President Donald Trump oversaw the launch of the U.S. military’s airstrikes against Iran from a makeshift Situation Room at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach, Florida, while a black-tie charity gala was ongoing at the same venue.
Far removed from the cocktail-sipping revellers on the other side of the sprawling estate, Trump watched the operation play out from a secure area curtained off from public view in the early hours of Saturday morning.
He was joined by Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Dan Caine, CIA Director John Ratcliffe, and White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles, whose smartwatch briefly sparked concerns it might give away the group’s precise location, according to CNN.
Meanwhile, back in Washington, D.C., Vice President JD Vance was chairing a meeting of Cabinet secretaries in the real Situation Room beneath the White House.
Vance was joined by, amongst others, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, who, like him, has previously denounced American intervention in Iran and who, like him, has been conspicuously quiet on social media since the strikes began, posting only official messaging — a detail far-right Trump supporter Laura Loomer described as “telling.”
Gabbard’s lack of involvement in the U.S. mission to remove Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro from power on January 3 was widely reported on at the time.
The White House has offered no official explanation as to why Vance was not at the president’s side in Florida, although it is common for the Secret Service to keep the president and his deputy apart in such moments of heightened tension as a national security precaution.
Benjamin Friedman, policy director at the Washington-based think tank Defense Priorities, told The Daily Telegraph: “It will be difficult for Vance to say he didn’t agree with this” in the future, particularly if, as is widely expected, he runs for the presidency himself in 2028.
“But I think he wants to not be seen as a leading cheerleader for it, so the people on the kind of anti-war right don’t abandon him as their candidate.”
Over at Mar-a-Lago, Trump did reportedly find time to attend to his guests, not mentioning the Iran strikes but telling them: “Have a good time, everybody. God bless the U.S.A. I gotta go to work.”
After watching the missile strikes send smoke plumes soaring over Tehran and other Iranian cities and tracking the bombing campaign on a map revealing both targets and regional American assets, Trump put out two social media videos over the course of the weekend.
The first announced the operation, the second confirmed the death of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and the killings of three U.S. soldiers — the latter attracting outrage from Democrats who felt the president’s attitude towards the casualties had been too casual or even callous.
Unusually, he did not deliver a live TV address to reassure the public or host a news conference, which also drew anger.
According to CNN, the president’s use of Mar-a-Lago for sensitive military actions has “always generated a degree of anxiety among national security professionals” because doing so brings paying club members into close proximity with integral national security secrets and highly-classified intelligence material.
The Secret Service screens guests before they enter the resort, but does not control who can access the club, which is a commercial concern.
While Trump has previously viewed strikes on Syria, Yemen and Nigeria from his Palm Beach home, as well as the assassination of Iranian general Qasem Soleimani in 2020 and the Maduro operation earlier this year, this weekend’s operation came just seven days after his security detail had been forced to shoot dead a man who had attempted to enter the premises, underlining pre-existing concerns about the practice.
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