Donald Trump's $85m home improvement

Even for The Donald, it's an audacious deal: a private home bought, done up and sold, within a year, for a $85m profit. Andrew Gumbel tells a tale of 'Changing Rooms' writ very large

You have to hand it to Donald Trump. While the rest of the world frets about torture chambers, global warming and the general erosion of the United States' moral authority in a dangerously destabilised world, he has kept his eye unwaveringly on the only prize he cares about, which is making a killing in the overheated American property market.

His latest ambition: to become the lucky beneficiary of the single most expensive private home sale in the history of American luxury real estate. And, while he's about it, to promote the hell out of himself and his ambition to be the undisputed guru of shameless wealth, in an era with ever more to be ashamed about.

We already have Trump office towers and Trump casinos, Trump get-rich books and Trump University, at which online students can learn to emulate the master. There are Trump mobile phone ring tones and Trump bottled water and Trump suits and Trump ties.

The Donald has, most recently, taken to the airwaves, lending his face and his famously tortured hairdo to promote everything from fabric softener to pizza to credit cards. Most prominently of all, he has pioneered the television show The Apprentice, in which would-be Trump acolytes are subjected to multiple business-world tests and humiliations in a knock-out contest for supremacy.

His latest venture is, among other things, a cunning exercise in cross-marketing. The winner of last season's The Apprentice, a Florida property agent by the name of Kendra Todd, has spent the last several months reworking and remodelling a luxury villa on the Atlantic shores of Palm Beach, two hours north of Miami. The idea is to turn a $40m (£23m) piece of real estate - which is what Trump paid for it in a bankruptcy auction last year - into a $125m piece of real estate.

That's quite some figure to contemplate paying for a private residence. Not so long ago, it would have seemed a preposterous sum even as the budget of an action-packed, special-effects-laden Hollywood blockbuster. But George Bush's America is nothing if not riven with contradictions. So while for most Americans 11 September 2001 turned out to be the day that changed everything, while US soldiers are dying in Iraq and half of the Gulf coast remains displaced in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, for the super-rich things have continued to go only from very good to even better.

Last year, the cosmetics billionaire Ronald Perelman sold his Palm Beach mansion for $70m. There was talk, too, of a $90m sale in the Hamptons on Long Island, although it is not entirely clear whether that transaction was completed.

And Trump himself has been right on top of the bandwagon. He is now the headline speaker for something called the Real Estate Wealth Expo Tour, which will earn him $1.5m for every hour-long speech he delivers over the course of the next year on the secrets of his business success. Palm Beach, meanwhile, has been something of a pet project of his for many years. As far back as 1985, he snapped up a 55,000 square feet mansion that had belonged to the Post cereal heiress Marjorie Merriweather Post and converted it into an exclusive beach club called the Mar-a-Lago, complete with 58 bedrooms, 33 bathrooms, a fully equipped cinema and no fewer than three bomb shelters.

Back in January, he and his third wife, the Slovenian supermodel Melania Knauss, tied the knot at the Mar-a-Lago before a celebrity-studded crowd. Last weekend, his son Donald Trump Jnr followed suit at the same venue as he married yet another supermodel, Vanessa Hayden.

The new property, just a few hundred yards further north at 513 North County Road, covers more than six acres and includes 475 feet of Atlantic Ocean frontage. The French Regency style house, first built in 1989, had belonged to a health care tycoon called Abraham Gosman, but he went $250m into debt and was forced to declare bankruptcy a few years ago. The property was first put on the market at Sotheby's but fetched an asking price of only $32m. The bankruptcy court trustee thought he could do better re-auctioning it in open court, which was when Trump swooped in and outbid, among others, a Wall Street financier and a home-building magnate.

The home isn't quite ready to be put on the market, but it has now been opened up to a handful of advance viewers. Kendra Todd gave a tour last week to a reporter from the South Florida Business Journal, whose dispatch reads in places like a kind of rich-person porn - a fetishisation of wealth and status that acts as both an escape and a total denial of the realities of the rest of today's world.

