Trump's ambition hits Palm Beach

The ruthless Kendra Todd, winner of The Apprentice, is a good match for mentor Donald Trump. Picture / Reuters

You have to hand it to Donald Trump. While the rest of the world frets about torture chambers, global warming and the erosion of the United States' moral authority, he has kept his eye unwaveringly on the only prize he cares about, which is making a killing in the overheated American property market.

His latest ambition: to become the lucky beneficiary of the most expensive private home sale in the history of American luxury real estate - and, while he's about it, to promote the hell out of himself and his ambition to be the undisputed guru of shameless wealth.

We already have Trump office towers and Trump casinos, Trump get-rich books and Trump University, at which online students can learn to emulate the master. There are Trump mobile phone ring tones, Trump bottled water and Trump suits and ties.

The Donald is lending his face and tortured hairdo to promote everything from pizza to credit cards.

Most prominently, he has pioneered the television show The Apprentice, in which would-be Trump acolytes are subjected to multiple business-world tests and humiliations in a knockout contest for supremacy.

It's a cunning exercise in cross-marketing. The winner of last season's The Apprentice, Florida property agent Kendra Todd, has spent the past few months reworking and remodelling a luxury villa on Palm Beach, two hours north of Miami.

The idea is to turn a US$40 million ($58.4 million) property - which is what Trump paid for it in a bankruptcy auction - into a US$125 million ($182 million) property.

Not so long ago, that would have seemed a preposterous sum even for a special-effects-laden Hollywood blockbuster. But for the super-rich things have continued to go from very good to even better.

Last year, cosmetics billionaire Ronald Perelman sold his Palm Beach mansion for US$70 million ($102 million). And Trump has been right on top of the bandwagon. He is the headline speaker for something called the Real Estate Wealth Expo Tour, which will earn him US$1.5 million ($2.2 million) for every hour-long speech he makes.

Palm Beach has been something of a pet project of his for many years. In 1985 he snapped up a 5000sq m mansion that had belonged to the cereal heiress Marjorie Merriweather Post and converted it to an exclusive beach club called the Mar-a-Lago, with 58 bedrooms, 33 bathrooms, a cinema and three bomb shelters.

In January, he and his third wife, Slovenian supermodel Melania Knauss, tied the knot at the Mar-a-Lago before a celebrity-studded crowd. This month his son, Donald Trump jnr, followed suit with supermodel Vanessa Hayden.

The other Palm Beach property, just a few hundred metres further north at 513 North County Road, covers about 2.5ha and includes 144m of Atlantic Ocean frontage.

The French Regency-style house, built in 1989, had belonged to healthcare tycoon Abraham Gosman, who was forced to declare bankruptcy a few years ago.

The property was first put on the market at Sotheby's but fetched only US$32 million ($46.5 million). The bankruptcy court trustee thought he could do better, re-auctioning it in open court - which was when Trump swooped in and outbid, among others, a Wall Street financier and a home-building magnate.

The home isn't quite ready to be put on the market but is open to a handful of advance viewers.

Kendra Todd gave a tour to a reporter from the South Florida Business Journal. Trump, Todd explained, wanted to go for an "understated" look, which is to say leaving the rooms relatively uncluttered and the walls neutral.

"As Mr Trump puts it, it has great bones," Todd said of the house. "What it needed was a cosmetic makeover. Mr Trump wanted to make the home more livable."

That has meant increasing the number of bedrooms in the main house from three to seven, and adding a guest cottage and tennis house, for a total of 15 bedrooms.

Todd also ditched the replicas of famous paintings, preferring to leave the wood-trimmed walls largely bare.

Clearly, part of the appeal of the house is the association with Trump and The Apprentice.

The fact that Trump is asking for such an outlandish amount of money may also be a selling point.

"You never know, there might be somebody who really might want to say he bought the most expensive house," said Palm Beach estate agent Shirley Wyner.

"Palm Beach and the people here have a lot of money. So, $6 million or $125 million - it is the same to them."

Such is the world that Trump lives in - or at least promotes himself as living in. A biographer, New York Times reporter Timothy O'Brien, has irritated Trump no end by suggesting he is not worth anything close to the US$2.7 billion ($3.9 billion) touted by Forbes magazine, or the US$5 billion ($7.3 billion) in other quarters, and that the reason he has worked so hard to put his face in the public eye is because he needs the money.

Certainly, it may be argued that there is something a little vulgar about the way Trump has been putting himself about lately. The super-rich tend to like to work quietly out of the public eye, but Trump has taken the opposite approach.

He has doused the US with self-promotion, almost to the point of saturation. A Chicago Tribune columnist asked the other day if we hadn't all overdosed on Trumpery by now, and she had a point.

Like a pornographer with sex, Trump is inordinately good at making his wealth as visible as possible and dangling it tantalisingly in front of his audiences without ever quite delivering.

His presentations to the Real Estate Wealth Expo Tour have been full of macho-sounding, go-ahead, no-nonsense catchphrases: "Always stay focused ... Go against the tide ... Never, never, ever quit".

But on close analysis, they don't add up to a lot.

And when it comes to the pornography of wealth, Kendra Todd is quite a match for her mentor.

Since winning the third season of The Apprentice in May - not without shoving her competitors out of the way in ruthless fashion - the 26-year-old has maintained her own business, gone to work for the Trump organisation, and hired the services of A-list PR agents with a view to getting into the best parties and squeezing her 15 minutes of fame for every limo ride and red-carpet appearance she can manage.

An email leaked to the New York Post suggested her handlers reeled off one demand after another when she hosted a "success party" in San Francisco - including a limo, a barricaded red carpet and "four attractive people" to work the door.

Todd told the Post she was "a very low-maintenance, down-to-earth person" but nevertheless felt flattered if her PR agency, which has since dropped her, made such demands on her behalf.

If anybody knows this kind of flirtation with fame and wealth doesn't always last, it is Trump himself, who has built and burned his way through two fortunes since coming to prominence in the archetypical decade of greed, the 1980s.

At one point he was almost US$1 billion ($1.4 billion) in debt, and famously told a beggar outside one of his New York buildings to get lost because he was poorer than the beggar.

To his credit, Trump never stops hustling, and his Palm Beach real estate stunt is one more instance of his refusal to settle for anything less than the utterly outrageous.

One columnist recently described his approach to capitalism as Trumponomics - the theory that anything is worth trying in the name of self-promotion.

"Be a little bit paranoid," Trump told a lecture-circuit audience. "Get the best people and don't trust them. Watch them.

"They're really after you. It is a vicious, vicious place we're living in."

- INDEPENDENT