s populist image,” Leamer wrote. “To keep building it, all Trump had to do was to continue feeding stories to Wayne Grover. This cost nothing to Trump in terms of the people with whom he lived and socialized.

“Almost none of those in Trump’s world read the supermarket tabloids, and most people he knew had no idea of the extent that Trump was collaborating with the downscale weekly,” Leamer wrote.

Leamer’s recounting of the now-President Trump’s time at Mar-a-Lago falls heavily on Trump friend, Chris Ruddy, the founder of the politically conservative, West Palm Beach-based website Newsmax.

Leamer credits Ruddy for leading his friend, Trump, “back into a world of political paranoia.”

Leamer said he spoke to Trump at Mar-a-Lago about talking to him for the book, but while Trump acted interested, he never did. Leamer, a registered Democrat, is not a member of Mar-a-Lago but has visited as a guest, he said.

The club, he wrote, is essential to Trump. It allows him to bask in the adoration he needs. Leamer, while observing Trump as the center of gravity in his club, put it this way:

“He belonged here,” Leamer wrote. “He controlled everything within his purview. Most of the people in the room were his, too. Many of them had joined just so they could be close to him.”

The book ends with a vivid final scene of Trump and his wife, Melania, leaving club members for the evening as they walk toward the family quarters inside the mansion while former boxing promoter Don King follows them while shouting, “The president! The great president!”

fcerabino@pbpost.com

@FranklyFlorida