Since early in the evening, the sense was that the rally-like crowd, drinking wine from a cash bar and eating spring rolls, was prepared to receive Trump as a winner no matter the outcome. There was a feeling of being prepared for the worst, given what they’d seen their candidate put through. On my way into the event, I ran into Joel Tenney, a pastor I’d met ten months ago, in a church in Iowa, where he was a Trump “caucus captain.” After almost a year of volunteering for Trump, Tenney was here as a special guest, wearing a black MAGA hat. By this point, Trump was in the lead in Georgia and North Carolina, and Tenney and his wife were in a really good mood. Still, they wanted to talk about how they were sure that they had “experienced voter fraud” in the previous election. “She gave us Sharpies because she knew we were Republican,” Tenney’s wife said, of a poll worker. Tenney added, “The machines are made in Germany. And Hillary interfered with Bernie Sanders.” As things started to look more certain for Trump, Tenney told me, “I can finally sleep again.”
The previous night, on my way over to Palm Beach, I saw a sign that said “Democrats killed democracy.” But there was little other visible evidence that an election many were describing as a referendum on democracy was about to happen. At a trivia night held around the pool of the Colony Hotel, guests dressed in patterned Dolce & Gabbana split into teams to compete over questions such as “How many pieces of candy corn are produced per year?”
On Election Day, I saw Rod Blagojevich in warmup gear getting coffee at the Hilton nearby. He was one of those MAGA characters who turned up everywhere in the course of the campaign: at the check-in desk at my hotel in Milwaukee for the Republican National Convention; at the recent rally in Madison Square Garden, where he walked in with Sarah Palin. Rudy Giuliani was another such figure; that morning, in Palm Beach, he had pulled up to Trump’s polling station in a blue Mercedes convertible—which he’d been ordered to give up as part of a defamation settlement. (“Rudy, do you worry you’ll be homeless?” someone asked him, as he idled outside Trump’s precinct. “I don’t worry about anything,” he said.) In some ways, the looming question of the day was whether the Rudys and the Rods would soon recede from public consciousness into obsolescence, and defend an ex-President in exile, or emerge as legitimate figures at the center of our politics, pardoned of all misdeeds. I wondered the same when I saw Kristi Noem in a polka-dotted dress eating dinner at the Hilton before going into the watch party.
In the early hours of Wednesday morning, as state after state projected victory for Trump, I kept hearing that his motorcade was about to leave Mar-a-Lago and make its way to the convention hall. Karoline Leavitt, the campaign’s press secretary, told one of the journalists working for Decision Desk HQ that they should just call North Carolina and Georgia for Trump so everyone could get to bed earlier. David Sacks and Marco Rubio showed up; Mike Johnson had been watching election returns with his constituents in Louisiana and decided to fly to Florida. Earlier in the day Trump had been pushing theories about “massive CHEATING”; now his feed had gone quiet.
