How the least divided place in America feels about the inevitability of Trump’s return
THE Kansas City Chiefs and the San Francisco 49ers are neck and neck, and Taylor Swift is stressed. About 2,500 miles across America, the 58th annual Super Bowl is blaring from three giant screens into a large, carpeted dining room. Sitting back on a golden chair in front of one of them, a man in a black suit has just spent a good 10 seconds shaking salt into a bag of already-salted popcorn. He grabs a fistful, tips his head back, throws the kernels into his gaping maw and chomps while reaching into the bag for more. Sometimes, he points at the screen and leans across to one of the men at his table to say something, mouth full. Sometimes he purses his pouty lips to suck some Diet Coke through a straw. Donald Trump is not stressed.
His annual Super Bowl party is taking place at the Trump International Golf Club West Palm Beach, Florida. The waiting staff are dressed like referees in striped black-and-white Tshirts, and mini plastic American footballs, the words MADE IN CHINA on their undersides, decorate the tables. The club itself has a theme too. The coat of arms whose lettering the former president changed from “Integritas” to “Trump” when he took over Mar-a-Lago — a 10-minute drive from here, on the island of Palm Beach proper — can be found everywhere from the gilded entrance gates to the shampoo bottles in the showers. Among golden-framed magazine covers and photos of the former president on the corridor walls, an honours board lists the golf club’s “Men’s Senior Club Champion”: 2012 — Donald J. Trump; 2013 — Donald J. Trump; 2022 — Donald J. Trump; 2023 — Donald J. Trump.
This year’s Super Bowl has a distinctively Trumpy flavour too. Ahead of the game, a conspiracy theory has been going around Maga circles that pop queen Taylor Swift’s relationship with Chiefs star-player Travis Kelce is fake, that the game has been rigged in the Chiefs’ favour, and that Swift and Kelce are assets in a plot to keep Joe Biden as president. Trump hasn’t publicly commented on the theory, though about an hour before kick-off, he posted on social media that “I signed and was responsible for the Music Modernization Act for Taylor Swift” and that there was “no way” she could “be disloyal to the man who made her so much money” by endorsing Biden.
When Trump makes his way into the dining room, I ask: “Who are you rooting for?”
He turns towards me and leans right in. “Uhh,” he stares at me. “I really have no preference.” The secret service are moving him along.
“What about Taylor—” “She’s nice,” he interrupts. Trump doesn’t react when either side scores. He does point at the screen once when the picture cuts to Swift and says something to Stephen Moore, a rightwing commentator who served as senior economic adviser to his 2016 campaign and who he talks to a lot. He sometimes says something to Michael Boulos, who is married to his youngest daughter Tiffany, though not much to Tiffany herself. He also says quite a bit to his glamorous, 34-year-old lawyer Lindsey Halligan — who has been paid hundreds of thousands of dollars in donor money from Trump’s “Save America” political action committee since he hired her in 2022 — who is sitting next to him. Sometimes, he addresses the attractive woman to her right, Margo Martin, his deputy director of communications. Melania is not at the party.
Not everyone here is a Trump fan. “He’s good for this country, but he’s a whore,” one guest tells me. “He screws everybody.” Another is a Democrat, who is complaining about the way everyone here “genuflects” to Trump. He is a member of Mar-a-Lago, which gives him access to the golf club too, and tells me he knows many members who claim to be Democrats. He adds that many people in Palm Beach pretend to be liberals but secretly love Trump. “When Trump became president, my wife wanted to leave,” he tells me. “But I said, ‘No, I don’t want to. I like this club.’” (He didn’t want to waste the $100,000 he spent getting into it either.)
Several tables over from Trump, his former lawyer Rudy Giuliani — who filed for bankruptcy in December after being fined $148mn for falsely accusing two poll workers of election fraud in the 2020 election, and whose filings suggest he owes $647 to the golf club we are sitting in — is tucking into what appears to be a Magnum ice cream. He is dressed in an immense chequered brown blazer with a bright orange pocket square, a matching orange tie and a blue shirt. At his table, I spot the heir to a European McDonald’s franchise fortune I met two nights earlier at Le Bar, a late-night Palm Beach spot. I use this as an excuse to approach the table and introduce myself to the man formerly known as America’s Mayor.
“How are you feeling about Trump’s campaign?” I ask.
