Donald Trump’s Administration Hopefuls Descend on Mar-a-Lago

Ever since Donald Trump left the White House in January, 2021, and flew back to Palm Beach, supporters have held vigil along the drawbridge en route to Mar-a-Lago. For a while, Trump’s Mar-a-Lago was in a sort of prolonged offseason funk. There was a time during his Florida exile when Ye (formerly known as Kanye West) and Nick Fuentes were the biggest names he could draw to his club’s patio. In 2022, the longest public procession of vehicles to the resort might have been when F.B.I. agents raided Trump’s estate in search of classified documents that he had taken from the White House.

But in the days after the 2024 Presidential election, as Trump nominated a growing roster of loyal Florida men to his Cabinet, acolytes made their way to Palm Beach, where his transition team met under a chandelier at Mar-a-Lago. Some members of Congress were as likely to come to Palm Beach as they were to go home to their districts. (It isn’t unheard of for a congressperson’s driver to pick up rideshare fares.) Even Mitt Romney was spotted on a plane from DCA to PBI. Everyone was flying in to see the man who had once advocated, without success, that Palm Beach International Airport be moved ten miles south so that the roar of jets wouldn’t disturb him. Now that he is President-elect, the flight path above the resort is restricted, as it was during his first term, and a canine security robot prowls the club grounds.

When I was at Trump’s Election Night victory party in West Palm Beach, someone suggested that Trump shouldn’t leave Mar-a-Lago until his Inauguration. For days after winning reëlection, Trump remained ensconced at the club, save for a day trip to D.C., when he met with Joe Biden at the White House, who congratulated him on winning. After, Trump flew back to Palm Beach, where he had already drawn the center of American power down to South Florida. Biden left for the Amazon. At Mar-a-Lago, Trump watched reels of audition tape of potential Cabinet picks; Elon Musk roared around on a golf cart.

In the evenings, Trump has opened the doors of his winter White House to guests who dress in black tie and ball gowns. Last Friday, the Conservative Political Action Committee held its investor gala there. Attendees were ferried past palm trees wound with Christmas lights. Steve Bannon, freshly out of prison, and the Blackwater founder Erik Prince spoke. The Catholic priest and exorcist Chad Ripperger was there. A little after five o’clock, Sebastian Gorka, the right-wing media host still said to be in the running for a spot as Trump’s deputy national-security adviser, was one of the final stragglers at the oceanfront bar of the Eau Palm Beach hotel, a five-star spa with a newly opened Nobu in South Palm Beach. Party buses idled outside. (The hotel, where the Chinese President, Xi Jinping, has stayed when he visited Trump in Florida, is located across from a Publix supermarket on Jimmy Buffett Memorial Highway.)

Gorka, wearing a MAGA hat and a black suit, asked the bartender for a bowl of trail mix. “Can I get some of those little snack things?” he said. At the other end of the bar a local woman with two Maltese puppies on her lap was being cut off after her nightly two-drink maximum. She asked the man in between us to hold her dogs while she went to talk to Gorka. She had apparently been trying, without success, to take a photograph with him. She sat back down and asked me what I was doing there. “I know everybody who’s anybody in this place,” she said. “You’re not a vacationer. You’re, like, former C.I.A. What network are you with? You have a blazer on. You’re not F.B.I.?” She went on, “I used to be a model for twenty years.” The man holding her dog turned to me and asked if we were in a dream. “She’ll just pawn those dogs off on anyone,” the bartender said. The room had mostly emptied out. “Looks like they were all headed to Mar-a-Lago,” the bartender said. “They got their red gear on.” Gorka paid his tab. The woman at the end of the bar told me I should have arrested him and his group. “They’re criminals!” she kept saying. “Why are you leaving me?” she cried out at Gorka, as he left for the buses.

“Gotta go party!” he said. “Party time.”

I relocated to another hotel, to meet a person involved in the transition. He had been at Mar-a-Lago the night before, then out at a dive bar in West Palm Beach with a potential Cabinet pick and a member of Congress. “It’s ‘Game of Thrones’ meets ‘Hunger Games,’ ” he said, of the maneuverings of all the Administration hopefuls. “It’s a weird little hive mind, the chatter and the consensus build. It’s kind of, like, Who’re we gonna put on this? There’s jockeying, propositioning.” People on Polymarket were betting on which of the Cabinet picks are likely to be confirmed by the Senate. (Kristi Noem is at ninety-four per cent; Matt Gaetz, the former congressman, who has been under investigation for indiscretions allegedly including sex with a minor, was at twenty-nine per cent to be confirmed as Attorney General before he withdrew from consideration under pressure on Thursday.) Of Trump’s over-all approach to populating his Cabinet, the person involved in the transition said, “It’s, like, I’m going to call out the absurdities of the system by forcing down your throat people that I like that I know I’m not supposed to.” He went on, “Dispositionally, Trump would rather it be all love. I compliment you, you compliment me, we get rich—that’s his ideal world. But politics is a blood sport, and they drew blood, so he will draw back. But he’s not going to burn down the country.” It was disco night at the hotel. People ate steak tartare prepared tableside as the din got louder.

