It’s late afternoon, and the palms of Fort Lauderdale are swaying as Roger Stone—dirty trickster, convicted felon—glides across the boulevard in short sleeves and a linen jacket, ready for his first cocktail of the day. We’re approaching the Elbo Room, a decrepit party bar on the spring-break beach strip that’s packed with revelers and blaring Daft Punk’s “Get Lucky.” “If you’re 18 and trying to get laid, this is the place to go,” observes Stone, who is shadowed by a neatly dressed young man who calls himself Eddie and whom Stone describes as his aide-de-camp.
This isn’t Stone’s usual watering hole, but it seemed like an appropriate stop: It’s the site of an anti-mask, pro-Trump rally last April called the Million Maskless March; the tabletops are decorated with sun-bleached photographs of seminude spring breakers in rubber Trump masks. As Stone steps to the corner, the bar crowd immediately recognizes the snow-white hair and comic book villain sunglasses, perhaps from cable news, where Stone was last seen mobbed by TV cameras following his conviction for perjury, obstruction of justice, and threatening a witness in the Robert Mueller investigation.
A thin, lantern-jawed young man covered with tattoos emerges from the bar, eager for a picture. “I have a following of a bunch of Republicans who are going to die!” he exclaims, posing next to Stone with his phone. He just moved to Florida from Boston, he says, because of “the weather and Governor DeSantis.”
Others come out, wide-eyed. A Black woman says her mother is a fan, and she wants a photo for proof of celebrity contact. Stone shoots me a victorious look—a Black woman who likes a Republican! “Say hello to your mother,” he smiles, greeting more fans. “How you doing? How are you?”
A few blocks from this bar, Stone informs me, is the home of former Trump campaign guru Brad Parscale, last seen drunk and shirtless and getting tackled by police officers after his wife reported him for acting erratically. Stone claims Parscale, currently advising Caitlyn Jenner on a run for governor in California, is a regular at the Elbo Room. “He likes to tell women that he’s a professional basketball player,” says Stone. (“Total bullshit,” Parscale later tells me.)
Just then, a drunk guy staggers over, gets in Stone’s face, and calls him an “old man,” infuriating Stone and sparking a brief confrontation that for a moment seems like it’s going to spin out of control. Stone’s lower teeth are now jutting out like a barracuda’s. “I’ve been boxing for 30 years,” he growls. “I hit the heavy bag every weekend for two hours. I could have killed him with one shot.”
The cocktail will have to wait. We retreat to the convertible Camaro I rented for the occasion, and Eddie squeezes into the back seat. “The people who liked me outnumbered those who didn’t,” Stone says. “Which is the way it usually is.”
Behold Florida, the state that reshaped the conservative vision of America in the age of Trump. Over four tumultuous years, the former president turned Florida into the de facto homeland of the GOP, site of the “Southern White House,” and haloed himself in Floridian allies and courtesans: Florida congressman Matt Gaetz; Palm Beach-based Laura Ingraham, Lou Dobbs, and Ann Coulter; Jupiter-based Mark Levin; Boca Grande-based Tucker Carlson; Palm City-based Dan Bongino; as well as Sean Hannity, who has a condo in Palm Beach, and newly minted Floridian émigré of the right, Ben Shapiro. They come for the weather, to avoid income taxes, and sometimes for Florida’s Homestead Act, which shields a house from creditors in the event of bankruptcy. It’s also a safe space from liberals. “If you’re Sean Hannity, you can’t walk down the street in Manhattan, you get punched in the face,” says Tucker Carlson, who started taping his Fox News show part-time from Florida after protesters came to his house in Washington, D.C., in 2018.
But long before Trump, Florida had transformed the modern right, starting with the wrenching battle royale over hanging chads in the 2000 election, the media spectacle that broke the spirit of the previous political age. This was the dawn of Fox News, the Drudge Report, Rush Limbaugh, Bill O’Reilly, and Ann Coulter, a loud and belligerent new breed of media pugilists that Beltway observers—old media—used to call “the Freak Show” until the freaks multiplied and the term lost all meaning. Roger Stone was in the vanguard, organizing a group of GOP lawyers and party functionaries, dressed in suits, to storm a voting center in Miami-Dade County and disrupt the 2000 recount, claiming fraud, in what became known as the Brooks Brothers Riot. That stunt established a new threshold for political performance art by turning a dull civic event like vote counting into just another spectacle for cable news.