“Oh, I’m feeling very good,” Giuliani replies. “Too good.” “Too good?”
“I’m used to things being tight,” Giuliani explains. “I’m used to a race!” His son Andrew, who ran unsuccessfully for New York governor in 2021, is sitting next to him.
In the final seconds of the first overtime period, just after 10.45pm in Palm Beach, the Chiefs’ quarterback throws the winning touchdown pass and the game is over. “Great for Al, bad for America,” says a woman near me, swigging back the dregs of her beer. Al, who is sitting across the table, has put money on the Chiefs and is looking smug. I follow the genuflecting crowds out, passing Giuliani, who is contentedly eating another ice cream.
The last time I was in Palm Beach, in November 2022, things were looking quite different. Trump had not yet become the first president to be charged with a felony. Not even one count, let alone 91. He hadn’t yet been found guilty of civil fraud or liable for sexual abuse. He was not facing hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of legal fines. But, by the somewhat obscure logic of US politics, he was nevertheless looking considerably politically weaker than he currently seems. The “Red Wave” that Republicans hoped would sweep across America in the midterm elections had not materialised and a host of Trump-endorsed candidates lost to Democrats. On social media, there was chatter of Trump being so cross that he was throwing ketchup at the walls in Mar-aLago.
Florida governor Ron DeSantis, his biggest rival, had raised more than $200mn from donors, and was being hailed as “DeFuture” by Rupert Murdoch’s New York Post, which was also mocking the former president as “Trumpty Dumpty”. When Trump announced a week after the midterms that he would be running for president, the newspaper trolled him again with the headline “Florida man makes announcement”. The billionaire Thomas Peterffy, who had thrown DeSantis a fundraiser just a few hundred yards from Trump’s house, had told me it was important for the big donors to “get together to make sure that he [Trump] is not going to be the Republican candidate”.
Peterffy soured on DeSantis after his turn to the right on issues such as abortion, and he doesn’t want to talk to me this time. DeSantis is now out of the race anyway, and has endorsed Trump, while some of his major donors — such as Robert Bigelow and Bernie Marcus — have defected to the former president’s camp. The only other even vague contender who remains, Nikki Haley, is trailing by as many as 70 points in some polls. (She will later go on to lose her home state to Trump in the primary.) And Trump has the lead in most polls against Biden too.
So I’ve come back to this lush and lavish island, which has one of the highest concentrations of wealth in America — some estimates put the number of billionaires with homes here as high as 57 in less than eight square miles — to see how its residents feel about the fact that their brash, four-times indicted neighbour is looking increasingly likely to have turned Mar-a-Lago back into the “Winter White House” by this time next year.
On my way to Trump’s golf club, I stop off at the oceanfront mansion of his neighbour, 69-year-old billionaire Jeff Greene, whose Picasso- and Picabia-plastered walls and light-up arcade games make the house feel like a cross between an art gallery and a teenage boy’s fantasy. A real estate developer who made a fortune buying credit default swaps during the 2008 financial crisis, Greene was, until recently, on good terms with Trump and a regular at his clubs. Trump turned on him, after Greene ran a critical ad during his unsuccessful bid to be the Democratic candidate in Florida’s 2018 gubernatorial race.
Greene tells me he does not dislike Trump. He does worry about the traffic if he becomes president again, a concern I hear repeatedly. “The traffic, the road blocks, oh it’s a disaster,” he says, looking out over his private beach. On this strip of Palm Beach there is only one road — the only way on or off the island (except by boat) — and the airport is across the waterway in West Palm Beach. “It’s bad enough that someone in a residential neighbourhood has an event space like that [Mar-aLago] where they have 500 cars coming in, but on top of that with the extra security when he’s president… On a Saturday night, if there’s an event on, I could wait for two hours trying to get to my own home.”
Greene is hosting his own Super Bowl party tonight in his full-sized private cinema with some of his good pals, including billionaire hedge fund manager John Paulson and heavyweight boxing champion turned cannabis entrepreneur Mike Tyson, who was Greene’s best man at his wedding. They will be having pizza and sushi prepared by his private sushi chef. “It’s a casual thing,” he makes clear. “This isn’t a fancy party.”
