PALM BEACH, March 16 — 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 SUVs in the circular driveway. Palm trees rustled in a warm breeze, croquet balls clicked and a security guard stood at the entrance to Donald Trump’s private living quarters.

“You can always tell when the king is here,” 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 Trump comes to escape, entertain and luxuriate in a Mediterranean-style manse, built 90 years ago by cereal heiress Marjorie Merriweather Post.

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

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

Senecal knows how to stroke his ego and lift his spirits, like the time years ago he received an urgent warning from Trump’s soon-to-land plane that the mogul was in a sour mood. Senecal quickly hired a bugler to play Hail to the Chief as Trump stepped out of his limousine to enter Mar-a-Lago.

Most days, though, he greeted Trump with little fanfare, taking the suit he arrived in to be pressed in the full-service laundry in the basement.

A portrait of Donald Trump hangs in the bar at the Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach, Florida, March 16, 2016. — Picture by Eric Thayer/The New York Times

The next morning, before dawn and after about four hours’ sleep, 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. 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.

On Sundays, Trump would drive himself to his nearby golf course, alternating each year between his black Bentley and his white Bentley.

Senecal tried to retire in 2009, but Trump decided he was irreplaceable, so while Senecal was relieved of his butler duties, he has been kept around as a kind of unofficial historian at Mar-a-Lago. “Tony, to retire is to expire,” Trump told him. “I’ll see you next season.”

Senecal, with horn-rimmed glasses, a walrus mustache and a white pocket kerchief in his black jacket, seems to reflect his boss’ worldview: He worries about attacks by Islamic terrorists and is critical of Trump’s ex-wives.

And like Trump, he is at ease among the celebrities who visit the estate. But while he might once have admired Dixie Carter sipping crème de menthe by the fireplace and reciting soliloquies from the television show “Designing Women,” these days Senecal encounters Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey lounging on a couch under the living room’s 21-foot gold-leafed ceiling, or chatting with Sen. Jeff Sessions of Alabama as he exits the luxurious Spanish Room.

Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate, a Mediterranean-style mansion with 118 rooms, in Palm Beach, Florida, March 16, 2016. — Picture by Eric Thayer/The New York Times

The butler’s up-close observations of Trump over the years have revealed not only the mogul’s quirks — Trump rarely appears in bathing trunks, for example, and does not like to swim — but also his habitual, self-soothing exaggerations.

In the early years, Trump’s daughter Ivanka slept in the same children’s suite that Dina Merrill, an actress and a daughter of Post, occupied in the 1930s. Trump liked to tell guests that the nursery rhyme-themed tiles in the room were made by a young Walt Disney.

“You don’t like that, do you?” Trump would say when he caught Senecal rolling his eyes. The house historian would protest that it was not true.

“Who cares?” Trump would respond with a laugh.

Trump is abundantly proud of his ability to drive a golf ball, once asking rhetorically during a news conference: “Do I hit it long? Is Trump strong?”

Senecal suggested that Trump was perhaps not quite as strong as he imagined, remembering times they would hit balls together from the Mar-a-Lago property into the Intracoastal Waterway.

The main living room in Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach, Florida, March 16, 2016. — Picture by Eric Thayer/The New York Times

“Tony, how far is that?” Trump would ask.

“It’s like 275 yards,” Senecal would respond, though he said the actual distance was 225 yards.

Still, Senecal said that Trump could be generous when the mood struck him, sometimes peeling US$100 bills from a wad in his pocket to give to the groundskeepers, whom 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,” Senecal said. “And they love him, not for that, they just love him.”

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

Trump was wearing a “Make America Great Again” cap. It was white, not red. He seemed in a good mood. — The New York Times

A 1927 Steinway baby grand piano in the living room at Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach, Florida, March 16, 2016. — Picture by Eric Thayer/The New York Times