A King in His Castle: How Donald Trump Lives, From His Longtime Butler

PALM BEACH, Fla. —Everything seemed to sparkle at the Mar-a-Lago estate here on a recent afternoon. The sun glinted off the pool and the black Secret Service S.U.V.s in the circular driveway. Palm trees rustled in a warm breeze, croquet balls clicked and a security guard stood at the entrance to Donald J. Trump’s private living quarters.

“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.

Few people here can anticipate Mr. Trump’s demands and desires better than Mr. Senecal, 74, who has worked at the property for nearly 60 years, and for Mr. Trump for nearly 30 of them.

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.

Cruz sees two-man race with Trump after Rubio’s exit

Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas said that Sen. Marco Rubio’s exit from the GOP presidential race has set up a two-man race between himself and businessman Donald Trump for the 2016 GOP presidential nomination.
Downplaying Gov. John Kasich’s win in Ohio, Mr. Cruz said during an election night rally in Houston that moving forward nation has a clear choice in the Republican contest.
“Only two campaigns have a plausible path to the nomination: ours and Donald Trump‘s,” Mr. Cruz said. “Nobody else has any mathematical possibility whatsoever.”
Mr. Cruz finished second in Illinois and North Carolina, and was running neck-and-neck with Mr. Trump in Missouri.
“Only one campaign has beaten Donald Trump over and over and over again — not once, not twice, not three times, but nine times all across the country from Alaska to Maine,” Mr. Cruz said. “And going forward the choice is straighter forward. Do you want a candidate who shares your values or a candidate who has spent decades opposing your values?”
The problem for Mr. Cruz is that the chance of the two-person race that he and his supporters are hankering for eluded him Tuesday after Mr. Kasich scored his first win of the campaign by defending his home state, keeping him alive in the contest.