Jared Moskowitz floats Mar-a-Lago tax hike after Donald Trump bemoans devaluation

As the old saying goes, be careful what you wish for.

One week after Donald Trump kvetched publicly about a recent devaluation of his Mar-a-Lago home in Palm Beach County, a South Florida lawmaker is asking for the property’s tax rate to reflect what the former President insists it’s truly worth.

“Mar-a-Lago was listed as worth $490 million in financial documents given to banks,” Democratic U.S. Rep. Jared Moskowitz of Parkland said in a Thursday letter to Palm Beach Property Appraiser Dorothy Jacks.

“If the property value of Mar-a-Lago is so much higher than it was appraised, will you be amending the property value in line with the Trump family’s belief that the property is worth well over a billion dollars?”

New York Judge Arthur Engoron ruled Sept. 26 that Trump and his company for years had created a financial “fantasy world” by fraudulently inflating the value of his properties.

Mar-a-Lago, the judge found, had in one financial statement been overvalued by as much as 2,300%.

Between 2011 and 2021, Jacks’ Office valued Mar-a-Lago at between $18 million and $28 million. The most recent market value Jacks’ team assigned to Mar-a-Lago, according to the Palm Beach Daily News, was $37 million and a preliminary taxable value of $33.4 million, up from $31 million and $30.36 million last year.

But in a post last Tuesday to Truth Social, his social media platform, Trump insisted the property is worth far more than that.

“This highly partisan Democrat ‘Judge,’” Trump wrote, “just ruled that Mar-a-Lago was WORTH just 18 Million Dollars when, in fact, it may be worth 100 times that amount.”

His son, Eric Trump, echoed the sentiment on X, formerly known as Twitter.

“In an attempt to destroy my father and kick him out of New York, a judge just ruled that Mar-a-Lago, in Palm Beach Florida, is only worth approximately ‘$18 Million dollars’…Mar-a-Lago is speculated to be worth well over a billion dollars making it arguably the most valuable residential property in the country,” he wrote. “It is all so corrupt and coordinated.”

Those comments and others disparaging Engoron and his staff prompted the judge to issue a limited gag order against Trump on Tuesday.

“Personal attacks on members of my court staff are unacceptable, not appropriate, and I will not tolerate them,” Engoron said after complaining — without naming names — about a defendant’s “disparaging, untrue and personally identifying posts about a member of my staff.”

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The Associated Press contributed to the report.