Today, you can buy a baseball cap that declares “DeSantis 2024: Make America Florida.” Following the Trumpian script, Governor Ron DeSantis, who has made successful political theater of bucking mask mandates and shaming the media, declares that Americans who “think like us” are coming in droves to the Sunshine State and becoming Republicans. And maybe it’s true, though tragedies like the collapse of the Surfside condo in Miami can challenge DeSantis’s upbeat visions and expose the rot within.
Florida has always been the “sunny place for shady people,” to quote Roger Stone quoting Somerset Maugham, the traditional haven of mobsters, drug kingpins, Ponzi schemers, and Joad-like last chancers on the road to salvation or meth addiction. Pablo Escobar had a home here, and Fox News chief Roger Ailes escaped here after News Corp. fired him for rampant sexual harassment. Stone’s first condo in Key Biscayne was purchased with help from Richard Nixon, who dubbed his own retreat the “Florida White House” years before Mar-a-Lago was a twinkle in Trump’s eye.
This is the state that gave us the Florida Man meme and the rogue weekly National Enquirer, precursor to the paranoid and factually challenged style of Fox News and Newsmax, and a crucial ally in Trump’s political ascent. A tabloid state for tabloid people. And now the place is lousy with comers. As Laura Loomer, a friend of Stone’s and radical right-wing activist, tells me, “Every grifter and their mom now wants to move to Florida and establish themselves as the new conservative media network or new conservative publication.”
It’s Wednesday morning in Palm Beach, and the sprinklers hidden in the Augustine lawns are wetting the sidewalks along the hedgerows. Laurence Leamer, author of Mar-a-Lago: Inside the Gates of Power at Donald Trump’s Presidential Palace, is sitting in his condo across from the ocean, still in his tennis whites.
“I’ve lived here 27 years,” he says. “This is the most incredible year I’ve ever seen. It’s a whole generation coming here with money.”
During the pandemic, waves of 1 percenters from Manhattan escaped to Florida and snapped up havens in Miami and Palm Beach. Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump prepped a luxury preserve on the private Indian Creek Island (following in the footsteps of Tom Brady and Gisele Bündchen), and Sean Hannity bought a condo around the corner from Trump for $5 million. It was an old story, rich New Yorkers escaping to the sunny “Sixth Borough.” Back when Trump was still a Page Six B-lister and the Manhattan elite laughed behind his back, he sought a kingdom of his own and found it in the gilded history of Mar-a-Lago, the estate built by cereal heiress Marjorie Merriweather Post in 1927. He also imagined himself a version of the real estate baron Henry Flagler, who built a railroad through the Florida swamps in the 19th century and turned Palm Beach “into the most desirable resort in America,” recounts Leamer, “building the biggest hotel in the world on this land and filling it up with these people who come down here. And marrying his mistress. That’s the classic Palm Beach story.”
For four years, the pecking order in Palm Beach was defined not just by yearly fees to exclusive clubs but by loyalty to Trump—or at least public silence on the matter. There was the cautionary tale of Lois Pope, a prominent philanthropist and member of Mar-a-Lago who wrote an op-ed in Time magazine in 2017 expressing disgust with Trump after he suggested the white supremacists in Charlottesville were “very fine people.” Pope, now 88, relinquished her Mar-a-Lago membership and was iced out by friends.
The cancellation of Pope—heir to the National Enquirer fortune—was an ironic twist given that the source of her wealth is exactly where the story of the Floridization of the right-wing media begins. The history of the tabloid, based in Florida for 42 years, tracks with the rise of populist spectacle and conspiracy theory in right-wing politics, crescendoing with Donald Trump.
One afternoon, I drove over to North Palm Beach to see Larry Haley, a craggy 34-year veteran of the Enquirer who in 1987 published the infamous photo of Senator Gary Hart and model Donna Rice aboard the Monkey Business yacht off Miami that helped torpedo Hart’s presidential ambitions. Three years later, Haley was at Trump Tower meeting the Donald, a new fixture in the paper’s pages. Trump offered his cooperation in turning his bitter divorce from Ivana and affair with Marla Maples into a tabloid story line. “Most of [the meeting] was him joking around and saying absurd shit about Marla, that her mother’s tits were better than Marla’s,” Haley recalls. “We published stories on Trump’s affair and divorce, which lasted for many, many issues. They’d fight, they broke up—a constant saga that went on for a long time.”
