This week on FT Edit we ran Jemima Kelly’s extraordinary account of her journey deep into the heart of Palm Beach, a land of billionaires, endless parties and, at the centre of it all of course, Donald Trump and his Mar-a-Lago playground. How did she gain such remarkable access? Here’s Jemima’s behind-the-scenes account.
In November 2022, I found myself on the billionaires’ paradise island of Palm Beach. I had been moderating an all-woman panel on “sex and psychedelics” in Miami, as you do, and decided that I would take the train up Florida’s east coast to find out what was going on at the private members’ club and home of a certain former president: Mar-a-Lago.
The problem was that Mar-a-Lago is notoriously difficult to get into. But I managed to find a member who would talk to me: Toni Holt Kramer, the head of the “Trumpettes”, a group of superfans who had been calling Trump “Mr President” since before he first ran for office. She invited me to her opulent home on the island and we hit it off — I found her a quite amazing and impressive woman, and we connected over personal things.
Despite some initial hesitancy, Kramer decided to organise a “luncheon” for me at Mar-a-Lago. I didn’t think I was going to see Trump because I’d been told he was usually out on the golf course during the day, but it just so happened that he had to fly to New York to pick up an award that evening and so I ended up meeting him, via an introduction from Kramer. I managed to invite myself to his announcement the following Tuesday of his second presidential run, where I witnessed him DJing from his iPad. This all formed the basis for my first dispatch from Palm Beach.
Then last year, I received an email from Kramer: she was going to be throwing a special gala to celebrate Trump, and I was invited. Not only could I come along to that, but she also said I could come with her to the Super Bowl party that Trump throws every year at his golf club, which was taking place the day after the gala. It was an invitation I couldn’t refuse.
So Kramer gave me my “in” yet again. But I’d also made some other contacts on my first trip both inside and outside of Mar-a-Lago, a few of whom I stayed in touch with and helped me this time around too. Some of the contact-building was by emailing anyone I could find online, and some of it was more organic: it is such a small and wealthy island that you can’t help but meet billionaires and multimillionaires wherever you go.
Being in Palm Beach is an experience like no other. After a day or two of finding the whole place absolutely bonkers in so many ways, it all starts to feel incredibly normal. It’s not until I return home that I look back at my notes and my photos and think, “Did that really happen?” I’m sure I will go back again. Whether or not that’s to write another story is unclear: that might depend on what happens in November.
Our favourite pieces
• My aha moment of the week came courtesy of this fascinating deep-dive into those Biscoff biscuits that suddenly seem to be everywhere. It turns out that the resolutely dull (opinion my own) biscuits are enjoying an unlikely resurgence thanks to the power of social media and the single-mindedness of a pair of school friends determined to turn Biscoff into the next Oreo cookie. It’s a happy tale, with a healthy dose of hard-nosed business nous at its centre.
Hannah Rock
Deputy editor, FT Edit (@HannahRockFT)
• There are some stories you are just compelled to read, and this week’s two-part investigation into Russia’s secret plans for using nuclear weapons was among them. Just one interesting tidbit is the relatively low bar Moscow has set for using tactical nukes, including preventing Russian forces from losing battles and making the navy “more effective”. There are also some eye-opening insights into Russia’s relationship with China that show it’s not all “eternal friendship” between the two.
David Hindley
Researcher, FT Edit (@DavidHindleyFT)
Our favourite fact of the week …
Stones have a notable role in Chinese cookery. The 12th-century poet Lin Hong included in his cookbook a recipe for “stone soup” in which lichen-covered pebbles were boiled in water to give a flavour “sweeter than snails”. More recently, a street-food craze for sucking stones after stir-frying them in chili oil attracted media attention worldwide. From The strange marvel of China’s stone feasts
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Something to watch
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