Why yes, now that you mention it, the Titanic did have a ballroom. A big ballroom, the hottest ballroom on those high cold seas. More splendiferous even than the Kravitz Center ballroom, where the president recently took to a Forum Club of the Palm Beaches podium.
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Donald Trump has big plans for my little slice of paradise.
“I give it the Mar-a-Lago treatment,” he first chuckled of the Oval Office re-glitzing before turning his gaze on the crowd and making clear he wanted to make West Palm Beach better, too. Real estate agents whipped out their phones to put a hard sell on anything east of I-95. Prediction markets collapsed under the weight of Gold Sharpie bets.
Or maybe I’m needlessly hyperventilating over the prospect of a searingly gilded arch in my future. Sometimes it’s hard to follow what Trump said, or meant, or thought, or forgot to mean or think. Sometimes that’s because a stray thought so often crashes the party that is the presidential cranium, kicks over the keg and makes for the nearest exit. Sometimes it’s because there are just so very many Trumps, as there were at the Forum Club speech.
Donald Trump, Professional Greeter: “This is a crowd where I know so many — many killers. Some are nice. Some are horrendous people.”
Donald Trump, Palm Beach Town Planner: “I said (to the mayor), why can’t we be more like a submarine?”
Donald Trump, marriage counselor: “One policeman told me, ‘My wife thought very little of me. She felt I wasn’t a man because I was a bad investor. With my 401(k), I had nothing I could do about it. It was under the Biden administration.’”
Donald Trump, sportswriter: “I said, 250 years, OK, I got the Olympics, I got the World Cup. Maybe I can also claim the 250-year thing that I got that, too. So, I tried. I said, I also got 250 years. And they said, so you didn’t get 200 with 250. OK, well, I gave up.”
Donald Trump, glass half full: “Saturday night, it (White House Correspondents’ Dinner) was good for one thing. People are loving my ballroom now … They love my ballroom. They love my ballroom.”
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Donald Trump, quantum physics ‘splainer: “I do a lot of things that are impossible to do. Like becoming president three times.”
Donald Trump, on wealthy Palm Beachers being diverted from Mar-a-Lago: “They get thrown around like piñatas by the Secret Service. They don’t mind. They’re honored.”
Donald Trump, graciously accepting audience questions: “Stupid question.”
Don’t take my word for it. There are transcripts. There is video. And sadly for the subtle, there was a whole lotta brash Trump love for West Palm in that room, too; for the killers, for Palm Beach County Sheriff Ric Bradshaw, who Trump maybe-joked-not-joked had peeked at his ballot; for the well-heeled piñatas of Worth Avenue; and especially for Palm Beach International Airport, soon to be Trump’s International Wings O’ Grift. Or, as Kamala Harris voters and Harry Potter readers refer to it, The Airport Which Must Not be Named.
Trump may be smitten with the home team now, but that’s only because FBI Director Kash “Stone Cold Sober” Patel hasn’t sent agents to see how very many seashells we have on our seashores. He’s been busy counting his bespoke bottles of FBI-branded bourbon and indicting his predecessor Jim Comey, because: seashells. Specifically, carapaces spelling out 8647, which is either shell-speak for evil intent or a bartender telling Patel to 86 his personal booze and buy a drink already.
And does the Secret Service know that there are 45 Palm Beach County addresses starting with 8647? Forty-five! The first term! Plus 8647! The conch conspiracy!
Add in international sex symbol Warren Buffett and 250 years of football or maybe democracy or maybe mashed potatoes and you are well on your way to not understanding why our president ordered Pete Hegseth to grab ’em by the Strait of Hormuz.
Maybe he thought his ships don’t sink.
Pat Beall is a Sun Sentinel columnist and editorial writer. Contact her at [email protected].
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