A Florida community considered “central” to President Donald Trump’s personal “mythos” and his obsession with golf has been rendered something close to a ghost, according to The Bulwark, and it is all his own fault.
Doral, Florida, is a prominent city in the Miami-Dade metropolitan area, noted for its significant Latin American population, about 40 percent of which is Venezuelan. As writer Adrian Carrasquillo noted in his Friday report for The Bulwark, it was among the many notably Latino communities that broke for Trump in the 2024 election, voting for him by a 23-point margin, a 19-point swing from 2020. Trump’s connections to the area go much deeper than that, however.
“Doral is a central location in the Trump mythos,” Carrasquillo explained. “His golf course there is something he speaks about with immense pride. And he sees his club as a Bretton Woods of the south. Beyond the Shield of the Americas, the G-20 is being held at Trump’s Doral resort in December. He also tried to invite Vladimir Putin to the G-7 there in his first term before abandoning those plans amid political backlash. When Trump renovated the Rose Garden during his second term, it was the trappings of Doral that he clearly sought to recreate.”
All of that reverence for the city, the writer argued, makes it all the more “profound” how much Doral has succumbed to “deterioration” in the last few years, showing that “Even Trump’s cherished places are not immune from the chaos he’s unleashed.”
“When I got to El Arepazo at lunchtime, my guide, Ade Ferro, a Venezuelan activist and Democratic organizer, remarked that she had never before snagged a parking spot right in front of the restaurant because the place was always too busy—but now she got one easily,” Carrasquillo wrote. “Surrounded by mostly empty tables, I asked an employee how ICE’s increased raids and enforcement efforts in the city had affected their business. Was it down 30 to 40 percent, the sort of figure I had heard cited by struggling business owners in Latino corridors across Chicago and in Minneapolis over the past eighteen months?”
“It’s more like [down] 80 percent,” the employee responded. “People are scared to come out and visit. When we make specials, sometimes we have to throw them out because they go bad.”
The owner of the Central Park Food Station, another Venezuelan restaurant in Doral, estimated that business was down 40 percent, with things getting even worse as ICE activity surged in the last month.
“People aren’t coming. They’re scared,” the owner explained. “It’s a chain: they don’t go to work, so they don’t make money, so they don’t come and spend money.”
“It isn’t dark magic that is causing these restaurants to struggle and Doral to be a ghost town,” Carrasquillo continued. “The people haven’t just vanished. They’ve had their status stripped away and now fear being chased and rounded up, detained, and deported, as has happened already to many of their compatriots. I have to be careful with details here—for reasons of safety and to avoid re-traumatizing people. At multiple businesses I visited, members of the staff had open asylum cases.”