WASHINGTON — After two months spent scorching the earth in Washington and complaining about being cooped up in the White House, President Donald Trump is planning to return this weekend to the one place where he knows he will receive a hero’s welcome for his troubles: Mar-a-Lago, his gilded club by the sea in Palm Beach.

“You would have to be insensitive not to be touched by how he has stayed there working,” said Toni Holt Kramer, founder of Trumpettes USA, a booster group that is planning to welcome him. “I think people will have tears in their eyes because they’re so grateful that he’s come back to his home away from home.”

Trump made a point of staying in Washington over the Christmas holidays — waiting, he said, for Democrats to negotiate with him on funding for a border wall — so it will be the president’s first visit to Mar-a-Lago since Thanksgiving.

It will not be a complete escape — he still has no deal on the wall and a State of the Union address to give Tuesday. But after his arrival Friday afternoon, Trump is expected to do many of the things he always does when he is at Mar-a-Lago: dining at the owner’s table on the patio; spending the afternoon at Trump International Golf Club, about a 15-minute motorcade drive away; and never venturing anywhere in Palm Beach outside his own two properties.

The first lady, Melania Trump, will travel there with him this weekend, her spokeswoman said, though Melania Trump tends to keep a low profile while at the resort.

In the Mar-a-Lago cocoon, the president is in his most comfortable mode, friends and allies say: playing the jocular host in front of an adoring crowd.

On Saturday, P.J. Schrantz, who founded Veleve, a charity that provides support for veterans, is betting on Donald Trump to make an appearance at a $600-a-plate fundraiser his organization is hosting in one of the club’s ballrooms. And plans for Trump’s annual Super Bowl viewing party at his golf club Sunday evening, complete with a steak and lobster buffet, are still on.

“I chose to have it there because I’ve attended galas there,” Schrantz said of his event, which will feature a George Michael tribute artist donating his time, as well as honor astronaut Buzz Aldrin. “The members are such giving people that we could raise a couple of million dollars in an evening.”

Some Mar-a-Lago members say they are already wistful about the blissful weeks without tangled traffic and increased security — a seven-minute drive from home to the club takes at least 30 minutes when Trump is in town, one said — but many will brave the roads for the chance to participate in a presidential selfie or a similar show of support.

Laurence Leamer, a longtime Palm Beach resident who has known Trump since the 1990s and is the author of “Mar-a-Lago: Inside the Gates of Power at Donald Trump’s Presidential Palace,” said in an interview that even if people had an issue with the president’s policymaking, the meatloaf recipe or anything in between, they tended to keep it to themselves.

“People have been trained to have like a Pavlovian reaction or something,” Leamer said. “You’re supposed to say things are great. When he asks you, ‘How are things?’ you’re not supposed to complain.”

Just as the Trump International Hotel in Washington has become a safe space for the president and his supporters, Mar-a-Lago is a 20-acre oasis for those who adore all things Trump, from his zero-tolerance immigration policies to the menu items named after his children.

The focus on Trump has grown to the point where some Democratic members, who have loved the club’s amenities for decades, have recently rescinded their memberships because they do not feel comfortable there anymore.

“There’s a political angle to being a member now,” said Cynthia Friedman, a Democratic fundraiser who joined the club 24 years ago and recalls playing tennis on Saturdays with Marla Maples, Trump’s second wife. “There are a lot of people who I don’t recognize. They’re not the people I used to play tennis with. Things change, and it’s time to move on.”

In December, instead of sending her $1,600 in monthly dues, she joined the Beach Club, a rival members-only club, on the other side of town.

But Friedman is still in the minority. Many Mar-a-Lago members book reservations weeks in advance to be in the same room with the president. And Trumpworld celebrities, like Anthony Scaramucci, the former White House communications director; the president’s son Donald Trump Jr.; and Antonio Sabato Jr., the Trump-loving model-turned-politician, have been spotted at social events and fundraisers in Palm Beach, serving as something of a warm-up act to the main event.

Karyn Turk, a business owner and the 2016 winner of the Mrs. Florida beauty pageant, said if the walls looked like they were caving in on the president in Washington, there were only blue skies in Palm Beach.

“It’s a lot of hype,” she said of the special counsel investigation, led by Robert Mueller. “I feel like in a lot of ways, it’s still just a witch hunt.”

If the “Winter White House” is a boon for the members of Trump’s exclusive club, and a respite not only for the president but also for the staff members who relocate with him, the annual decampment still raises ethical concerns.

The White House has refused to release a list of those who visit the president there. And elsewhere in the Trump Organization orbit, the company said it would introduce new procedures to screen immigrants after The New York Times reported that Trump’s flagship New Jersey golf club employed people who had entered the country illegally.

And ProPublica reported last summer that three Mar-a-Lago members had amassed an unusual amount of influence in the Department of Veterans Affairs, meddling in agency initiatives and participating in the review of a contract worth some $10 billion.

“It certainly seems unprecedented,” said Noah Bookbinder, executive director of the ethics watchdog CREW, “and highly troubling for people to be given significant authority over government matters seemingly primarily on the basis of being paying customers of the president.”

The White House has taken at least one informal step to block people who have access to the president’s properties from asking for anything that seems to go too far. Aides have long been on the alert to intercept any notes or policy proposals from overeager supporters — including one from a guest who once helpfully tried to show the president an executive order he had drafted. Trump has at times directed his aides to give those people ample listening time even if he cannot, according to someone familiar with the process and his thinking.

Security around the president may have tightened since 2017, when Trump sat on the open patio, in front of hundreds of eyeballs and iPhones pointed in his direction, discussing a response to North Korea’s missile test with Shinzo Abe, the Japanese prime minister. But in many ways, Trump himself has not changed from the involved club owner he has always been.

He has always kept close watch over who comes and goes, and pays close attention to those in the latter category.

Jeff Greene, the Palm Beach billionaire who ran unsuccessfully in the Democratic primary for governor of Florida, joined the club when he moved to Palm Beach in 2010. But he quit because, he said, “I have my own tennis court. I never loved going there.”

Trump, he said, took his resignation personally. Sitting next to him at a charity event at Mar-a-Lago, Greene recalled being confronted. “He went right at me, saying, ‘I can’t believe you quit the club.’ He’s figuring someone with plenty of money, why would they care about paying dues for a club?”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.