He ordered another red wine. “I may disagree with Trump on some of these picks, but I think he deserves his mandate,” he said. “If any of these asshole senators with these cushy jobs—and all they do is go to rubber-chicken-eating ceremonies and hand out favors and appointments and board seats to their friends and family members—if they think that they have anything to do with what happens in this country, I have a serious issue with that. It’s, like, a moral obligation to make their lives a living hell until they give Trump what he wants.” He paused and said, “I respect the Constitution, and advise and consent, but at the end of the day we live in extraordinary times.”

The night before, the America First Policy Institute, a conservative think tank that is involved in the planning for Trump’s second term, had held a gala at Mar-a-Lago. Ric Grenell, Trump’s former Ambassador to Germany, attended despite having just been passed over for Secretary of State in favor of Marco Rubio. Musk and Javier Milei, Argentina’s President, spoke to the group. Milei, a libertarian who clones his dogs, was the first foreign leader Trump met with as President-elect. At the dinner, Trump was introduced by Sylvester Stallone, who compared him to Rocky Balboa. Rocky, Stallone said, “was going to go through a metamorphosis and change lives, just like President Trump. . . . I love mythology. This individual does not exist on this planet.” Trump, in a tuxedo, looking much more rested than he did when I last saw him, on Election Night, took the stage and spoke briefly about politics. “We’re conservative in this room, but we can understand the other side,” he said. “What we really are,” he said, calling out Tulsi Gabbard, Vivek Ramaswamy, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., Elon Musk, Newt Gingrich, and Milei, are “people with common sense.”

Trump announced that his second term would usher in an era of opulence and glamour. The stock market had “gone through the roof” since the election. Then he told the crowd at Mar-a-Lago about the people he had seen around the country. “They just wanted hope,” he said. “They wanted something; they just didn’t want what they had. . . . When I went around, I heard something that was very interesting: the word ‘grocery.’ It’s sort of such a strange and simple, nice word, you know, ‘I’m going out for groceries today.’ . . . I tell a story about a woman, she got three apples, an old woman, she had three apples and she brought them up to the cash register and she looked at the woman and she said, ‘Is that the right price?’ and the woman said ‘Yes, Ma’am, I’m sorry, yes it is.’ And she said, ‘Oh that’s O.K., could you wait one minute?’ and she took one of the three apples and she brought it back to the refrigeration and she came back gently up to the cash register, and she paid for two apples instead of three.” Those days of scarcity were over, Trump said. When Mar-a-Lago was built, in 1927, for the socialite cereal heiress Marjorie Post, “it was a Roaring Twenties. We’re hotter now than they ever were in the Roaring Twenties, I believe. We’re going to be a lot hotter.”

For decades, Trump was shunned by the Palm Beach establishment. “The social elite of Palm Beach had regarded Trump as a vulgar interloper when he first came to the island,” Laurence Leamer writes, in “Mar-a-Lago: Inside the Gates of Power at Donald Trump’s Presidential Palace.” He had long wanted to remake Palm Beach society with Mar-a-Lago at its center. In 1993, he bused in models and Miami Dolphins cheerleaders for a “bachelor ball” on the same night as the Old Guard was at an International Red Cross charity benefit. Arguably, Trump’s first real political campaign was to attempt to persuade the Palm Beach Town Council to let him convert historic Mar-a-Lago into a club; he thought it was preposterous that he had to seek zoning approval for a property he owned. “Much of the origins of Donald Trump’s disdain toward what he considers the country’s entrenched, unresponsive political establishment originates in this experience in Palm Beach,” Leamer writes. When the club opened, Trump pretended that Princess Diana and Prince Charles, along with Steven Spielberg and Norman Mailer, were founding members. Three decades later, he had his own set of “counter-élites” at Mar-a-Lago. When I met Rick Lacey, the chairman of the Brevard County G.O.P., at Mar-a-Lago on Super Tuesday, he had told me that Trump’s resort was the closest thing America had to its own Versailles. I asked him last week about the group gathered there post-election. “I think we’re going to see a new version of Camelot—between friends, celebrities, powerful business people coming together, socializing and defining a new direction, just kind of a feel.”

The morning after the CPAC gala, the roads in South Palm Beach were flooded. At high tide a moat formed around the entrance of the Eau hotel, cutting it off from the outside world. Seasoned drivers maneuvered their cars like canoes through the water. “It’s shallower in the middle,” a biker told me, as I hesitated at an intersection. “Whatever you do, don’t go slow.” I parked at Publix, and a white G.M.C. Yukon from the hotel came to drive me and other arrivals across the water.

