The campaign, the candidates and the choice ahead
Vain, shocking and orange: How the Republican candidate’s crocodilian campaign reflects the state that treats him like a local
“WE’VE GOTTA BE NICE AND COOL, NIIIIIIICE AND COOL. STAY ON POINT, DONALD. STAY ON POINT. NO SIDETRACKS, DONALD. NIIICE.” — DONALD TRUMP TO A CROWD IN PENSACOLA, FLA., THIS WEEK
In the end, the landscape merged with the man. Trump became Florida, Florida Trump — a single burnt orange haze inexplicably at the centre of everything again.
After all the madness of the past 18 months — after Ch-EYEna! and the wall and the torture praise — Donald Trump remains viable. He could still win Tuesday. He has several paths and all of them run through the Sunshine State.
It seems literary, almost clichéd, that it would come down to this. But here we are. With days left in the campaign, it’s all about Florida for Trump. If he wins there, he could win the White House. If he doesn’t, he can’t, a fact made abundantly clear by his blanket presence there this week.
Of course, Florida won’t be enough. Not on its own. To win, Trump needs to pick up an unlikely collection of states where his odds remain poor to uneven at best, including, probably, New Hampshire, Colorado, North Carolina, Nevada and parts of Maine. But Florida is the key.
The New York Times polling site The Upshot mapped out 315 ways he could win Tuesday. Only 39 of them, all outlandishly improbable, work without Florida. For example, with Florida, he could win with Pennsylvania, Ohio, North Carolina, Wis- consin, Iowa, Nevada and New Hampshire. But his plane could also spontaneously combust. The odds of either one happening aren’t that different.
In other words, for Trump, it’s Florida or bust. And for now, Florida is effectively tied.
It’s fitting, in a way. Trump may be Queens, N.Y., born and bred, but his campaign — garish, crocodilian and probably doomed — is Florida to its core. His ties to the state run deep and go back decades. But the connection between is as much about feel as anything else.
There’s a particular idea of Florida in the public imagination. It’s reflected in the swamp noir of Elmore Leonard and Carl Hiaasen and by “Florida Man,” the online meme about outlandish crime. Trump is all that writ large. He is vain and always shocking in novel ways (It’s the novelty that’s key). He is, in that way, the ultimate “Florida Man.” So it makes sense that in the final days of his campaign, he has come back to his spiritual home. It’s Tuesday night in Pensacola, on the western tip of the Florida panhandle. At an outdoor arena under a clear black sky, Trump’s fans have gathered. When the music kicks in — a brass band version of The Star Spangled Banner — six big gouts of sparkly flame shoot up from below the stage.
In the footage released later online, his silhouette appears first. He stands in the shadows behind stage right, letting the anticipation grow. When he walks out, finally, he looks incongruous, still, after all these months — his boxy suit falling oddly on his big frame, a camouflage baseball hat pulled low over his eyes.
On this night, he seems tired and a little loopy. Barely minutes in and he’s already talking to himself or maybe mocking his team.
“We’ve gotta be nice and cool, niiiiiiice and cool,” he says pushing his hands palm down toward the podium. “Stay on point, Donald. Stay on point. No sidetracks, Donald. Niiice. ”
The event is Trump’s second Florida rally of the day. The next morning, he’ll be off again, to speak in Jacksonville and Orlando, running the painful gauntlet of a late-stage presidential campaign.
For Trump, the Florida leg comes on something close to home turf. For decades he has kept a second home in Palm Beach. He bought the enormous Mar-a-Lago estate, once home to the richest woman in America, in 1986. At the time, it was one of the priciest private home sales in American history, according to a story published in The New York Times.
The house included “58 bedrooms, 38 bathrooms, 27 servants rooms, three bomb shelters, a theatre, a ballroom and a nine-hole golf course,” the paper reported. It sat on seven hectares of land and had a private tunnel to the beach.
Trump’s history with Mara-Lago is much like his history with anything else: litigious, and full of half-truths.
Trump and his team have, over the past 30 years: sued Palm Beach County over an 25-metre flagpole and his constitutional right to erect it on his lawn, zoning be dammed; claimed that the cultlike Unification Church of America would buy Mar-a-Lago if the town did not let Trump subdivide the property; and implied that Diana, the Princess of Wales, and her estranged husband, Charles, were buying memberships in the private club he established on its grounds. (Buckingham Palace called the claim “complete and utter rubbish.”)
Today, Mar-a-Lago is the country palace to Trump’s New York business home, a symbol of all his excess.
His Florida ties aren’t limited to Mar-a-Lago, though, where he married his third wife, Melania, in 2005. A comprehensive review of “Trump’s Florida,” published by the Tampa Bay Times recently, included business dealings in Fort Lauderdale, Doral, Jacksonville and Homestead, not to mention some heavy lobbying in the state capital, Tallahassee.
Trump also has long exuded an unmistakable air of “Florida,” in the thematic sense. From his garish hair to his gilded, nouveau-riche taste, he has always seemed a bit like the villain, or maybe just the patsy, in a dark crime comedy, something set in the Everglades or Miami Beach.
Maybe that’s why, politically, the state has treated him as more of a local than several actual locals in the past year. Two of Trump’s most prominent primary opponents were Floridians: Jeb Bush, the former governor, and Sen. Marco Rubio.
Bush didn’t survive long enough to contest the Florida primary. But Rubio did. For his trouble he received a thrashing, losing to Trump 45 per cent to 27 per cent on his own home turf.
In the general election campaign, the Florida polls have mostly followed the national trend. It was close in June, then Hillary Clinton marched ahead. Things tightened again after the Republican convention in July, then Clinton leaped out once more.
The same pattern repeated itself in the leadup to and the aftermath of the debates. As recently as Oct. 18, the aggregation site fivethirtyeight.com had Clinton with a 75 per cent chance of winning the state. Today, it’s effectively tied.
Under fivethirtyeight’s formula, Trump has about a 33 per cent chance of carrying the whole thing Tuesday. But he can’t do it without Florida. And so, this week, his long cavalcade of assaults against the political norm nearing an end, he came home.
Earlier Wednesday, in Miami, wearing a white hat this time, Trump spoke for about 45 minutes. He looked invigorated, fresher than he would later that night. When the crowd chanted, “Trump! Trump!” and “CNN sucks!”, he smiled, a thin, flat grin. “So sad,” he said, with obvious joy.
Trump looked comfortable there, among his people. He seemed at home, confident they would deliver a win. For him that’s vital. He can’t survive without Florida. But it also might not be enough. Florida Man could easily take Florida Tuesday and still walk away with nothing at all.