Trump, Todd explained, wanted to go for an "understated" look, which is to say leaving the rooms relatively uncluttered and the walls painted in neutral colours. "As Mr Trump puts it, it has great bones," Todd said of the house. "What it needed was a cosmetic makeover. Mr Trump wanted to make the home more livable."

"More livable" has meant expanding the number of bedrooms in the main house from three to seven, and adding a guest cottage and tennis house, for a total of 15 bedrooms. Todd also ditched numerous replicas of famous paintings hanging on the walls, preferring to leave the wood-trimmed surfaces largely bare.

Clearly, part of the appeal of the house is the association with Trump and The Apprentice. If nothing else, it is guaranteeing plenty of column inches in the newspapers, and the attentions of celebrity television shows. The very fact that Trump is asking for such an outlandish amount of money might be a selling point, according to at least one local expert. "You never know. There might be somebody who really might want to say he bought the most expensive house," Palm Beach estate agent Shirley Wyner told the Business Journal. "Palm Beach and the people here have a lot of money. So, $6m or $125m - it is the same to them."

Such is the world that Trump lives in - or at least promotes himself as living in. A recent biographer, the New York Times reporter Timothy O'Brien, has irritated Trump no end by suggesting he is not worth anything close to the $2.7bn touted by Forbes magazine, or the $5bn touted in other quarters, and that the reason he has worked so indefatigably to put his face and his name into the public eye is because he needs the money.

Certainly, it might be argued that there is something just a little bit vulgar about the way Trump has been putting himself about lately. The super-rich tend to like to work quietly, out of the public eye, while Trump has taken the absolute opposite approach. He has doused the United States with self-promotion, almost to the point of saturation. (A Chicago Tribune columnist asked the other day if we haven't all overdosed on Trumpery by now, and she had a point.)

Like a pornographer with sex, Trump is inordinately good at both making his wealth as visible as possible and also dangling it tantalisingly in front of his audiences without ever quite delivering. His presentations to the Real Estate Wealth Expo Tour have been full of macho-sounding, go-ahead, no-nonsense catchphrases ("Always stay focussed", "Go against the tide", "Never, never, ever quit") that don't, on close analysis, add up to a whole lot.

And when it comes to the pornography of wealth, Kendra Todd is quite a match for her mentor. Since winning the third season of The Apprentice in May - not without sharpening her elbows and shoving her competitors out of the way in compellingly ruthless fashion - the 26-year-old has maintained her own business, gone to work for the Trump organisation, and hired the services of A-list PR agents with a view to getting into the best parties and squeezing her 15 minutes of fame for every limo ride, red carpet and first-class champagne sip she can manage. An e-mail recently leaked to the New York Post suggested her handlers reeled off one demand after another when she hosted a "Success Party" in San Francisco over the summer - including a limo, a barricaded red carpet, "four attractive people" to work the door and a "large, controlled roped-off VIP section with security". Todd told the Post she was "a very low-maintenance, down-to-earth person" but nevertheless felt flattered if her PR agency, which has since dropped her, made such demands on her behalf.

If anybody knows this kind of flirtation with fame and wealth doesn't always last, it is Trump himself, who has built and burned his way through a couple of fortunes since coming to prominence in the archetypical decade of greed, the 1980s. At one point he was almost $1bn in debt, and famously told a beggar outside one of his New York buildings to get lost because he was poorer than the beggar.

To his credit he never stops hustling, and one senses that the Palm Beach real estate stunt is one more instance of his refusal to settle for anything less than the utterly outrageous. One columnist recently described his approach to capitalism as Trumponomics - the theory that anything is worth trying in the name of self-promotion.

"Be a little bit paranoid," Trump told his lecture-circuit audience recently. "Get the best people and don't trust them. Watch them. They're really after you. It is a vicious, vicious place we're living in."