Trump and the Enquirer were fated for each other. The tabloid’s founder, Generoso Pope Jr., was a childhood friend of Roy Cohn, the Joe McCarthy aide and Nixon lawyer who mentored a young Trump (and Roger Stone) in the art of political warfare and media manipulation. Pope called Cohn the smartest man he ever met, and Cohn credited Pope’s father, Generoso Pope Sr., a politically connected concrete magnate in New York, with helping get him his start in politics. Pope Jr. bought the original New York Enquirer in the 1950s with money borrowed from a family friend, the mobster Frank Costello, and in 1971 moved to Lantana, Florida, to remake it into the supermarket bible of UFOs and dubious gossip about Liz Taylor. Like Trump, Pope Jr. grew up in privilege but thumbed his nose at the Manhattan elite, preferring instead to titillate the lumpenproletariat with a garish mélange of scandal, nostalgia, miracle diets, and right-wing patriotism. At its peak in the 1980s, the Enquirer reached 4.7 million readers. When Pope died in 1988, Haley went to his house in Manalapan, Florida, and viewed the spartan bedroom: a single bed, a big-screen TV, and shelves groaning with VHS tapes of Hogan’s Heroes and Gilligan’s Island. “This is where his head was at, which is pretty much where our readers’ heads were at,” he says.
That same year, Stone, in an interview on C-SPAN, argued that Trump, whom Stone met in 1979 through Cohn, would be “a credible candidate” for president of the United States. “What you don’t understand,” Stone recalls saying, “is the political world and the pop culture worlds have fused. It’s all entertainment.”
In the 1990s, Haley was a guest at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago parties, and Trump became a regular Enquirer source, tipping off the paper when Michael Jackson was coming to the property for a rendezvous with Lisa Marie Presley, or inviting Haley to his wedding to Maples so the Enquirer could cover it. “We got an exclusive first picture of the baby,” says Haley. (It was Tiffany Trump.)
Trump, meanwhile, was learning from the Enquirer how to communicate with a mass audience. “We taught Donald Trump how to talk in buzzwords,” Haley explains. “He was a good student, he paid attention. I was amazed how much attention he paid, because I didn’t have a strong sense of that at the time, except that he seemed amused by it. But he was looking for a way to use buzzwords to get the attention of our readers.”
The Enquirer’s interest in politics was mainly of the salacious variety—the Hart affair, or the revelation in 1996 that Stone and his wife were swingers, which got Stone fired from Bob Dole’s presidential campaign and thrust him into the world of behind-the-scenes politicking. Then came the big kahuna: Bill Clinton’s affair with White House intern Monica Lewinsky, the virtual Genesis story of the modern right. The Enquirer went full-court press, splashing Lewinsky on the cover (“Monica’s Story: ‘I Just Wanted Bill to Love Me’ ”) and sloganizing a new philosophy: “These days, celebrities are politicians, and politicians are celebrities.”
The Clinton affair set the table for the mega-spectacle of the 2000 presidential election, when for five solid weeks, Florida and its hanging chads became the white-hot center of the American political universe. By the time the Supreme Court ruled in favor of George W. Bush over Al Gore, NBC’s Tim Russert had popularized the concept of red and blue states, Fox News had turned conservative distrust of the media into a game-changing brand of hyperpartisanship, and Florida was a byword for quadrennial political cliffhangers.
Around this time, David Pecker, a pal of Trump’s from Manhattan, became the CEO of Enquirer parent company American Media and moved the tabloid to Boca Raton. Pecker began holding board meetings at Mar-a-Lago and supported Trump’s first attempt to run for president in 2000 on the Reform Party ticket. By 2010, the tabloid started claiming Barack Obama wasn’t an American citizen (“Barack Obama Kenyan Birth Certificate—Exposed!”) right as Trump was road testing the racist conspiracy as a political attack. Six years later, the Enquirer published an endorsement of Trump for president, a first for the tabloid.
Behind closed doors, the relationship was hand in glove in ways no one yet knew: Pecker’s Enquirer was buying exclusive stories from Trump’s alleged mistresses and burying them in advance of the 2016 election (the infamous “catch and kill” strategy).
