After months of searching, Donald Trump Jr. and Kimberly Guilfoyle have finally bought a Florida mansion in an exclusive gated community that once wasn’t so welcoming, judging by letters sent by residents who expressed concerns about the couple’s notoriety and association with the Jan. 6 Capitol riot.
But other residents of the Jupiter neighborhood of Admirals Cove were eager to prove they weren’t so judgmental and could be “inclusive,” allowing the so-called “prom king and queen of Maga-land” to purchase a $9.7 million waterfront mansion on Wednesday, according to the Palm Beach Post.
“We have a diverse membership here, and I have no problem with Donald Jr. moving in,” retired race car driver Johnny Gray told the Palm Beach Post. He owns an Admirals Cove home featuring a 25-car garage. “And I’ll be the first one to have a cocktail party and welcome them to the neighborhood, as I would for anybody else.”
With the purchase, the couple will be able to live about 20 miles north of Mar-a-Lago, the Palm beach resort owned by Trump Jr.’s father, ex-President Donald Trump. Trump Jr. also will be close to his five children with his ex-wife, Vanessa, who lives nearby in the Jupiter Country Club.
The couple first eyed buying two adjacent homes in 288-home Admirals Cove in January, according to the Palm Beach Post. One property was the 11,270-square-foot mansion they purchased on Wednesday.
For reasons not specified, both deals fell out of contract in February, the Palm Beach Post added.
In the weeks after the Capitol attack, some 30 Admirals Cove residents contacted the homeowners’ association to express their concerns about having Trump Jr. and Guilfoyle as neighbors, the Palm Beach Post reported.
“About half have concerns about safety,” Peter Moore, general manager of the property owners association, told the Palm Beach Post in January. He said the other residents had “political concerns” over the insurrection.
Trump Jr. and Guilfoyle, a former Fox News host, had joined the former president on stage at a pro-Trump rally near the White House on Jan. 6, where they helped push his false claims of election fraud and urged his MAGA-hat wearing supporters to “fight” to overturn the results of Joe Biden’s victory. Trump Jr. also had recorded a disturbing video of Guilfoyle excitedly dancing backstage before the rally.
There’s a dancing ? emoji!? #TheSeditionShuffle@kimguilfoyle @DonaldJTrumpJr pic.twitter.com/YCEkw8wWjZ
— Michael Ⓜ️ (@michaelschweitz) January 7, 2021
After the rally, the crowd turned into a violent mob that stormed the U.S. Capitol, engaged in deadly clashes with police and threatened to hang Vice President Mike Pence.
One Admirals Cove resident went so far as to say in a neighborhood email thread that the couple’s presence would be “a nightmare,” the Palm Beach Post reported. Another resident, in a letter to the homeowners board, brought up a report in the New Yorker that suggested that Guilfoyle had to leave Fox News in the summer of 2018 because of sexual harassment allegations made by a former assistant.
When the original Admirals Cove deals fell through, Trump Jr. and Guilfoyle, the ex-wife of California’s Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom, began looking in nearby Palm Beach Gardens.
They zeroed in on a $6.5 million, 11,654-square-foot house owned by David D. Smith, chairman of broadcast television giant Sinclair Broadcast Group, the Palm Beach Post said, citing public records. But after inspections, that deal didn’t go through, either, and Trump and Guilfoyle circled back for another look at one of the homes in Admirals Cove they had considered earlier.
The home they ended up purchasing belonged to Sheri Quinn, a co-owner of The Hagerstown Suns, once a minor-league affiliate of the Washington Nationals baseball team, the Palm Beach Post reported. The home also boasts 11 bathrooms, an elevator, a swimming pool and a private dock.
The deal was put together by Rob Thomson of Waterfront Properties, a longtime resident of Admirals Cove. He told the Palm Beach Post that “many residents” had approached him with welcome letters to Trump Jr. and Guilfoyle. Thomson, a member of the Mar-a-Lago club, also said he personally delivered the notes to the couple.
Officials at the community’s private club also pushed back on talk of preventing Trump Jr., and Guilfoyle from buying in Admirals Cove, the Palm Beach Post reported. Officials said the couple would automatically be welcomed into their club as residents of the community and after they paid their $195,000 membership fee.
“The Club has no say in who buys in Admirals Cove,” Morris told the Palm Beach Post. “The Club cannot disapprove of them for membership.”
The club features a spa, 45 holes of golf, tennis courts, a fitness center, four restaurants, a marina for mega-yachts and a 30-room hotel for guests of members.
Even before the Jan. 6 insurrection, which led to Trump being impeached for a historic second time, Trump Jr. and Guilfoyle had begun house-hunting in Florida because they knew they couldn’t return to New York City after Trump left the White House, multiple reports said.
Like the former president, and other Trump family members, Trump Jr. and Guilfoyle faced reports that they would “not be welcome” in the liberal social circles of Manhattan where Trump Jr. was once a prince in his father’s real estate empire and Guilfoyle a conservative media star.
As if to distance themselves from New York social circles, the couple just sold their home in the Hamptons home for $8.1 million, the New York Post reported. They had only owned the 9,200-square-foot mansion for two years, purchasing it in 2019 for $4.4 million — which means they made more than $3 million pretax profit from the sale.
According to the Post, the deal revealed last month was made off-market and as quickly as possible as the couple was apparently in a hurry to relocate to Florida.
Vanity Fair noted that the New York Post’s source did not divulge who decided to pay practically double what Trump Jr. and Guilfoyle paid for the house just two years years earlier, or whether the couple had made any kind of improvements that would warrant such a profit.