Since early within the night, the sense was that the rally-like crowd, ingesting wine from a money bar and consuming spring rolls, was ready to obtain Trump as a winner irrespective of the result. There was a sense of being ready for the worst, given what they’d seen their candidate put by. On my manner into the occasion, I bumped into Joel Tenney, a pastor I’d met ten months in the past, in a church in Iowa, the place he was a Trump “caucus captain.” After virtually a 12 months of volunteering for Trump, Tenney was right here as a particular visitor, sporting a black MAGA hat. By this level, Trump was within the lead in Georgia and North Carolina, and Tenney and his spouse have been in a extremely good temper. Nonetheless, they needed to speak about how they have been certain that they’d “skilled voter fraud” within the earlier election. “She gave us Sharpies as a result of she knew we have been Republican,” Tenney’s spouse mentioned, of a ballot employee. Tenney added, “The machines are made in Germany. And Hillary interfered with Bernie Sanders.” As issues began to look extra sure for Trump, Tenney informed me, “I can lastly sleep once more.”
The earlier evening, on my manner over to Palm Seaside, I noticed an indication that mentioned “Democrats killed democracy.” However there was little different seen proof that an election many have been describing as a referendum on democracy was about to occur. At a trivia evening held across the pool of the Colony Resort, visitors wearing patterned Dolce & Gabbana break up into groups to compete over questions corresponding to “What number of items of sweet corn are produced per 12 months?”
On Election Day, I noticed Rod Blagojevich in warmup gear getting espresso on the Hilton close by. He was a type of MAGA characters who turned up all over the place in the middle of the marketing campaign: on the check-in desk at my resort in Milwaukee for the Republican Nationwide Conference; on the latest rally in Madison Sq. Backyard, the place he walked in with Sarah Palin. Rudy Giuliani was one other such determine; that morning, in Palm Seaside, he had pulled as much as Trump’s polling station in a blue Mercedes convertible—which he’d been ordered to surrender as a part of a defamation settlement. (“Rudy, do you are concerned you’ll be homeless?” somebody requested him, as he idled exterior Trump’s precinct. “I don’t fear about something,” he mentioned.) In some methods, the looming query of the day was whether or not the Rudys and the Rods would quickly recede from public consciousness into obsolescence, and defend an ex-President in exile, or emerge as reliable figures on the heart of our politics, pardoned of all misdeeds. I questioned the identical after I noticed Kristi Noem in a polka-dotted costume consuming dinner on the Hilton earlier than going into the watch occasion.
Within the early hours of Wednesday morning, as state after state projected victory for Trump, I saved listening to that his motorcade was about to go away Mar-a-Lago and make its strategy to the conference corridor. Karoline Leavitt, the marketing campaign’s press secretary, informed one of many journalists working for Resolution Desk HQ that they need to simply name North Carolina and Georgia for Trump so everybody might get to mattress earlier. David Sacks and Marco Rubio confirmed up; Mike Johnson had been watching election returns together with his constituents in Louisiana and determined to fly to Florida. Earlier within the day Trump had been pushing theories about “huge CHEATING”; now his feed had gone quiet.