Paulson, who lives just a little further down “Billionaires’ Row”, as this stretch of South Ocean Boulevard is known, has long been one of Trump’s key financial backers and hosted a fundraiser at his house earlier this month. Tyson, who lives just south of here in Delray Beach, is also a friend of Trump’s — a framed picture of the two of them hangs on the wall at Trump International — and he sometimes stops off at Greene’s house on the way to Mar-a-Lago. Greene tells me he regularly entertains people from different political backgrounds. “I had a dinner here once with Marsha Laufer, who’s probably the biggest Democratic donor in Florida, and I had her sit next to Thomas Peterffy,” he says. “I joked: ‘You two could save a lot of money if you teamed up. You could zero each other out.’”
In Palm Beach, even among those who care enough about who wins to donate millions of dollars to a particular candidate, partisan divides don’t matter as much as they seem to in other parts of America. “These people see politics more like sports; money transcends politics here,” explains publisher and president of the Palm Beach Freedom Institute Paul du Quenoy, over dinner one night at La Goulue, a Manhattan institution that opened in Palm Beach in 2020. “You might easily be neighbours. You might be members of the same clubs; your wives might be friends. If you start choosing your friends based on partisan differences, it would be — let me think about how to say this… ” he takes a long pause, “it would be unsociable.”
Being sociable is no small matter in Palm Beach, particularly at this time of year. It’s the height of “the season”. Though the precise bounds are disputed, it roughly spans the months between Thanksgiving and Easter, after which islanders traditionally retreat to other homes in the Hamptons or perhaps Europe. That means there are parties and galas pretty much every night, sometimes more than one. So on Friday night, I am party-hopping between two separate events, the first in honour of a duchess and the second in honour of the man who waged “moral war against Disney” alongside DeSantis.
The party for the Duchess of Rutland is being thrown on a balcony of a fabulous apartment right in the middle of Worth Avenue, the island’s palm tree-lined luxury shopping street. It’s Jimmy Borynack’s place. He’s the chair of Findlay Galleries, with locations
in New York and Palm Beach. The duchess is in town for the inaugural “American Friends of Belvoir Castle” gala the following night, which will be raising money to maintain the Leicestershire castle the duchess lives in. I make my way through the crowd — glasses full of Veuve Clicquot, faces full of filler — to have a chat with the duchess, who explains why she chose to raise money here. “Palm Beach is the only place where people care that I’m a duchess,” she says, laughing. “They think I’m the Queen here.”
The second event is a far less frivolous affair. It has been organised by the Global Liberty Institute, a non-profit that positions itself as an alternative to the World Economic Forum, and the purpose of the evening is to give the conservative activist and culture warrior Christopher Rufo its “2024 Liberty Award”. The host and organiser of the evening is Scott Atlas, Trump’s former Covid-19 adviser, who was a lockdown sceptic. “It’s just so nice to walk into a room and to know: these people think like I do,” one woman tells me.
I meet Andy Guttman, a Republican who is running for Congress in Florida’s 22nd district, an area that encompasses Palm Beach. “Everyone says the same thing about Palm Beach — that it’s like billionaire high school,” he says. “It’s all these masters of the universe who have nothing to do, who are bored out of their minds… I raise money from these people, and you meet with one guy who’s worth a billion dollars and he goes: ‘Listen, I don’t have real money, you have to talk to this guy, he’s worth six billion.’ It’s a crazy place.”
Many such islanders have been pouring money into Nikki Haley’s campaign, which even before her humiliating performance in South Carolina on February 24 seemed doomed. Haley’s Palm Beach billionaire donors include Citadel’s Ken Griffin, Home Depot co-founder Ken Langone, KKR cofounder Henry Kravis and former Goldman Sachs banker and private equity investor Chris Flowers, who hosted a fundraiser for Haley at his house the week before I got here. Among the donors who attended was the sprightly 84-year-old John Sculley, CEO of Apple between 1983 and 1993, and president of PepsiCo before that, who is now a tech investor. Over coffee with his wife Diane and their Shih Tzuh, Cinnamon, he tells me there were between 75 and 100 donors there, about double the number who had attended the last fundraiser on the island at the end of last year. “The money just keeps flowing in and there’s no indication it’s going to slow down,” he says. “Why?” I ask? Does he think she can win the primary? “No. But strange things happen in politics. I’m old enough to have seen a lot of them.”
