Donald Trump, Robert Mercer, and a Russian oligarch reportedly all arrive in Palm Beach
This tune is becoming all too familiar to anyone who’s been paying close attention. Shortly after it was publicly announced that Donald Trump would be spending Thanksgiving week at his Mar-a-Lago residence in Palm Beach, Florida, a local newspaper revealed that a Russian oligarch with existing ties to the Trump-Russia scandal had also just arrived in Palm Beach. Now, according to tracking information, Trump’s longtime political financier Robert Mercer has also arrived.
The Palm Beach Post was the first to report that Russian oligarch Roman Abramovich’s private yacht had just docked off the coast of Palm Beach Florida (link). A spokesman claims the yacht is merely in town for “maintenance” and that Abramovich isn’t even on it, so take that for whatever you think it’s worth. But now internet sleuths have used online tracking to determine that Robert Mercer’s yacht has also arrived (link), and is parked about a mile away from Abramovich’s yacht.
So either Trump, Mercer and Abramovich are all in Palm Beach right now for underhanded reasons, or perhaps Trump is there alone, and his pals’ boats keep showing up there for no reason. Mercer is notoriously eccentric and reclusive, so good luck proving or disproving whether or not he’s really in Palm Beach alongside his yacht. Perhaps his boat suddenly needed maintenance as well, because after all, most of that kind of routine maintenance is done during a week in which those kinds of workers would all be off for the Thanksgiving holiday, right? These “coincidences” keep piling up to the point that you need that kind of sarcasm to even recount them all.
Another Russian oligarch Dmitry Rybolovlev kept showing up in the same cities as Donald Trump, both before and after the election. Rybolovlev claimed it was all a coincidence. He even provided evidence that he had only visited one of those cities because he had invested in a battery company headquartered in that city. Later, that battery company went bankrupt without having ever materialized into anything. Coincidence again? Rybolovlev had previously bought a Palm Beach mansion from Trump for twice what it was worth, never did live in it, and then bulldozed it. No one knows why.
Oleg Deripaska, the Russian oligarch who financed Trump’s campaign chairman Paul Manafort, had his own private jet sitting on a tarmac at a small airport in New Jersey during the entire week that Manafort was reportedly going to be arrested. Was he providing a getaway vehicle in case Manafort wanted to take it, or was this yet one more bizarre Trump-Russia transportation coincidence? We can only hope we eventually get all these answers.
