Billionaires flocked to Donald Trump’s winter White House this week to audition for Treasury secretary, making their pitches to the president-elect behind the doors of Mar-a-Lago.
Trump’s victory has turned his opulent home into a bunker. Local police cars and black SUVs dot the bridge to the Palm Beach resort. A Secret Service tower looms on the left among palm trees, watching the intersection in front of Mar-a-Lago’s entrance. Orange cones snarled traffic to a crawl and helicopters buzzed overhead.
The message is clear: invitation only.
For those without an invite, speculation on who was in and out of favour as Trump chose his cabinet this week flowed through the bars and chic gourmet eateries on a nine-mile spit of land between the Breakers and the Four Seasons. There, gleaming red Ferraris and black Bentleys lined the streets.
Security around Mar-a-Lago was stepped up even further at the beginning of the week after guards heard a pop, only to learn that an elderly man with a pellet gun was shooting iguanas nearby.
Asked if he was the culprit, 80-year-old billionaire Thomas Peterffy, who lives a couple of mansions down from Trump and who has been known to take a violent dislike to lizards on his property — responded over email: “Ha ha.”
On Monday morning, Mitt Romney, the outgoing Republican senator and Trump critic, was getting out of a Dodge. At the Palm Beach airport he said he was only in town to support his wife Ann, an equestrian. He was not seeking a job.
As he left, the line of supplicants continued to grow and machinations surrounding who would be Trump’s pick for Treasury secretary played out behind the scenes.
On Monday night, cigar smoke wafted down Worth Avenue; a turn down an alley revealed Rudy Giuliani smoking at a bar filled with men in dark suits and women in tight dresses, after filming his online show.
Giuliani, like others on the right, said he was sceptical of Scott Bessent, a reported billionaire who would be Trump’s eventual choice for the Treasury job, because of his investment work for George Soros. But Bessent had a range of Republican allies including Larry Kudlow, Steve Bannon and Stan Druckenmiller, his mentor at Soros’s firm when they bet against the British pound in the 1990s.
On Tuesday, Trump left town for Texas, where he watched a SpaceX rocket launch with Elon Musk. Bill Hagerty, the Tennessee senator and Treasury secretary contender, joined, fuelling more questions about who the president-elect would pick to lead the US economy.
In absentia, the president-elect announced a slew of picks for other key positions.
Howard Lutnick, Bessent’s chief rival for the Treasury job and a co-head of Trump’s transition team, did not get what he wanted. Instead he would lead the commerce department and appeared to get control over trade.
Trump’s other transition co-chair, former World Wide Wrestling chief Linda McMahon, who seemed to want commerce, then got the education department. Trump also chose Dr Mehmet Oz, the TV star, to run Medicare and Medicaid.
That night, allies of Bessent and Hagerty unwound at the same restaurant at the Brazilian Court Hotel, only to discover in the morning that they faced new wealthy rivals.
Billionaire Marc Rowan, the Apollo chief, flew in to Mar-a-Lago from Hong Kong to meet Trump. Kevin Warsh, married to billionaire Jane Lauder, came as well despite it being rumoured that his dream was to one day chair the Federal Reserve.
Wednesday’s round of interviews at the resort for the Treasury secretary job did not yield an immediate conclusion, only exhaustion. Fox Business personality Charles Gasparino tweeted his thoughts seemingly every 20 minutes of who was up or down.
On Thursday, Matt Gaetz took himself out of contention to be attorney-general, after allegations of sexual misconduct ruined his path to confirmation through the Senate. Gaetz’s decision astonished the Maga faithful, including a man standing in a parking lot on the bridge to Mar-a-Lago, hoping to catch a glimpse of the Trump family.
“Shut up,” he said when told the news. “Why?”
That afternoon, 18 vehicles, including two ambulances, whizzed to the seaside resort flashing lights. Was it Trump? Had he chosen his Treasury secretary? The campaign later revealed it was JD Vance, the future vice-president. A false alarm.
On Friday evening, Trump announced that Bessent, the frontrunner all along, would get the Treasury job.
At Mar-a-Lago, a southern man in a pin striped suit and a blue and red tie was heading back to the Palm Beach airport. Asked if he was at Trump’s resort, he smiled and replied: “Nah. They wouldn’t let me in.”
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