New with a Twist/Commentary

…and The Palm Beach Post hasn’t had so much prominence since, well, “hanging chads.”

Since last week’s FBI “raid” (“Trumpworld”word, not mine) on the former president’s home/country club/winter White House/top-secret storage facility, Mar-a-Lago, Palm Beach County has become news of the day ground zero as evidenced by these recent Page One headlines from the Palm Beach Post.

For those of you not familiar with The Post, it is part of the Gannet newspaper chain (think USA Today) with a daily print circulation of 88,231, larger than its more famous neighbor to the south, the Miami Herald and, for those media elites reading and snickering at this story, larger than the daily circulation of many “big city papers” including the Boston Globe (68,806), the Dallas Morning News (65,369), the Houston Chronicle (65,084), the Philadelphia Inquirer (61,180) and…drum roll please, my former hometown paper, the San Francisco Chronicle (60,098).

But beyond its relatively robust circulation, the fact is this is probably the most attention The Post has garnered since the paper became nationally recognized for its coverage of the 2000 presidential election when it reported about flawed ballots occurring in Palm Beach County, ballots with the infamous “hanging chads.”

So, The Post has some credentials. And those credentials include the paper’s legendary columnist, Frank Cerabino. Frank writes several Post columns a week and they’re all, in my opinion, must reads. In fact, I been known to refer to Frank as The Post’s Herb Caen (San Francisco readers will know what I mean).

Frank’s column this past Sunday solved a problem for me. There’s been so much Mar-a-Lago news lately, I’d been having difficulty determining what to write; how to approach the story; what angle I might take. But after reading Frank’s column I knew the answer: Simply republish Frank’s whimsical, “News with a Twist” take on it. So, without further ado, and with Frank’s permission, I turn over today’s Around the Block to Frank Cerabino. I hope you get as much of a kick out of reading it as I did.

Dear Mar-a-Lago Club members, this FBI raid is going to cost you

by Frank Cerabino – Palm Beach Post

Dear Mar-a-Lago Club member:

It’s me again, your President.

I’m sure that you, too, are outraged at the assault on your club by the Radical Left Democrats in the FBI.

Federal agents viciously showed up at Mar-a-Lago during the off-season, when it could not be mightily defended by the many foreign workers employed there during its operational months.

It’s a disgrace. Who comes to South Florida in August? So unfair. There weren’t even any valet parkers available for the FBI vehicles.

What sort of self-parking Third World country have we become?

Since when are we a country where presidents who leave office with classified documents they treat as personal mementos and fail to return after months of prodding, get those documents removed by the federal agency led by the director they appointed?

Sad. So sad. People are saying that even Frederick Douglass is upset about this.

We’ll never know what these agents took, other than the detailed inventory of seized items they left with me. So, it’s a mystery.

The bad news for you is that this means I will be forced to raise your annual fees for next season at the club. So unfair for all of you.

You can blame the totally corrupt, George Soros-directed FBI, who broke into my safe at Mar-a-Lago.

It was a very expensive safe. Nobody knows safes like me, and trust me, this was the most beautiful, powerful safe you could ever imagine. I call it “The Trump Safe.”

And it contained all sorts of precious Trump things, such as Barack Obama’s Kenyan birth certificate, my plans for infrastructure week in 2025, my actual health records, and non-disclosure agreements from enough women to fill a party bus.

Unfortunately, it’s going to take a rather large special assessment on your annual fees to replace that safe, and I feel very sorry for you, the true American patriots who must bear the brunt of this.

And it was so unnecessary. Instead of breaking into the safe, the FBI could have just asked me for the combination.

Even if I would have strongly told them the wrong number, they could have easily guessed the correct combination.

It’s “1-2020” of course. So true that I won that election. Everybody knows it. Everybody says It was a national disgrace that the legislators in the states that I lost weren’t able to just ignore the larger number of Biden ballots cast and declare me the winner.

And now this is another disgrace. No other president has had to endure such a violation of their total and complete right to treat national secrets as their own private property.

Florida’s U.S. Sen. Rick Scott, a good guy who knows more about Medicare than Jesse James knew about banks, put it perfectly:

“The way our federal government has gone, it’s like what we have thought about the Gestapo and people like that, that they just go after people,” Scott said.

Yes, on one side, you had the Nazis hauling millions of people to extermination camps based solely on their ethnicity, and on the other, you had the U.S. Department of Justice enforcing a law over an ongoing year-long violation of national security.

Perfect comparison, Senator Scott. Thank you for that important, very powerful historical perspective.

Like so many things, this is all Hillary Clinton’s fault.

If she didn’t put government emails on her private server, I wouldn’t have signed a law in 2018 to amend the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act to enhance the criminal penalties for the unlawful appropriation of classified information.

I made violations a felony and increased the maximum prison time from one year to five years in prison.

As I said when running for office in 2016: “In my administration, I’m going to enforce all laws concerning the protection of classified information. No one will be above the law.”

I was talking about Hillary, who’s a real “no one,”, not me. I’m somebody, that you can be sure. The crooked, corrupt fake news doesn’t tell you that.

When it came to Hillary, my very valid attempts to “lock her up” were never intended to be used against me. That would be so unfair and un-American.

Even Mike Pence, who is so weak, so incredibly weak, is hanging with me on this.

Pence said the FBI raid “undermines” Americans’ faith in the justice system.

And if anybody is an expert on undermining, it’s Pence.

Way to hang in there, Mike. It’s good to see you doing your part to rope in my supporters by joining other courageous Republicans who are doing their part to make law enforcers feel the noose tightening.

As I said in a message since the raid on our club, I suspect the FBI may have been up to no good during the raid.

“Everyone was asked to leave the premises, they wanted to be left alone, without any witnesses to see what they were doing, taking or, hopefully not, ‘planting’” I wrote. “Why did they STRONGLY insist on having nobody watching them, everybody out?”

(And by “everybody”, I am not counting my two lawyers who were there during the raid to make sure that nobody touched that beautiful, 1989 oil paint portrait of me in tennis whites.)

Was I saying that the FBI planted incriminating evidence against me at Mar-a-Lago? That’s what I’m hearing. People are saying this.

What’s clear is that I will need the boat dock that the Town of Palm Beach has so far failed to grant me along the Intracoastal seawall beyond the back lawn of Mar-a-Lago.

The boat dock will be vital for me and my family, should we have to make a speedboat exit from Mar-a-Lago during any future unannounced, in-season raids by the FBI.

There’s no telling what sort of evidence the FBI planted at Mar-a-Lago during their raid — secret business contracts with foreign dictators, incriminating tax documents, Putin’s private cell number, kilos of Don Junior’s medicine.

The agents may already be planning to show up again during the season when I am back in Florida. If so, I may have to make a sudden departure from Mar-a-Lago by a perfectly legal water exit on TrumpBoat 1.

Getting the boat dock won’t be cheap. It will take some lawyering with the Town, and then it will have to be constructed in a way that meets the architectural review standards.

Once again, this will further add to your annual dues next season. It’s going to be an expensive year for you, club members.

You can thank the totally corrupt FBI and the Department of Injustice, as I like to call it.

But we have to take action, and fight with powerful strength, not weakness, or we’ll wake up one day and discover we don’t have a country club anymore.

See enclosed invoice.

Your President now and forever,