President Donald Trump on Friday suggested that he could make his post-presidency home near a North Carolina military base instead of the gilded Florida social club where he’s lived since leaving his longtime New York home to avoid various investigations into his conduct.
Trump was winding his way through remarks to soldiers at Fort Bragg that were little different from his usual political stump speech when he began boasting about the “billions” his administration is purportedly investing into improvements to housing and other facilities on the sprawling military base.
He also claimed his administration would similarly spend “billions of dollars” on improvements “here and around the area” to “make it great” because “people in this area have been so incredible.”
“In fact, I’m thinking about moving here someday. Maybe I’ll, maybe I’ll move here with our great movie star … with our First Lady,” he said, referring to first lady Melania Trump, who had also traveled to the base in a rare joint appearance with her husband.
Turning to his wife, he said: “We’ll move to Fort. Bragg. Would you like that, darling?”
The first lady, who seemed to be there as much to promote her documentary as to ride along on to Mar-a-Lago afterward, laughed and seemed to nod, at which point Trump resumed speaking, telling the assembled soldiers: “She loves you.”
“It’s a possibility — actually, it’s not a bad idea, because we love it,” he said.
While the president’s remarks were made in jest, he does have some family ties to the Tar Heel State through his daughter-in-law, Lara Trump, a North Carolina native who has twice considered but rejected chances to run for open Senate seats there.
Trump and his wife previously changed their primary residence in 2019, when they filed documents to officially shift their domicile from the eponymous New York skyscraper where he’d lived since 1983 to Mar-a-Lago, the Palm Beach, Florida mansion where he maintains quarters while using the gilded age-era residence as a social club for dues-paying members.
At the time, he claimed to “cherish” the Empire State, where he lived from birth through the start of his first term in the White House in 2018 but complained that he’d been “treated very badly by the political leaders of both the city and state” amid multiple civil and criminal investigations into his conduct there.