The Enquirer pulled up stakes in Florida in 2014, but its tabloid DNA—the conspiracy theories and bogus and serialized claims about celebrities, embedded in a nostalgic, commercialized jingoism—had now migrated wholesale to the conservative media. Instead of obsessing over the travails of Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie, the tabloid right obsessed over Barack Obama as a secret Muslim or Joe Biden as a socialist puppet for a cabal of radical feminists.
Nowhere was this tabloid conversion more evident than in Newsmax, the right-wing media company founded by Chris Ruddy, who had made his name questioning the suicide of White House counsel Vince Foster, feeding the conspiracy theory that the Clintons were somehow involved. Fresh off a book on the subject, Ruddy moved to West Palm Beach from New York in 1998 and started Newsmax with backing from right-wing financier Richard Mellon Scaife, hoping to build a conservative media empire and take the company public.
Ruddy’s media menu included a healthy dose of right-wing conspiracy, including Trump’s favorite—Obama’s birth certificate. “Ruddy loves conspiracy theories,” says a former Newsmax employee. “They’re great for hysteria in the media. He also loves psychics and predictions of stuff.”
Ruddy mined the National Enquirer for hires, recruiting veteran editor Steve Coz to run Newsmax editorial. Meanwhile, he knocked around Mar-a-Lago, trying to meet powerful people, and launched Newsmax TV. By 2016, Trump was running for the GOP nomination, but Ruddy initially backed Ted Cruz. “I remember in 2016 being at Trump International Golf Club for a Sunday brunch and sitting at this table with Chris,” says Leamer, a former social friend. “And Trump comes over and Chris didn’t even want to talk to him because Trump wanted Chris to turn Newsmax pro-Trump. And Ruddy felt that Trump was a psychopath.” (Ruddy declined to comment on the record.)
Ruddy became a full-time Trump functionary, cashing in on the demand for pro-Trump news, building up his TV network, dining with Trump at Mar-a-Lago, and watching his revenue rise. “He made his pact with the devil,” as Leamer put it. “He knew what Trump was.”
Newsmax went all in as Trump sought re-election (Ruddy made another former National Enquirer editor, David Perel, the editorial director) and Newsmax TV gave credence to every lie told by Trump up to and including speculation that Biden was “cognitively impaired” and that the election was stolen through chicanery involving Dominion Voting Systems. While the January 6 Capitol riots were under way, Newsmax initially reported that it was only “6 to 10 people” breaching the building and speculated that they were antifa, later providing uncritical airtime to a Trump rioter who declared “this is our house, and we have the right to be here.”
In recent years, Ruddy has expressed regret for overzealous attacks on Bill Clinton in the 1990s, personally reconciling with the former president and donating $1 million to his foundation. One might presume his regret extended to spreading conspiracy theories like the Vince Foster canard, but business is business, and Ruddy merely moved on to other fake stories, giving voluminous airtime and ink, even after the insurrection, to “stolen election” conspiracy mongers Mike Lindell, the MyPillow founder, and former Trump lawyer Rudolph Giuliani.
The week that I’m in Florida, the Enquirer cover on newsstands is virtually indistinguishable from Newsmax, promising “THE TRUTH ABOUT JOE BIDEN’S HEALTH!”
“Okay, slow down,” instructs Ann Coulter. “We’re coming to it now—on the left is going to be Bernie Madoff’s old house.”
We’re in the Camaro for what Coulter is calling my “right-wing tour” of Palm Beach, pointing out the homes of various conservative heroes, liberal enemies, and notorious scoundrels. At 59, she’s bone-thin in a sporty white dress and tennis visor. “I almost wore Lilly Pulitzer for you,” she says, referring to the preppy dressmaker. “Honestly, I’m from New Canaan, I just always thought that’s what people wore.”
We begin in front of Au Bar, where William Kennedy Smith met the woman he was later acquitted of raping in the controversial and much-televised trial in 1991, a classic tale of Kennedy family privilege that still tickles Coulter. The proprietors “came in, waved the incense, had an exorcism, and now it’s a great restaurant,” she says.
