Trump temporarily drops plan to build dock at Mar-a-Lago

President Trump has temporarily dropped plans to build a dock at Mar-a-Lago amid legal tensions with local officials, according to The Washington Post. 

The president changed his residency to Florida during his first term and said he voted by mail in Florida’s Republican presidential primary this year. Local leaders that the Post spoke with expressed frustration with Trump moving forward with a dock request while the town council navigates remote meetings with limited public input. 

In a letter sent to the Palm Beach mayor and town council on Monday that was obtained by the Post, Trump’s Palm Beach attorney, Harvey Oyer III, cited “the extraordinary circumstances that we find ourselves in” for their withdrawal of the dock proposal.

Oyer did not mention the pandemic but did say the president would revisit the proposal once the council is able to conduct regular meetings that yield high civic engagement, according to the Post. 

One of Trump’s neighbors in the town of roughly 8,000 people is Glenn Zeitz, a Trump critic who owns a winter home in Palm Beach. Zeitz argued that Oyer’s letter to the council purposefully avoided citing the ongoing pandemic because it would counter the administration’s narrative. 

“The proposal was noticed during the crisis and it was going down the train track, and it got derailed by the facts and the law,” Zeitz told the Post. “It’s a lawyer practicing semantic surgery. I have to believe that the letter is written so as to not have to put in a letter that the coronavirus is the reason.”