https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/mar-a-lago-neighbors-legal-action/
Worshiper at Religious Society of Friends (Quakers) (1966–present)How will Trump’s Mar-a-Lago-neighbors enforce the 1993 covenant that he cannot stay more than 21 days a year and 7 consecutive days when he has spent 130 days during his presidency and it is registered as his permanent Florida address?The Mar-a-Lago Club; 1100 South Ocean Boulevard, Palm Beach, Florida 33480
Mar-a-Lago was supposed to be Mr. Trump’s protected place from creditors. The theory that Mr. Trump is following is that Florida has some real cool laws on the books that prevent people from chasing you to this state to pay your debts. This also has two sides to it. Mr. Trump sees himself as a public person – the rich and shameless come to his door because literally, no matter what shit you have on your soul, it is not worse than Trump.
Trump likes all those people visiting him but he has made a scam out of it. Instead of being a host and opening a home to people – I can name dozens of millionaires who have opened a bedroom and fed me a dinner in the last five years alone – Trump makes you pay for the pleasure. Locals pay for the club, people from out of town pay a per-diem.
By the way, here is how this whole dodge works. This “house” that looks like a hotel for gaudy drug lords is actually Trump’s one and only residence. Or so he “legally” claims. Everything else is just a front. As his one and only residence, Mar-a-Lago is thus subject to being protected under the Homestead act as exempt. Under the Florida Constitution, homestead exemption accomplishes three types of exemptions:
- Exemption from forced sale before and at death – all those people he owes money to cannot come and get Mar-a-Lago.
- Restrictions on devise and alienation. What is this? Devise occurs when property passes to the next generation through a will, and alienation by occurs when there is no will. The Florida law prevents huge amounts of taxes from being paid on the first homesteaded house.
- Exemption from taxation per Article VII, Section 6, which says, “Every person who has the legal or equitable title to real estate and maintains thereon the permanent residence of the owner, or another legally or naturally dependent upon the owner, shall be exempt from taxation thereon, except assessments for special benefits, up to the assessed valuation of twenty-five thousand dollars and, for all levies other than school district levies, on the assessed valuation greater than fifty thousand dollars and up to seventy-five thousand dollars, upon establishment of right thereto in the manner prescribed by law…” Which means he pays next to nothing in tax on the property.
The problem for Trump is he is taking two different legal ideals and jamming them together illegally.
Mar-a-Lago is a house, in which case he owes education and property taxes and cannot run a business there.
Mar-a-Lago is a business, in which case he cannot live there or protect it through homestead.
To make sure Trump understood this, they had him sign a contract which says, I won’t live there and run it as a hotel except when I am president and have the power to tell you to fuck yourself.
The power to tell people to fuck themselves is ticking away. So the end game for Trump-
#1 Shut the hotel down, pay your taxes of what I personally figure is 1.8 million per year, and you are OJ Simpson safe from losing the property.
#2 Run the hotel and pay business taxes, but stay out of the residence two days in three through audits. And someone can come and sue you for it.
He cannot do both.
By the way, there are a lot of minor errors in some posts. I want to put them right without implying they are outlandish.
- The status of the club is a significant issue and was under threat of adjudication before Mr. Trump won the presidency. With his change of residence from New York to protect him from a last minute NYS records request as he was running for president, he agreed that in exchange for forbearance on the issue of Mar-a-Lago, he would return to the agreed upon 130 day residence per year – in essence matching the yearly residence process that a few shared properties, where family members exchange the property each month with other family members, and thus being a legal clear zone for removing litigation.
- The issue is affecting the value of some even more expensive property, and thus is not simply a poor little city fighting a big behemoth. Right now the “Marion Sims Wyeth” house – one of the most beautiful I have ever seen anywhere – and the Maurice Fatio Residence are coming on the market or are now being shown, plus four new constructions, and the Trump circus is not making selling easy. The Kushners are already finding out that just a hint they may be buying property in New York City is causing real-world loss of property value. My friend in Satellite says the Trump name is on par with Sirhan Sirhan in terms of popularity. A lot of movers and shakers are saying the Trump circus just needs to go buy acreage in Glendale California and make friends with the Kardashians. All of this means there is great pressure to see Trump et. al. follow their contract, with an eye to seeing him off.