Coulter was triggering libs before Twitter was even invented. As we cruise by the late Roger Ailes’s house, she sprays her thighs with sunscreen and tells the story of how she got her start as a conservative commentator on the fledgling MSNBC in 1996. A supporter of “Pitchfork” Pat Buchanan, the stridently xenophobic arch nationalist who was running for president that year, her on-air mantra was “Go, Pat, go!” It was the early days of the internet, and she recalls reading a new site called the Drudge Report, “which was just that tiny little blog out of Hollywood,” she says. “And out of the blue Drudge sends me an email saying nothing but ‘Go, Pat, go!’ ”
Coulter and Drudge met in person while the two were in Washington to support the long shot candidate. “We went to Pat Buchanan’s first presidential launch party at his house,” she recalls. “And we were sort of inseparable, but it wasn’t just ideological.”
When Drudge broke the story of Clinton’s White House affair on his primitive website in 1998, he breathed life into a nascent cable-and internet-driven conservative media but also ruptured the wall between the “legitimate” press and the tabloids, regularly linking to the Enquirer and, later, Alex Jones’s InfoWars. Newly rich and famous, Drudge moved to Miami with his pet cat, bought a beachfront condo on Collins Avenue, and began operating the website from a yellow Mustang convertible. At Drudge’s urging, Coulter moved to Miami and took up residence in the same building; they became attached at the hip. “We created something nobody had done before and nobody thought it would work,” Coulter says.
The two were giddy with newfound success. Coulter gave Drudge his first taste of alcohol on a flight from California. On another trip, sitting in first class, Drudge looked at Coulter’s stack of the New York Times and said, “You’re not going to learn anything from that.” She looked over: Drudge was reading the National Enquirer. (According to a former Enquirer reporter, Drudge sometimes socialized and traded gossip with the staff at a South Palm Beach motel called the Hawaiian.)
We pass a cobbled driveway dotted with American flags and sun-faded pictures memorializing the address’s late owner, Rush Limbaugh. Coulter points to the service entrance, where she and Drudge would enter Limbaugh’s 34,000-square-foot estate to avoid being seen and have regular dinner parties, drinking $800 bottles of wine as their host puffed on Cuban cigars. This went on for years. In 2005, Coulter bought a Palm Beach property and took up the clubby lifestyle. “All the parties here take place in private,” she says.
From a distance we see the Breakers hotel, where Roy Cohn spent some of his last days watching the ocean while dying of the AIDS virus he denied having. “I loved Roy Cohn,” she says of the political fixer whose first job for Trump, in 1973, was defending his practice of barring Black people from his rental properties. “I wish I could have met him.”
Coulter was a regular reader of the New York Post and thought Trump was a doofus. But a funny thing happened. In December 2014, Drudge came to her house to ring in the New Year, just the two of them, and came up with the title of Coulter’s latest book, ¡Adios, America!: The Left’s Plan to Turn Our Country Into a Third World Hellhole, her diatribe against illegal immigration. To stir up outrage, Coulter promoted the book in an interview with prominent Mexican American anchor Jorge Ramos on Fusion, the Hispanic media channel, and compared Mexican immigrants to ISIS terrorists. “If you don’t want to be killed by a Mexican, there’s nothing I can tell you,” she said. Drudge splashed the headline on his site, and Trump’s campaign requested a copy of the book the same day. Then Trump appeared to use it as the basis of his first speech as a candidate at Trump Tower. “I mean, I pushed the whole Mexican rapist thing, but I put it a lot better than Trump did,” Coulter says.
After Trump won the election, Coulter began a regular correspondence with his adviser, Corey Lewandowski, and occasionally saw her private opinions spring up in Trump’s public commentary. Coulter felt she was having some influence. But the worm turned in 2019. “I was flying back down to Florida that day from New York,” recounts Coulter. “I see on the Drudge Report: ‘No Wall Funding.’ And I’m just rip shit.”
Feeling betrayed, she whipped off a tweet calling Trump a “disloyal actual retard.” Drudge followed soon after, pivoting his site to become critical of Trump, who noticed the shift and claimed that Drudge had experienced a “nervous breakdown” and “sold out.”
Drudge has become a Howard Hughes-like figure in recent years, rarely seen in public. When a Florida reporter named Bob Norman tried knocking on his door last year, Drudge freaked out and threatened to call the police. Norman said he just wanted to know Drudge’s views on Trump, to which Drudge replied, “You and everybody else.”
