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The Mara-a-Lago Sniff Test

Noel Holston
2 min readJan 25, 2025

Trump’s variation on Citizen Kane’s Xanadu reportedly boasts an immersive experience for visiting favor-seekers

Sculpture by David Cerny. Photo courtesy N. Choirer

By now you’ve probably read about how Donald Trump, joker than he is, suckered well-known health nut and cabinet wanna-be Robert Kennedy Jr., into eating McDonald’s take-out on the big man’s private jet.

Presented with a Big Mac, RFKJ grinned and bit it.

What you probably don’t know is that Trump has established a ritual at Mar-a-Lago for the tech billionaires and other CEOs who fly down to Florida to flatter and fawn in hopes of being scratched off his enemies list. You saw many of them in the best seats at Trump’s inauguration Monday.

Thanks to a Florida photographer I know (but whose name I won’t divulge), I got a copy of one of his unauthorized shots deep inside Trump’s luxury encampment. My friend has a very powerful telephoto lens.

It appears that Trump has purchased and had installed copies of sculptures by Czech arist David Cerny, known for his oversized whimsical and satirical works, many of which decorate Prague.

Exactly how Trump employs the sculptures is not clear, but the ladders attached to them suggest that visiting sycophants and favor-seekers are encouraged to ascend the rungs and take a sniff of Eau de Donaldo if they understand what’s good for them.

There are also rumors circulating that Trump, always alert to a good money making opportunity like his “$Trump” meme coin, is contemplating franchising the statuary, betting that regular MAGA folk would pay a few bucks for the same whiff that guys like Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos have paid millions for.

These rumors, however, have not been confirmed.

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Noel Holston
Noel Holston

Written by Noel Holston

Memoirist, economist, Methodist, hedonist

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