Author and historian Laurence Leamer appeared on MSNBC on Saturday to discuss the decline of Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago country club.
“I know that you live actually in this neck of the woods and you have witnessed the big return,” said anchor Alex Witt. “So what happened there and what’s happened since Wednesday? Are supporters camping out outside his property there? Are they lining the streets? What’s it look like?”
“No,” said Leamer who wrote the definitive book on the Mar-a-Lago resort. “What’s fascinating — I’ve talked to a bunch of people the last couple of days. A lot of people have quit Mar-a-Lago. They don’t want their names to be in The Washington Post or The New York Times, and the list of people that have quit, they’ve silently walked out. They don’t want anything to do with Donald Trump. And many of the members, they’re not going there very often, because it’s a very dispirited place. They’re not concerned about politics. It’s a sad place for Trump to be hanging out. It’s not what it was.”
“Does that mean that Trump won’t also get the money that he gets for those private club memberships?” asked Witt. “That’s going to dwindle as well?”
“You know, these people paid up to $200,000 to get in because he was president,” said Leamer. “I don’t think they’re going to pay that anymore. It’s just another measure of how his power has declined and even in Palm Beach, where many people were for him, simply because they wanted lower taxes and they wanted a booming stock market. But they’re walking away from him. Even here, people don’t like him.”
Take a look at the discussion below: