According to Trumps butler, Anthony Senecal, red caps mean dont fucking talk to me.
According to Trump's butler, Anthony Senecal, red caps mean "don't fucking talk to me." Joseph Sohm / Shutterstock.com

I don't know what I was hoping to find when I saw The New York Times received a butler-guided tour of Donald Trump's Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach, Fla. A MTV Cribs-style visit that revealed the racist Oompa Loompa's fridge really is stocked with bottled children's tears? That the butler, who has spent nearly 30 years working for Trump, secretly had it out for his leathery boss?

All I found was that the Trump mansion is exactly as awful as you'd imagine it to be.

Here are some choice excerpts from the NYT's visit.

“You can always tell when the king is here,” Mr. Trump’s longtime butler here, Anthony Senecal, said of the master of the house and Republican presidential candidate.

The king was returning that day to his Versailles, a 118-room snowbird’s paradise that will become a winter White House if he is elected president. Mar-a-Lago is where Mr. Trump comes to escape, entertain and luxuriate in a Mediterranean-style manse, built 90 years ago by the cereal heiress Marjorie Merriweather Post.

*vomits* Glad we got that out of the way.

He understands Mr. Trump’s sleeping patterns and how he likes his steak (“It would rock on the plate, it was so well done”), and how Mr. Trump insists — despite the hair salon on the premises — on doing his own hair.

This...actually explains a few things.

The next morning, before dawn and after about four hours’ sleep, Mr. Trump would meet him at the arched entrance of his private quarters to accept a bundle of newspapers including The New York Times, The Daily News, The New York Post and the Palm Beach papers. Mr. Trump would emerge hours later, in khakis, a white golf shirt and baseball cap. If the cap was white, the staff noticed, the boss was in a good mood. If it was red, it was best to stay away.

And this sounds like the introduction to a modern day fairytale book titled Holy Shit This Guy Is Actually Being Considered for U.S. President.

Still, Mr. Senecal said that Mr. Trump could be generous when the mood struck him, sometimes peeling $100 bills from a wad in his pocket to give to the groundskeepers, whom Mr. Senecal described as appreciative.

“You’re a Hispanic and you’re in here trimming the trees and everything, and a guy walks up and hands you a hundred dollars,” Mr. Senecal said. “And they love him, not for that, they just love him.”

And here that adorable grandpa turns out to be our stereotypical, racist grandfather.

In 1990, Mr. Senecal took a sabbatical to become the mayor of a town in West Virginia, where he gained some notoriety for a proposal requiring all panhandlers to carry begging permits. He said that Mr. Trump wrote to him, “This is so great, Tony.”

A decade later, Mr. Trump decided to put his own imprint on Mar-a-Lago by building the 20,000-square-foot Donald J. Trump Ballroom. The venue made its big debut with the 2005 wedding of Mr. Trump to Melania Trump, whom Mr. Senecal described as exceptionally compassionate. Tony Bennett, whose paintings hang in the mansion, sang. Mr. Senecal greeted guests at the door, including Hillary Clinton. (In the interview, he offered a profane description for Mrs. Clinton, the front-runner in the Democratic presidential race.) ...

Mr. Senecal’s admiration for his longtime boss seems to know few limits. On March 6, as Mr. Trump made his way through the living room on his way to the golf course, Mr. Senecal called out “All rise!” to the club members and staff. They rose.

And we'll leave it there. Or rather, here: