Trump’s Beloved Mar-a-Lago Faces a Major Threat

Donald Trump may be too much for Palm Beach, Florida, to deal with.

The town is reviewing legal options, including closing his Mar-a-Lago country club, to help residents feel safe following the assassination attempt against Trump last month. Since then, the Secret Service has closed the main road to the club, South Ocean Boulevard, with security around the property increased. Local police say it won’t be opened again before Election Day in November.

Despite the road’s closure and increased checkpoints, Mar-a-Lago has remained open, with hundreds of people attending different events, including ones hosted by the president. That has touched a nerve with the town’s leadership.

“In my mind, if the road is closed, the Mar-a-Lago Club is closed,” Mayor Danielle Moore said in a council meeting Tuesday. “There’s no way in God’s green earth that they can bring 350 people into that club. It’s completely illogical that you’ve got a road closed and then you’re going to let 350 strangers into your club.”

“However, you can’t have it both ways, boys and girls,” Moore added. “Either the club’s open or not.”

The mayor, the town council, and the residents all said at the meeting that they didn’t want anything to happen to Trump, and that politics didn’t play a role in their discussion, which was prompted by concerns that the town won’t receive a reply to a July 22 letter it sent to the Secret Service asking for “the legal authority authorizing it to implement the road closure for the specified duration and even when protectee(s) are not in residence in the Town.”

Trump may not take the town’s concerns kindly. The events the club hosts rake in money, and Trump enjoys getting feted by the right and far right who come to sing his praises, sometimes literally. And he certainly doesn’t have a history of recognizing how much his presence costs the residents of the places he visits.

Trump is still holding firm on his conspiracy that Vice President Kamala Harris couldn’t possibly pull large crowds to her campaign events and is using artificial intelligence to digitally enhance images of her rallies.

When asked by a reporter to follow up on his comments earlier this week that an image of thousands of people attending Harris’s Detroit airport rally was fabricated using A.I., Trump doubled down.

“You said Harris’s crowds were A.I. and that there weren’t people there. There’s all kinds of video evidence from people who were there who have proven that false. Can you tell us about why you made that claim?”

“Well, I can’t say what was there, who was there,” Trump responded.

“We have the biggest crowds ever in the history of politics,” Trump continued, getting defensive.

Well, here’s an easy fact-check: An estimated 15,000 people showed up to Harris’s airport rally in Michigan.

Trump has long been obsessed with crowd sizes. Last week, things got weird as he tried to claim his January 6 crowd was larger than Martin Luther King Jr.’s March on Washington. “Nobody’s spoken to crowds bigger than me,” said the former president. “If you look at Martin Luther King when he did his speech, and you look at ours ... we had more.”

The vice president’s campaign vehemently denies that the image of her Detroit crowd was faked in any way despite Trump posting on Sunday that Harris “CHEATED” or “‘A.I.’d’ it” and that the massive crowd “DIDN’T EXIST!”

Perhaps Trump is lashing out due to his insecurity about his upcoming micro-event strategy, where the former president will hold smaller “messaging events” rather than large-scale rallies.

Fundraising for the Democratic National Convention has gone through the roof, shattering previous Republican and Democratic fundraising efforts with a whopping $94 million, according to the host committee, Development Now for Chicago.

“Today’s announcement is a reflection of the unified love for our city, and we couldn’t be more grateful for the broad coalition of partners who came together to ensure Chicago could put its best foot forward at this convention,” Christy George, the host committee’s executive director, said Wednesday in a statement obtained by the Chicago Tribune.

The announcement listed AT&T, Invenergy, and United Airlines as major investors, according to the Tribune, though a more comprehensive picture of donors will be available after the convention ends next week.

All in all, the committee raised $9 million more than the Republican National Convention in July, which brought in $85 million, according to Milwaukee’s host committee.

The milestone arrives alongside a Monmouth University poll illustrating skyrocketing momentum behind Vice President Kamala Harris’s campaign. There were significant boosts in enthusiasm among Democrats—which leaped from 46 percent to 85 percent now that Harris is the nominee—as well as independent voters, who similarly jumped from 34 percent when President Joe Biden was in the race to 53 percent with Harris.

