Haughty Palm Beach learns to love Trump, once a scorned outsider

Miami Herald ^ | January 17,2017 | BY PATRICIA MAZZEI

[Hojczyk]

Immediately branded by the notoriously insular locals as a vulgar arriviste, he acquired the late cereal heiress Marjorie Merriweather Post’s landmark Mar-a-Lago estate — and the desirable social standing it bestowed — in 1985, only to spend the following three decades suing the town over and over again when it got in his way. The squabbles between Trump and the Palm Beach establishment became the stuff of tabloid legend.

My, how times have changed. Or at least, Trump’s place in the world has.

With Trump’s imminent presidential inauguration, Palm Beach has become far more tolerant of its most famous, and now most powerful, part-time resident. One might even be tempted to say the town has — gasp! — wrapped Trump in its collective embrace.

“That’s going too far,” chuckled Carey O’Donnell, a public relations and advertising exec and longtime resident who now lives on one of the three bridges leading to barrier-island Palm Beach. (The uninitiated often mistakenly identify Mar-a-Lago as being on the decidedly less upscale mainland city of West Palm Beach.)

Trump’s relationship with Palm Beach “has evolved over time,” O’Donnell conceded. “But certainly now there’s a drastic change. You wouldn’t call it an evolution anymore; now it’s a drastic shift — out of necessity, of course.”

And so, good luck finding a Palm Beacher today who offers something other than praise for the president-elect.

“Before the election, you’d ask people, ‘Are you for Donald Trump?’ They’d say, ‘I’m not,’” said Laurence Leamer, a veteran nonfiction author who exposed the foibles of Palm Beach society in his 2009 book “Madness Under the Palms” — and was promptly shunned. “And now they’re like, ‘I am!’”

[Hojczyk]

It is a good article....a little history..

The reporter must have taken Valium