Coulter, who remains in touch with Drudge, suggests that he, like herself, was simply angry over Trump’s broken promises on the wall funding. With Drudge silent (he did not respond to multiple interview requests for this story), rumors have flowered as the site continues to batter Trump over his presidency and the January 6 storming of the Capitol. One theory has it that Jared Kushner personally offended Drudge; another suggests Drudge sold the website to some investors in advance of the 2020 election and his silence was a way to keep up the ruse.
Ann Coulter has lost traction in the Trumpified media, her failure to pledge total fealty making her persona non grata. The style she helped create had long since run amok and morphed into something else, an entire industry of partisan carnival barkers on cable and talk radio who cashed in on what Coulter and her pals pioneered. Before he died of cancer earlier this year, Limbaugh, a Trump supporter through and through, privately expressed contempt for Sean Hannity and Mark Levin, calling them “imitators” who copied his act but with half the wit and even less of the intellect (his opinion no doubt complicated by the fact that Limbaugh’s brother David is Hannity’s agent). In the Trump era, whatever thin line had existed between the political parties and their media mouthpieces was long ago erased.
Coulter directs my gaze above the hedgerows. “That hideous, way-too-big American flag that looks like a car dealership is Mar-a-Lago,” she says. I ask her if she bears any responsibility for helping invent the hyperpartisan atmosphere that has, over 20 years, drowned America in a toxic stew of perpetual outrage and tabloid paranoia. She considers this a moment.
“No,” she says. “Because I made it fun. I don’t think I was mean-spirited. I mean, give me the quote and I’ll defend it. You can make funny jokes about politicians. They’re politicians. People who are out there in the public, they make fun of me, I make fun of them. They were funny, they were lighthearted, but there was always a point behind it.”
Mexican immigrants, perhaps, found it less funny.
We circle back to Au Bar. Adios, America?
“Who knows,” Coulter says, “Maybe we could still save the country.”
But not Florida. A week later, Coulter sends me a text: “Drudge and I are both leaving Florida and we’re not telling anyone where we’re going this time.”
Roger Stone refuses to be vaccinated for the coronavirus, paranoid about unknown side effects and claiming “the swine flu epidemic we had under Obama” caused more deaths than COVID-19.
Me: “That is not true.”
Stone: “We’re still under those numbers, in terms of deaths.”
Me: “That is not true.”
Stone: “It is true.”
Me: “That is false.”
Stone: “It’s not false.”
It’s demonstrably false, but Stone maintains a white-knuckle grip on his own version of reality. He’s been banned from most social media (he was kicked off Instagram for operating a network of Proud Boy ghost accounts) and is currently writing a book about the Russia imbroglio, which nearly landed him in prison for three years until Trump pardoned him, weeks before leaving office. He promises a frontal attack on New York Times reporter Michael S. Schmidt, who won a Pulitzer Prize for his coverage of the Russia investigation, which explored whether Stone was the link between the Trump campaign and WikiLeaks. “I take Schmidt’s articles, sentence by sentence, and I rip them to shreds with facts,” growls Stone. “I destroy this guy. He’s a cocksucker. He should turn his Pulitzer back in because he’s a liar.” (This isn’t to say Stone dislikes all Times reporters: “Maggie Haberman is one of my oldest and best friends,” he says.)
(Schmidt declined to comment.)
Stone still faces a civil suit from the IRS, which says he owes more than $1 million in back taxes. “When you run out of money, you have this choice,” he says. “Should I pay my lawyer to stay out of prison or should I send money to the IRS?”
One could be forgiven for thinking Stone enjoys all this controversy since he’s done nothing but attract it for decades. “Maybe,” Stone ventures, “controversy is attracted to me.”
We arrive at Raindancer, a steak house in West Palm Beach, where we meet Laura Loomer, an Islamophobic right-wing provocateur notorious for handcuffing herself to Twitter headquarters in New York to protest her removal from the platform after she repeatedly attacked Congresswoman Ilhan Omar of Minnesota. At 28, Loomer is the love child of the years-long Floridization of the right wing. In boarding school, in Miami, she wore a “Fuck Obama” shirt around campus (“Barack Hussein Obama,” she says, “was the first Muslim president”) and became an acolyte of James O’Keefe, the conservative activist under whose tutelage she performed media stunts like putting on a burka and attempting to register to vote as Hillary Clinton aide Huma Abedin. “We have a full-blown jihadist infiltration within our government,” Loomer says. “And if you talk about it, you’re called a bigot, you’re called a racist, you’re called an Islamophobe.”