- Then there is the money. Everyone I know in the industry says no one will lend Trump 50 cents unless he spends the money making a raft to take it to Cuba. The idea that Trump has the money to maintain a 30-million dollars property that he has listed as worth ten times that is a joke. The word is – he owes 500 million on paper, 500 million on tax dodges, and has no property worth a cent, even Mar-a-Lago is leveraged, and his only income not coming from cheating the Government is something called Trump Ice, which may allow them to have a comfy split level in Snell island. To make Mar-a-Lago work he needs all the scams to stay in place.
Donald Trump’s money faucet is getting turned off
His money troubles have started. If he is filthy rich these small loses should not matter.
Holding the G-7 Summit at a Trump Golf Course Is Blatant Corruption
In the competition to persuade wealthy customers to stay at high-end golf resorts, the Trump National Doral Miami is a so-so contender. When Golf magazine recently listed the top twenty-five golf resorts for luxury and the top twenty-five for general excellence, Doral didn’t make either list. It did get included in the top-hundred list, and it was also featured in the “Top 25 Resorts for Buddies,” a segment designed for hardcore golfers seeking “immersion therapy with multiple courses to play 18, 36, or until you just can’t see the ball anymore.” Doral has four courses, including the famous Blue Monster, which for many years was a regular stop on the P.G.A. Tour, and it’s certainly easy for your buddies to get to. Miami International Airport is just a few miles away.
Like many golf courses and golf resorts, Doral has faced serious challenges from rising competition and a decline in the number of people playing golf. In 2012, the Trump Organization purchased Doral out of bankruptcy court for a hundred and fifty million dollars—Deutsche Bank provided a mortgage—and added “Trump National” to its name. Once Trump bought the property, he started an extensive renovation, which was completed in 2016. The Trump Organization claimed that the renovation cost more than two hundred million dollars, although there is no way to verify that claim. But, in any case, Doral, which has almost six hundred and fifty guest rooms, represented a major investment for Trump, and it is by far the biggest of his golf resorts.
Despite the renovations, however, Doral’s struggles have continued. They may well have intensified. In 2016, Cadillac pulled out of sponsoring the venue’s annual P.G.A. Tour event, which created invaluable publicity, and the organizers moved the tournament to Mexico City. (“I hope they have kidnapping insurance,” a miffed Trump commented.) Earlier this year, the Washington Post’s David A. Fahrenthold and Jonathan O’Connell, two reporters who have done sterling work tracking Trump’s intermingling of his public duties with his private business interests, reported that Doral had seen a “steep decline” in its business since Trump decided to run for President. The resort’s “room rates, banquets, golf and overall revenue were all down since 2015,” the Post reported. “In two years, the resort’s net operating income—a key figure, representing the amount left over after expenses are paid—had fallen by 69 percent.”
In a statement provided to the Post, the Trump Organization claimed that the Zika virus and hurricanes had driven visitors away from South Florida. But the paper cited statistics showing that “competing resorts in the same region of Florida still outperformed the Trump resort in the key metrics of room occupancy and average room rate.” It also quoted experts who suggested that the Trump name might be hurting the Doral brand.
Whatever the cause of its troubles, Doral clearly needed a boost, and its proprietor has now provided it with a huge one: a federal contract to host next year’s G-7 meeting, which will bring the resort a substantial sum of taxpayers’ dollars and generate invaluable publicity for Doral all over the world. On Thursday, Mick Mulvaney, Trump’s chief of staff, announced that the summit will be held at Doral in June of 2020. Trump will attend the meeting, along with the leaders of Britain, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, and Japan, and sizable delegations from each member country.