“This is clearly a different ballgame. The nominee change has raised the ceiling for potential Democratic support in the presidential contest by a small but crucial amount, at least for now,” said Patrick Murray, director of the independent Monmouth University Polling Institute, in a statement.

A former aide to Donald Trump doesn’t predict good things coming out of his campaign’s latest strategy.

In an effort to keep the Republican presidential nominee from making more childish ad hominem attacks against Vice President Kamala Harris and her crowd sizes, the Trump campaign has reportedly discussed holding smaller “messaging events.” Those will replace his boisterous, multi-hour rallies, which he won’t resume until after the Democratic National Convention, Trump spokesman Steven Cheung told CNBC.

But although the intention of the micro events is to keep Trump focused on the issues that actually matter to voters, former Trump press secretary Stephanie Grisham believes that the events will be short-lived as the campaign discovers Trump doesn’t thrive in smaller crowds.

“I imagine he will do some of them, and maybe for a week he’ll, you know, attempt to stay on message,” Grisham said on a CNN panel Tuesday. “It depends on how tough his staff is being with him, but he will get bored. He doesn’t like those small events; he never has. And he will be demanding to do a large rally sooner rather than later.

“They want him to be a fake version of himself,” she added. “Donald Trump is a bombastic narcissist, and he loves attention.”

Conservatives have been less than enthused about Trump’s performance in recent weeks, as the typically bombastic populist had floundered to find an appropriate political response to Harris’s nomination outside of mocking her race, her personality, or her intelligence. Even some of Trump’s most ardent supporters have abandoned ship. Last week, notorious white supremacist Nick Fuentes announced a “groyper war” on Trump’s social media platform, Truth Social, believing that Trump’s current campaign staff are setting the party up for a “catastrophic loss.”

Gun rights activist and charged Kenosha, Wisconsin, shooter Kyle Rittenhouse publicly withdrew his support from Trump earlier this month, announcing in a video statement that he felt Trump wasn’t a true champion of the Second Amendment and that he intended to write in former Representative Ron Paul. (Though less than 12 hours after making the post, Rittenhouse was approached by Trump’s team and subsequently changed his tune.) And users on Trump’s social media platform, Truth Social, got the hashtag “#TrumpIsACoward” trending after the Republican nominee backed out of a prearranged September 10 debate with Harris on ABC News. (Trump has since agreed, again, to the debate.)

But despite Trump’s inability to adapt and change to the new race, Grisham doesn’t believe he’ll be able to keep up the mini rallies—even if they’re for the good of his campaign.

“Look, we did this a million times,” Grisham told CNN. “We did it in 2016. We did it throughout our time in the White House. We were all trying to keep him on message. Everybody was frustrated all the time.”

Donald Trump attempted to blame Kamala Harris for inflation in the wake of a new economics report, but its findings actually showed a crucial decrease in inflation.

A new report published Wednesday by the Bureau of Labor Statistics found that in July, year-over-year inflation dropped to 2.9 percent—marking the first time that inflation has slipped below 3 percent since March 2021. The report makes way for the Federal Reserve to cut rates in September.

However, consumer prices rose: The price of food increased by 0.2 percent in July, according to the report. The data was still in line with a significant slowdown in the rising price of food, which actually went down in June. Shelter was an outlier, with the price of rent increasing by 0.5 percent.

The report represented a huge win for Democrats, who have been consistently slammed by Republicans over inflation, and the price of groceries. A recent Cato Institute poll found that a whopping 40 percent of American voters surveyed listed inflation/prices as one of their top three issues in the upcoming presidential election—placing it above any other issue in terms of voter priorities.

In light of the good news for Democrats, Trump’s campaign attempted to reframe the conversation around high prices but incidentally cited “Kamalanomics” as the cause for what is ultimately an improved economic situation.

“Under Kamala Harris, everything costs 20 percent more than it did under President Trump,” said Trump spokesperson Karoline Leavitt in a press release about the Labor report.

“America cannot afford another four years of Kamala’s failed economic policies,” Leavitt said, citing increases in the price of baby food and the price of gas.

Meanwhile, a new survey conducted by the Financial Times found that Harris had blunted Trump’s edge on the question of who voters trusted to handle the economy.