We’re seated in a private room and our heavyset waiter, an immigrant from the former Yugoslavia named Mario, introduces himself as a die-hard Republican. Mario is crestfallen that the 2020 election was “stolen” from Trump.
Mario: “Unbelievable what they did to us.”
Loomer: “I know.”
Mario: “Bunch of criminals.”
Stone: “Not over yet.”
Mario: “That’s right. I’m hoping. We’re all hoping.”
Stone orders a martini (“olive, no vermouth, but very, very cold”) and points to me: “He actually thinks Joe Biden won, which is hard to believe.”
Last year, Loomer ran for Congress in the district that includes Palm Beach County, endorsed by both Trump and her friend Marjorie Taylor Greene, the congresswoman from Georgia who was an early enthusiast of the QAnon movement. As expected in a blue district, Loomer lost to the Democratic candidate, but she insists the election, like Trump’s, was stolen. She’s running again in 2022.
Loomer has a strong command of the party trick that Trump taught the GOP and is now regularly employed by every conservative from Tucker Carlson to Matt Gaetz: Toss out an outrageous claim, trigger alarm and public rebuke, declare that free speech has been impinged, then make “cancel culture” the rallying cry, thereby lending the original claim the patina of a righteous truth under siege from leftist censors; rinse, repeat.
Loomer may have run that strategy a little too hard, however, getting bounced not just from Twitter but from conservative outlets like Newsmax and Fox News, which may have calculated that Loomer’s entertainment value isn’t worth a defamation suit or loss of advertisers. “If Roger Ailes was living, there would be zero tolerance for cancel culture,” she says. “There is this grifter cheapening of the conservative media landscape.”
I ask Loomer why Florida is attracting so many like-minded figures from the right, and her answer is both obvious and telling: careerism. “All roads lead to Mar-a-Lago,” she says. “Anybody who is anybody, who wants to be somebody in politics, has to formulate their political career and build up a donor base and establish themselves in Palm Beach County. This is where the political power within the right wing or the America First movement is centralized.” She casually brags of her many visits to Mar-a-Lago: “I was with President Trump three times in one week.”
Stone orders a second martini and Mario grinds pepper on the salads. It’s not easy being a dissident in a dissident party. “I view myself as a political prisoner,” Loomer says. “I’m a political prisoner living in a digital gulag and the only place I have any freedom is in Florida. Because of the people who wish to digitally exterminate me, wish to physically exterminate me. And Florida is the only state in the nation where any lawmaker would stand up for me at all” (a reference no doubt to the law signed by DeSantis meant to prevent social media companies from banning political allies like Donald Trump—a toothless state law with no actionable virtue other than publicity for DeSantis, already floated as a potential presidential contender in 2024).
Earlier that day, Stone had compared Loomer to Abbie Hoffman, the ’60s provocateur who pulled public stunts for media attention and traded in conspiracy theories, but for radical liberalism. As I listen to Loomer and Stone, it’s easy to see they view themselves as radicals for a reverse-engineered revolution. Instead of protesting the Vietnam War or fighting for civil rights, as Hoffman did, they’re fighting for the rights of “Western civilization,” their idea of a traditional white Judeo-Christian patriarchy. (In a bit of overlap, Stone is an avid pot smoker and owns a white porcelain bong in the shape of Richard Nixon’s face.)
In addition to everything else, the revolution has been hell on Loomer’s dating life. “When you get canceled, your personal life gets canceled too,” Loomer complains. “Roger is constantly trying to set me up with somebody.”
After the steaks are polished off, Mario takes Stone’s third martini order and laments: “We are losing our freedom. They’re trying to take everything away from us.”
Stone’s sidekick Eddie chimes in with the debunked conspiracy that Facebook plans to ban Christian-related posts on their platform. Loomer gives an amen to that. “They already are,” she says. “They already are.”
(They’re not.)
