“Hey, we have a lot going on with Iran right now, so we’re not going to do the auction,” Damien Stuck recalls hearing. The Tampa-based artist, known for his maximalist MAGA paintings, got the news from the organizer of a charity gala at President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort. Stuck’s work has earned him several invitations to the Palm Beach members club, in this case for a party in the ballroom to raise money for a local nonprofit focused on “faith-based” efforts to help foster children and combat child trafficking. Trump was meant to sign a Stuck painting that would then be auctioned off.

At one point in the evening, the president waltzed out into the ornate chamber to bask in the crowd, as he so often does. “Trump came in there and the whole room just bombarded him,” Stuck says. Wearing a suit and white “USA” hat, the president arrived around 9 p.m. and danced to Lee Greenwood’s “God Bless the USA”—briefly.

“I gotta go to work,” he informed the revelers. “Have a good time, everybody.”

At that point, Trump returned to a side room at Mar-a-Lago, the one cloaked in black drapes, to oversee the largest military operation in two decades: the opening strikes of a war with Iran. A few hours later, US and Israeli bombs began to fall, killing the country’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, dozens of top Iranian officials, and, by Tuesday, more than 1,000 civilians, including 181 children under 10, according to HRANA.

“I sell Art at Mar-a-Lago with the President while he bombs evil dictators,” Stuck wrote in the caption of his Instagram post for the evening, “We are not the same pimp.”

Photos released by the White House captured the scene as the attacks unfolded: Trump, ball cap on, his face the familiar color and texture—ochre and moist. Chief of Staff Susie Wiles and Marco Rubio, who serves as both secretary of state and national security adviser, sat to his left. CIA Director John Ratcliffe sat to his right. On an easel, a map of the Middle East, with American flag pins denoting US military positions. Red diamonds showed a wide range of targets within Iran.

The room is the Mar-a-Lago version of what’s known as a “sensitive compartmented information facility,” or SCIF, which was erected at the club to allow the president a space to discuss classified information. It appears to be the same room from which Trump monitored the raid that captured Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro in January. A White House source explained toVanity Fairthat Mar-a-Lago security is handled by the Secret Service, which has also set up secure communications capabilities at the club. Typically, presidents would conduct these operations from the Situation Room of the White House, but according to multiple sources close to the president, he vastly prefers the comforts of his South Florida resort.

“The whole fucking place is his man pad,” explained one longtime friend of Trump’s. “He feels so in control in Mar-a-Lago. That is where he launches some [of the] most important geopolitical activities.” Trump, who seems afflicted with an intense aversion to being alone with his thoughts, also appears to enjoy the incessant stimulation that Mar-a-Lago provides.

“A relaxing night for you and me might be a quiet dinner with friends or at home with family,” said one Mar-a-Lago member who has known Trump for years. “For him, a relaxing night is to sit out and have 500 people watch him.” When Trump is at the resort, as he is many weekends, his presence is all-consuming. “He’ll walk over to get a Diet Coke at the bar,” the old friend said. “Secret Service lets him go. But every eye in the whole fucking restaurant follows every fucking step he takes.”

It’s not an exaggeration to say that many members pay for the privilege of being around Trump. “He’s surrounded by people he likes to impress and he likes to give a show to. That’s almost a membership perk,” said Michael Wolff, a journalist who has spent time with Trump at Mar-a-Lago and written several books about him. “It’s a surreal feeling that such major world events are being discussed and taking place at the same club that we were at,” said Rosalyn Yellin, a Palm Beach socialite and star of Netflix reality showMembers Only, aReal Housewivesknockoff. She has been a Mar-a-Lago member since 2021 and attended the gala on Friday night. “The energy was electric in the room,” she told me. Yellin said she’s been at the club during other spectacles, including when Javier Milei, the unruly president of Argentina, visited.

Source: Drudge Report