Celebrating Donald Trump’s victory in West Palm Beach

From early in the evening, the sense was that the rally-like crowd, drinking wine from a cash bar and eating egg rolls, was prepared to receive Trump as the winner regardless of the outcome. They felt they were prepared for the worst, given what they had seen their candidate go through. On the way to the event, I ran into Joel Tenney, a pastor I’d met 10 months earlier, at a church in Iowa, where he was a Trump “caucus captain.” After nearly a year of volunteering for Trump, Tenney was here as a special guest, wearing black MAGA hat. At that point, Trump was leading in Georgia and North Carolina, and Tenney and his wife were in very good spirits. Still, they wanted to talk about how they were sure they had experienced “voter fraud” in the previous election. “She gave us Sharpies because she knew we were Republicans,” his wife said of a poll worker. Tenney added: “The machines are made in Germany. And Hillary interfered with Bernie Sanders.” As things started to look more certain for Trump, Tenney told me, “I can finally sleep again.”

The night before, on the way to Palm Beach, I saw a sign that read “Democrats have killed democracy.” But there was little other visible evidence that an election that many described as a referendum on democracy would take place. During a trivia night around the Colony Hotel’s pool, guests dressed in patterned Dolce & Gabbana split into teams to compete on questions such as “How much candy corn are produced per year?”

On Election Day, I saw Rod Blagojevich in warm-up gear getting coffee at the nearby Hilton. He was one of them MAGA characters who showed up everywhere over the course of the campaign: at the check-in desk at my hotel in Milwaukee for the Republican National Convention; at the recent rally at Madison Square Garden, where he entered with Sarah Palin. Rudy Giuliani was another such figure; that morning he had driven to Trump’s polling station in Palm Beach in a blue Mercedes convertible – which he had to surrender as part of a defamation settlement. (“Rudy, are you worried about being homeless?” someone asked him as he walked outside Trump’s police station. “I’m not worried about anything,” he said.) In some ways, the looming question of the day was : whether the Rudys and the Rods would soon fade from public consciousness into obscurity, defending an ex-president in exile, or emerge as legitimate figures at the center of our politics, forgiveness of all wrongdoing . I wondered the same thing when I saw Kristi Noem in a polka dot dress having dinner at the Hilton before heading to the watch party.

In the early hours of Wednesday morning, as state after state predicted victory for Trump, I kept hearing that his motorcade was about to leave Mar-a-Lago and head to the Assembly Hall. Karoline Leavitt, the campaign’s press secretary, told one of the reporters working at Decision Desk headquarters to just call North Carolina and Georgia for Trump so everyone could go to bed earlier. David Sacks and Marco Rubio showed up; Mike Johnson had been watching the election results with his voters in Louisiana and decided to fly to Florida. Earlier in the day, Trump had floated theories about “huge.” CHEATING”; now his feed had become silent.