Nobody should be surprised, of course. In making frequent visits to his commercial properties in Florida, New Jersey, and other locales, Trump has been funnelling federal dollars into his own coffers ever since he was elected. For example, Mar-a-Lago, Trump’s oceanfront resort in Palm Beach, charges its government visitors up to five hundred and fifty dollars a night for their rooms, according to ProPublica. Trump started pitching Doral as the G-7 venue as early as June. By August, when he attended this year’s G-7 meeting, in the French coastal city of Biarritz, the fix was already in, although he tried to portray the choice of Doral as the outcome of a proper search process rather than that of a Presidential edict. “They went to places all over the country, and they came back and they said, ‘This is where we’d like to be,’ ” he said. “It’s not about me. It’s about getting the right location.”
Since resigning as the head of the U.S Office of Government Ethics, in 2017, Walter Shaub has taken on the invaluable role of pointing out Trump’s many transgressions and challenging them alongside his colleagues at the watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, or crew. But, as Shaub pointed out to me in a conversation on Friday, the selection of Doral represents a “new low” in the President’s behavior. “It’s just so obviously a right-and-wrong issue,” Shaub said. “It’s the kind of thing that we see happening in completely broken nations. There is no definition of corruption that anyone could think of that would lead them to say this isn’t corruption.”
The even greater scandal is that Trump continues to get away with this sort of thing. If an ordinary government official awarded a valuable federal contract to a company that he had an ownership stake in, he could well be arrested and sent to prison. As President, Trump is exempt from the federal conflict-of-interest statutes—a glaring omission that must have delighted him when he found out about it. That means there is virtually no chance of the Justice Department even looking into his involvement in the choice of Doral. Of course, other officials who were involved might not be so lucky. Shaub has raised the question of whether they may have violated criminal provisions of the Procurement Integrity Act, which lays down strict rules for the awards of government contracts. On Friday, Shaub and his colleagues at crew called on the State Department’s inspector general to look into the matter.
Since the delegations to the G-7 meetings routinely pay for their own hotel rooms and other facilities, choosing a resort that Trump owns to host the summit looks like a clear violation of Article I, Section 9 of the U.S. Constitution, which states that no federal officeholder can receive any “present, Emolument, Office, or Title, of any kind” from any foreign state unless he receives the consent of Congress. (An emolument is a payment in money or anything else of value.) But a number of legal challenges to Trump’s self-dealing based on the Emoluments Clause have already been bogged down in the courts.
In July, the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals, which is based in Richmond, Virginia, threw out a lawsuit that claimed that the President’s ownership of the Trump International Hotel, in Washington, D.C., which representatives of many foreign governments now patronize, violated the Constitution. The three-judge panel said that the plaintiffs—the Attorney Generals of Maryland and Washington, D.C.—didn’t have legal standing to enforce the Emoluments Clause. Last month, a separate panel of judges, from the Second Circuit Court of Appeals, which is based in New York, issued a ruling that rejected the Fourth Circuit’s reasoning and reinstated another emoluments lawsuit, which crew had filed. But that case, and a third one in Washington, D.C., where the plaintiffs are a group of Democratic lawmakers, are proceeding at a very slow pace—too slow to stop Trump.
With the courts tied up and the Justice Department under the control of a Trump loyalist, responsibility for bringing Trump to book falls squarely on Congress, which already has a lot on its hands. The Democrats are busy pursuing “Ukrainegate.” Most Republicans on Capitol Hill are as cowed by Trump as they’ve ever been, and at least one of them has welcomed the decision to hold the G-7 meeting at Doral. “Selfishly as a Floridian, senator from Florida, I think it’s great any time our community gets that kind of attention,” Marco Rubio said.
That statement, along with the over-all lack of reaction from other G.O.P. officials, caused Shaub to despair. He said to me, “If the Republican senators shrug this off, then their message is that there is literally nothing they would say is corruption.” Judging by Trump’s recent actions, he has already received the message.