One-time Martinsburg Mayor Has Strong Ties to Trump

As Donald Trump prepares to enter the White House, Martinsburg, West Virginia can make a unique claim: One of its former mayors spent 16 years as the billionaire politician's butler at Mar-a-Lago, the 126-room, 110,000-square-foot Trump estate in Palm Beach, Florida.

Long before Trump made his run for the presidency, Tony Senecal pointed to his onetime boss as someone sorely needed in D.C. politics. "He's a red, white andblue American patriot," Senecal, now largely retired, said in a 2011 magazine interview. "He believes in the free enterprise system and abhors anyone who screws around with it."

Senecal, who served as Martinsburg's mayor hum 1990 to 1992, told Panhandle magazine that Trump would work to rebuild the nation's manufacturing sector and return the United States to its proper position on the world stage. The 74-year-old first came to West Virginia after he landed a low-level job in the Capitol Hill office of Clarence Kilburn, a Republican Congressman from his home state of New York.

Senecal, then still a teenager, got to know a friendly West Virginia Democrat, Harley O. Staggers Sr. After Staggers, a Mineral County lawmaker, recommended Senecal check out a small college in the bucolic Eastern Panhandle, the Plattsburgh, New York, native enrolled at what was then Shepherd College in 1959.

Senecal's political career included controversy, particularly over his unsuccessful quest to force panhandlers to spend $50 a year for a panhandling license- "a war on the poor" that made national news, including a segment on "Larry King Live."

"I've always been appalled that people who come downtown to shop are always being asked, 'Have you got 25 cents? Have you got 50 cents?"' Senecal said at the time.

After dropping out of Shepherd, Senecal worked as a footman at Mar-a-Lago, the historic Mediterranean-style mansion completed in 1927 for cereal heiress Marjorie Merriweather Post, once the United States' wealthiest woman. When she died in 1973, the 17-acre estate was left to the United States government. Post envisioned her home becoming a "Winter White House," a posh getaway for presidents and visiting foreign dignitaries. After the government balked at paying $1 million a year in taxes and maintenance costs, the estate was returned to the Post Foundation in 1981.

Four years later, Trump purchased Mar-a-Lago, which today boasts a white and gold ballroom, a spa, six tennis courts, a pool, eight seaside cabanas and a private beach. Senecal returned to work there starting in 1994, eventually rising to become Trump's private butler. Last year, he was also back in the headlines after the Secret Service came calling over a multitude of anti-Barack Obama posts on Facebook, including one in which Senecal said the president "needs to be hung for treason."

In a May interview with an Eastern Panhandle newspaper, Senecal said he wouldn't actually kill Obama, but wishes the Democrat hadn't lived to serve eight years in the White House. "I think (Obama's execution) should have been done by the military in the first term," he said. Senecal also told The Journal of Martinsburg the Secret Service came to his Florida home because the agency "wanted to make sure I wasn't going to go in (to the White House) with a rifle," Senecal said. "I told them it was too far to drive. I lived in Washington and hated it. I'm glad I got the hell out of there."