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.
The first lady’s appearance alongside her husband — only one of a select few speaking engagements she’s had with him since his return to the White House — comes weeks after the premier of a hagiographic documentary about her preparations for his January 2025 inauguration that was purchased by Amazon for $40 million in what critics derided as a blatant payoff to her and her husband.
Amazon also reportedly spent $35 million to market the film, which thus far has brought in just over $13 million in box office revenues since it was released in theaters last month.
Trump referenced the documentary’s box office performance in his remarks to the troops, telling them that the United States “is truly blessed to have such a phenomenal First Lady.”
“And now she’s a movie star,” he said.
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