Another significant Haley donor is Paul Levy, founder of the private equity firm JLL Partners, who lives just across the street from Flowers. (When I ask if he is a billionaire, he says “It varies”.) “We need a steady hand — against Hamas, Iran, antisemitism,” he tells me. “There are plenty of people who would like to vote for Trump if he were narrowly defined as some of his more sensible issues — a strong America, lower taxes, less regulation, the border. [But] the problem with Trump is Trump.”
The following evening, as the sun is setting, I arrive at Mar-aLago to the sound of a Cuban salsa band playing their hit song “Yo voy a votar por Donald Trump” for several hundred guests by the pool. I am here for a gala organised by Toni Holt Kramer, head of the “Trumpettes” group of superfans, who I met last time I was here.
The flyer for the gala, “A Golden Evening for a Golden President”, promised “an elegant evening of puttin’ on the glitz” and a special guest appearance by “our 47th president to be”, as well as a “mega Maga star-studded guest list”. Entry ranged from $850 to $2,500 for a “24-karat VIP ticket”, the latter giving ticket-holders “limelight recognition” and “worldwide media coverage”. (I am the only mainstream press here.)
The idea of the gala is, simply, to celebrate Trump — it is the Trumpettes’ fourth such event — but there is a special theme tonight too, which Kramer had explained to me beforehand, swearing me to secrecy: “Don’t let the cat out of the bag, but we’re calling President Trump “0047”, because he’s going to save America.” (If Trump wins in November, he will become America’s “47”, having already been its “45”.) To go along with the theme, there is a real-life Bond villain here, who is also a supporter of Trump and frequent Conservative Political Action Conference speaker: Robert Davi, who played the drug lord Franz Sanchez in Licence to Kill.
There is also a strict dress code: “glamorous attire” in black, white or gold for the ladies and black tie or a black suit for the gentlemen. Texas senator and former presidential hopeful Ted Cruz — who once called Trump a “pathological liar” after he implied Cruz’s father was involved in JFK’s assassination, but who earlier this year endorsed him “enthusiastically” for president — seems to not have got the memo, and is in a grey blazer and some rather revealingly tight trousers.
The gift shop is rammed. A diamanté clutch bag with the words FAKE and NEWS encrusted on to either side of it is on sale for $650. I’m slightly surprised to see an “LGB” clutch above the till, until I realise it stands for “Let’s Go Brandon”, code for “Fuck Joe Biden” (if you want the uncoded version there is a “FJB” bag available too). Propped up on the counter, behind some Trump-embossed chocolate bullion bars, is a signed copy of Letters to Trump for $500, which includes letters from Kim Jong Un that address Trump as “Your Excellency”.
Outside, I meet a man in his sixties who is wearing a jacket with “BORN TO RIDE FOR 45” stitched on to the back, who tells me his name is Doctor Pickle. “They call me Doctor P — I sell pickles for PTSD,” he explains in a thick New York accent. He goes on to tell me that he was a first responder in 9/11 and went on to be diagnosed with PTSD himself. “Donald Trump was at 9/11 handing out water to help us wash out our eyes and he never talks about that.” I am somewhat surprised by this and ask Doctor P if he witnessed this himself. “The man just has a heart of gold, helping people.”
Another woman, in her seventies, with rhinestones stuck below her eyebrows and a heart shape painted in red over her lips, has flown in from Los Angeles for the occasion. She says Trump has been “anointed by God” to save America. “I would walk through fires for him,” she tells me, bursting into tears.
We are told to go inside the ballroom, where there is a sense of great excitement ahead of the very special guest’s appearance. Projected on to the screens around us are the words “007 SAVED ENGLAND. 0047 WILL SAVE AMERICA.” Davi, the Bond villain, has got up on stage and is crooning out Frank Sinatra’s “My Way” but with some of the words changed: “Trump did it hiiiiiiis wayyy.”
At the table across from me are an abundance of “honorary Trumpettes”: Trump loyalist Marjorie Taylor Greene, who was earlier selling signed copies of her memoir, MTG; Kari Lake, the election-denying former TV news anchor and now senate hopeful; Kimberly Guilfoyle, fiancée of Donald Trump Jr and a former Fox News host, who was once married to Democratic California governor Gavin Newsom; Tiffany Trump and husband Michael.