Trump hadn’t addressed reporters since before the election. Everyone was trying to mine morsels out of Mar-a-Lago. Speculations bounced back and forth from the official transition headquarters in West Palm Beach to X to Trump’s Truth Social. I got a text saying that Kash Patel—a Trump loyalist who has promised to defeat the “government gangsters” of the deep state—“feels like he’s got fbi momentum.” A person who’d been in transition-team meetings that day called to tell me they were going to clean house at the Census Bureau.

“I love them for the same reason that the establishment G.O.P. hates them,” a former Trump official wrote to me, of Trump’s picks. “I am genuinely surprised TBH—I did think that we would do better and make fewer mistakes in the second term, but I didn’t really think he would try to ‘drain the swamp’ by appointing fearless outsiders to the system. I thought we’d get some good picks, make some (hopefully) good reforms but settle in with a truce to the powers that be.” He went on, “Do I think we’ll win? No–The system is really powerful, and, beyond that, most of our party in Congress actually opposes any attempt to change things.”

On the final night of the CPAC meeting, I decided to drop by the Eau for sunset cocktails. In an oceanfront ballroom, I approached a group of well-dressed older women sitting together by the window. They were saving a chair for CPAC’s chairman, Matt Schlapp. When I introduced myself as a reporter, one of them, an attorney, spoke up: “We’re not ogres. I’m not alt-right,” she said. “I don’t have swastikas on.”

CPAC, she continued, “is the center. It’s middle America.” She wouldn’t tell me who had spoken at the gala the night before, but said that “the vibes at Mar-a-Lago are good.” Schlapp arrived, saw my notebook, and told me to leave right away. The attorney walked me out to the veranda so she could finish her thought. I’d asked how she made sense of Trump’s Cabinet picks so far; he seemed focussed on retribution and deportation. “It’s not about retribution!” she said. “It’s the rule of law. And you have to have justice before you have mercy or grace.” Trump’s trials had been “a total violation of due process. There’s no guardrails.” The Trump Administration would bring back the guardrails. “They are not going to do anything that violates the rule of law. They will hold people accountable.”

Earlier this year, at the annual CPAC convention, outside D.C., when Gaetz had spoken alongside Mike Lindell, the MyPillow founder turned election denier, and Liz Truss, the shortest-serving Prime Minister in British history, the gathering felt less relevant than ever, more of a garish sideshow for grifters. Now, the attorney said, the rest of the world was catching up. “It’s a big tent,” she said, of the crowd that was assembling in Florida. She was the second person that weekend to tell me how many viewers CNN had lost over the past few years. “The numbers are way down. They don’t even show it in the airport anymore.” We stood in the ocean breeze as the sun went down, and she told me to “look into the source documents” from the 2000 election recount in Florida. She promised to send me a book about Bush v. Gore: “I’ll make a deal with you. Research how the media defanged the Supreme Court, and I’ll talk to you again.” She went on, “It’s like a marriage. You broke trust. We can try to reconcile, but you have to earn it back.” Even while Kash Patel insists, jokingly or not, that he wants to put journalists in jail? “Well, those J6 people were just walking around the Capitol,” she replied. “You don’t see non-Republicans being prosecuted.” She went on, “Justice, then reconciliation.” I exited through the restaurant, and she went back inside for the CPAC toast.

By now, the moat around the Eau hotel had been drained, and having promised Schlapp that I wouldn’t come back inside after he threw me out, I drove north on Jimmy Buffett Memorial Highway. At a hotel a few miles away, two men at the bar were talking about whether they’d get posts in the Administration. They realized that they had both been at Mar-a-Lago for the America First Policy Institute gala. They had each wondered whether to give a lot of money to Trump before they knew he’d win the election.

“In 2016, we had to donate a lot less.”

“Has there ever been an ambassador go back to a post?”

“I don’t think there’s a legal prohibition.”

“I’m honestly not sure anyone else even wants China. The residence isn’t even that nice.”

“What about Korea?”

“If you can assist me in that regard, I’d be very grateful.”

They loved the “unconventional” Cabinet picks. “With inexperienced people, I guess the question is, can they root out all the bad stuff going on at the departments, and still do good?” one said.

Trump, meanwhile, had just left Mar-a-Lago for the second time since the election, to attend the Saturday-night U.F.C. fight at Madison Square Garden, flanked by Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, his newly appointed heads of the so-called Department of Governmental Efficiency. Joe Rogan and Dana White, his ambassadors of masculinity, sat nearby as Mike Johnson, his top button undone, took mid-fight selfies with Kid Rock. Down in Florida, after nightfall, I drove back to the mainland. Both sides of the drawbridge over the lagoon were lit up with flashing police lights, and bait fishers were throwing their lines in the water. Early Sunday morning, even more law-enforcement officers descended on the lagoon, after loud pops that sounded like gunfire rang out near Mar-a-Lago. It was a local shooting iguanas with a pellet gun. ♦