The New Yorker:
Since Election Day, the Florida club has played host to a rotating cast of characters from MAGA world, all vying for positions of power.
By Antonia Hitchens
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.
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