President Donald Trump is eyeing a new presidential retreat à la Camp David.
The location? His golf course in West Palm Beach, Florida.
The golf-obsessed president pitched designating a portion of his Trump International Golf Club for use by “all past, current, and future United States Presidents and visiting foreign heads of state,” his attorney Harvey Oyer wrote in a letter to Palm Beach County commissioners last month.
The proposed retreat, which does not have a name yet but would sit close to an airport and a boulevard bearing the president’s name, was first reported by The Palm Beach Post and highlighted in The Washington Post on Wednesday.
“This is a gift that the President would like to share with his successors, the people of America, and his fellow Palm Beach County residents,” wrote Oyer, adding that he expected the project wouldn’t be done until Trump has left office.
The course, which opened in 1999 and is owned by the Trump family, sits on county-owned land leased to the president after he settled a lawsuit involving airplanes flying over his Mar-a-Lago estate.
Oyer — who compared the proposed retreat to the likes of Camp David, Windsor Castle and the Élysée Palace in his letter — requested that the county give a portion of land to the federal government and claimed Trump would foot the bill to construct any lodging/facilities, The Washington Post noted.
The Trump family would continue to operate the course.
Palm Beach County Administrator Joe Abruzzo, in a statement to The Palm Beach Post last month, referred to the proposed retreat as a “remarkable and historic opportunity” for the county.
Andrew Caballero-Reynolds/AFP via Getty Images
The proposal is in tune with the wishes of Marjorie Merriweather Post, who willed her nearby Mar-a-Lago estate to the federal government upon her death in 1973, hoping it would serve as a “Winter White House.”
Due to high maintenance costs, the federal government returned the property to her estate, only for it to later be purchased by Trump in 1985.
Trump would eventually unofficially designate Mar-a-Lago as the “Winter White House” just before he took the oath of office in January 2017.