A striking octogenarian named Toni Holt Kramer pulls up to Trevini Ristorante in a chauffeured Rolls-Royce, toddles up the steps wearing a glossy white sash that reads “Trumpettes,” and greets the maître d’ with air kisses. Three friends from Holt Kramer’s club of pro-Trump socialites, Mar-a-Lago members all, arrive to a shaded table overlooking Palm Beach’s Sunset Avenue: Janet, Suzi, and Stephanie, plus Stephanie’s husband, a talkative multimillionaire with a brush mustache named Dr. Peter Lamelas, who made his fortune flipping a chain of medical offices in South Florida.
“I love what Maria Bartiromo always says,” says Holt Kramer over iced tea, referring to the now right-wing CNBC anchor. “Money is mobile and it will go to whoever treats it the best. And I think that people who have a lot of money realize that we are in the middle of a war right now. We are really in the middle of a war.”
Their enemy, of course, is the “total radical leftist” Joe Biden.
In the 1960s, Holt Kramer was a dancer at the Copacabana in New York and later became a celebrity interviewer in Los Angeles (Frank Sinatra, Rock Hudson) before taking up part-time residence in Palm Beach with her seventh husband. She recently published a book called Unstoppable Me: My Life in the Spotlight. When Trump ran for president, she formed the Trumpettes, who count Kimberly Guilfoyle as an honorary member. For them, the Trump presidency was one long Mar-a-Lago function, a parade of right-wing political stars who came for dinner and photographs. Gaetz, Kellyanne Conway, the whole lineup of Fox News. “We’ve had Judge Jeanine there two years in a row,” Holt Kramer says. “I see everybody there, Bret Baier, everybody comes to Mar-a-Lago. Laura Ingraham. I have photos with her. Lou Dobbs. I have all the pictures.”
The Trumpettes speak of a Trump the public doesn’t see, telling the story of Debbie Porreco, a Trumpette and Mar-a-Lago member whose husband died in 2015. Upon hearing the news, Trump broke away from dinner with New Jersey governor Chris Christie to visit her table. Like a healer, Trump gave Porreco the strength to carry on. “She bounced back on her feet and married a zillionaire,” says Holt Kramer triumphantly.
Stone told me Holt Kramer is a “nut job. She thinks Trump loves her.” But the alternative reality at Trevini differs little from the one at Raindancer. When I asked people why Florida is the preferred haven of the conservative movement today, the word I heard the most is freedom. Freedom from taxes, freedom of speech. But the liberty they seem to exercise the most is the freedom to believe any conspiracy theory that will justify Trump. Holt Kramer and her friends imbibe a steady diet of Newsmax and One America News, unconvinced that Trump lost to Biden, what with all the boat parades they saw on TV. Echoing the cover of the National Enquirer, Lamelas diagnoses Biden with dementia (“I’ve seen it a million times. They get angry very quickly. They forget things later in the afternoon”) and says he “heard” that Dr. Jill Biden is actually running the country behind the scenes. “Obama’s tried to influence her administration, but Jill was controlling [Biden] and controlling access to him,” he says. “This is what I’ve heard. Biden’s got an inner circle of people that are making the policies for him.”
On and on it goes: The January 6 insurrection was instigated by “paid professional agitators” on the left; the Black Lives Matter movement is a coordinated Marxist revolution; George Floyd was “no hero” but just a convenient pretext for looting luxury stores on Rodeo Drive. The outside world, in Florida-vision, is always closing in, seething with intrigue and phantoms under the palms. Not even in Palm Beach can they escape the stories they tell themselves. Across the bridge on the mainland are radicals who want to silence them, take their money, outfit them in Maoist pajamas. “People think, Socialism, maybe that’s like social media,” says Lamelas. “It’s a nice thing. Let’s give it a try.”
I have a flight to catch. It’s late spring, and the heat and humidity will soon rise and make life unbearable. Trump, having left for New Jersey for the summer, will return in the fall, and the doors of Mar-a-Lago will reopen and new tales will be told. An America remade in the image of Florida? It’s not so much America as an escape from America. But that’s the old story, the land of Walt Disney’s fantasies. Before I leave for the airport, we’re discussing Trump when Holt Kramer leans across the table and fixes her gaze on me. It’s as if she has a secret to confide, maybe the inside story I’ve been looking for all week. “He’s Superman,” she whispers. “He’s Superman.”
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