Trump had been expected at 8pm but at 8.45pm Kramer comes on to tell us that, “The president is running a little late, but, as they say, all good things are worth the wait. Before you know it our 0047 will be arriving.” To fill in the time, she summons Greene to the stage. “You need to listen carefully!” shouts Greene. “Right now in America the government is weaponised, not just against President Trump but against each and every one of you.” She reaches a crescendo. “We are in dangerous times ladies and gentlemen, and we have to fight like never before. Our elections are rigged! Our elections are stolen!” The crowd claps and yells approvingly.
At 10pm, by which time many people have started to grumble, the Trump anthem “YMCA” starts to play and all is forgiven. Trump appears at the entrance to the ballroom, with Vivek Ramaswamy by his side. Ramaswamy, the former presidential candidate who has now dropped out and endorsed Trump, is grinning widely and doing the “YMCA” dance though he’s got the letters in the wrong order. Behind them are their wives, Melania and Apoorva. The four of them make their way through the ecstatic crowd. “Je t’aime Melania! Je t’aime Melania!” a woman screams.
Trump takes to the stage and freestyles. He explains that he is late because he was on the plane back from South Carolina, where he was at a rally earlier in the day. (I later hear from a Mar-a-Lago member that he had been having dinner with Cruz and Ramaswamy in a separate area of the club before he appeared in the ballroom.)
“So we have a problem and we’re going to solve the problem, but we have to make sure that in November bad things don’t happen like happened last time,” Trump tells the crowd, without making explicit what these “bad things” are.
“Hell yeah!” a man shouts near me.
“And, I will say this: we’re far more popular in the polls, and I think just popular, period, right Kimberlay?” Trump has spotted Guilfoyle in the crowd. “I always call her Kimberlay — I love that name, so elegant. Kimberly is a fantastic person doing a great job and we appreciate it, thank you Kimberly.” Guilfoyle blows him a kiss.
Trump gives shout-outs to more than a dozen people in the room, though none to Greene, who once said she was on Trump’s list of potential vice-presidential candidates, I notice. At the end, he brings Ramaswamy on stage, who is very much giving off the vibe of VP auditionee and gives a fawning address about the importance of voting for Trump. On his way out, he chats with Cruz and Davi, gives a kiss to Tiffany, and walks straight past Greene.
One woman is trying to give Trump a giant gingerbread man wearing a Maga cap and badges made of icing reading “0047”, but she never manages to deliver it to him. “I just wanted him to see it,” she says sadly. The party is over and the crowd begins to make its way out, many people wearing the #47 caps that had been attached to all the chairs in the ballroom, and many showing signs of having had access to an open bar.
I have seen a lot of new Palm Beach while I’ve been here and, on my final night, I decide I would like to see a bit of the old Palm Beach. I head to the annual Venetian Masquerade Ball, thrown by Ballet Palm Beach, at the famous Breakers Hotel, originally built at the end of the 19th century by Henry Flagler, the tycoon responsible for turning Palm Beach into a winter playground for the rich by extending the Florida East Coast Railway into the area and building several luxury hotels. Here, I imagine, I might find some of the people who turn up their noses at the noisy neighbour down the road in Mar-a-Lago.
Next, I meet a woman with long blonde hair extensions in an elaborate headpiece and a striking patterned strapless dress. She had another dress for tonight, but she got stuck in it and her husband had spent an hour cutting her out of it. “So this is my backup dress,” she says. “I got this at an auction for newborns at Mara-Lago a few weeks ago.” She’s another Trumpette, it turns out.
In Palm Beach, it seems, the Gilded Age never really ended. Lawsuits might come and go, but these islanders — the most famous one included — are doing just fine, thanks. Do these Americans really care whether it’s Trump or Biden in the White House? Yes, insofar as it gives them something to talk about at the country club — and because it might affect how long it takes for them to get to dinner. But they will keep on going to their galas and their charity auctions and their favourite golf clubs, no matter what, and life will be good.
I bump into a man of about 60 who I had met at Trump’s Super Bowl party. This is a very small island. I ask what he does in life. “Go to parties,” he says.
I laugh. “Really? That’s what you do?”
“Well no, I’m in the real estate business.”
At the end of the night, after the talented young dancers of the Ballet Palm Beach have performed and we have been served dinner, some of the guests take to the dance floor. The relentlessness of the season is taking its toll on me, so I decide to call it a night. As I leave, I notice that one guest is still on the dance floor, driving down its average age considerably and jumping around rather more energetically than the others. It’s a little dog named Botox.