January 10, 2025 Donald Trump, wearing a white golf shirt and a red hat that said trump was right about everything, bounded between rooms of his Florida pleasure palace. The presidentelect was running late between meetings, after spending hours on the links. The afternoon was warm and sunny, ten days before his second inauguration, and the MaraLago Club teemed with visitors. A group of women in matching red dresses boarded a charter bus outside. A stretch Cadillac Escalade limousine idled by the front door. Foreigners wearing name tags filled the golden lobby. Congresswoman Lauren Boebert passed through carrying a shimmering short dress. Roger Stone luxuriated on a white sofa holding an unlit cigar.
"You''re the One That I Want" from the Grease soundtrack blasted over the sound system. Trump''s body man, Walt Nauta, who''d been charged alongside him with hiding and lying about classified documents, rambled through the lobby meeting fans. Trump''s personal lawyer, Boris Epshteyn, who''d been accused of demanding payoffs in exchange for recommending people to Trump for administration posts, was still around making introductions. Tech executives, political operatives, and club members wandered the halls, hoping for a handshake or an autograph--or maybe an ambassadorship, an inauguration ticket, or a favor for a friend. Trump had been musing to members that maybe he should raise the club''s initiation fee, which was already more than half a million dollars. He had fundraising dinners almost every night with business executives and finance titans lavishly praising him and trying to influence him on issues like vaccines and the corporate tax code. "Zuckerberg is in there," Trump whispered slyly, pointing to another room. The Facebook founder was mediating a lawsuit that Trump had brought to challenge his suspension from the social media platform after the January 6, 2021, riot in the U.
S. Capitol. Elon Musk, who would appear shortly, was in a different room nearby. "We''ve had everybody here," Trump said. "We''ve had Google, we''ve had Facebook, we''ve had Bill Gates, we had Tim Cook, Apple--we''ve had all of them." They weren''t coming emptyhanded. They came bearing sevenfigure checks for his inauguration. Amazon, Meta, Microsoft, OpenAI, Uber, Toyota, Ford, GM, Pfizer, Goldman Sachs.
His advisers said they did not have enough time and perks to accommodate all the new admirers. "I used to have a list," Trump said. "And I always ask them, ''Would you have been here if I lost? Would you have been here if I lost?'' It''s funny. They know the answer is no, but they don''t want to really say it. And it would be no if I were them too." He settled in a dining room with a curved glass panorama overlooking the ocean, helped himself to fried shrimp dipped in tartar sauce, and pondered how different his life would be now if he''d lost the election. Friends and politicians would have abandoned him. He would have faced multiple criminal trials.
He might have lived out his golden years behind bars. Friends told him, "You were either going to win or your life was really going to be very unpleasant." Miserable, even. He couldn''t disagree. He was feeling especially triumphant on this afternoon, having appeared earlier that morning by video link in a New York court for sentencing. He had been convicted of thirtyfour felony counts for paying hush money to a porn star before the 2016 election. The crimes carried a penalty of up to four years in prison. But the judge, whom Trump had berated for months as biased and unfair, imposed nothing.
"Discharge, unconditional discharge," Trump marveled. "Nobody ever even heard of it. ''We are unconditionally discharging this case.'' It''s over. No fine. No penalty. No this. Nothing.
It''s actually just a total win." An aide interrupted the presidentelect to remind him he had to meet three candidates for secretary of the Air Force, and he was having dinner with lawmakers from the hardline House Freedom Caucus. "You have three interviews, sir, and you have to be at your dinner in an hour," said the aide, Sergio Gor, who published Trump''s coffeetable books ( Save America and Our Journey Together ) and would soon become the director of the White House Presidential Personnel Office. Trump believed the biggest mistake of his first term was picking disloyal officials, and Gor was determined to disqualify candidates who had ever criticized Trump or anyone associated with him. "I look a little bit sloppy," Trump lamented, between bites of fried shrimp. He preferred to wear a suit and tie for such meetings. For all the hubbub around the club, it was more heavily fortified than ever before. No traffic was allowed on the oceanfront highway.
Vehicles were screened by bomb detectors in a parking lot across the road. A metal detector and TSAlike bag scanner guarded the front door. "Let me ask you," he said, taking a moment to reflect on his brush with death at a summer rally in Pennsylvania. "If that didn''t happen, that day in Butler didn''t happen, would the result have been . I think I would''ve won, but it might''ve been a little bit closer. Do you think? I don''t know. I would have preferred that it didn''t happen, obviously. But I cannot tell you whether or not it would''ve been closer.
" "I think you would''ve won no matter what, sir," Gor said. Gor pressed again about the Air Force interviews. Trump''s son, Don Jr., walked through the room. Musk soon followed. Natalie Harp, a former One America News Network anchor who took Trump''s dictation for social media posts and often carried a portable printer to show him flattering articles, sat in a corner, smiling as Trump talked. Ever since he''d left the White House four years earlier, this club had been Trump''s refuge. Here, no matter his criminal jeopardy and political isolation, the sun was always shining, the fans were always fawning, and the toasts were always MAGA.
The bathrooms were decorated with magazine covers and old pictures of Trump playing golf with Arnold Palmer or marching in a parade in Manhattan. A replica of Air Force One sat out in the lobby. His office displayed a drawing of his face on Mount Rushmore. But now the world outside the curved glass of the dining room windows was Trump''s too. The four prosecutions against him had crumbled and collapsed. He had redefined the Republican coalition and created an existential crisis for the Democratic Party. He''d promised to pardon January 6 rioters, round up and deport millions of immigrants, start trade wars with allies, use government power to punish his critics, purge law enforcement agencies to install personal loyalists, relocate homeless people to tent cities, eliminate government agencies, give his biggest donor free rein to slash federal spending, even act as a dictator, if only for a day. And America said OK.
Almost every county shifted right. He im proved with almost every demographic. He even won the popular vote. The acceptance and legitimacy Trump had craved his whole life was at last his to enjoy. A day earlier, he''d attended Jimmy Carter''s funeral, walking into Washington not as a scourge but as a conqueror. He could ignore the speech on character by the outgoing president, and the cold shoulder from the vice president he''d defeated. Instead he sat next to Barack Obama and invited him to play golf, enticing him with descriptions of Trump''s courses around the world. He was no longer an anomaly.
He was being treated like an American president. He wanted to be remembered as a great one. "Honestly, what can you say that was bad?" Trump said in the dining room. "I won. Seriously. I won against all odds. I won against the DOJ, and the whole world was against me. And I won.
" There was a view popular among some political insiders that this election had been over before it started. The overwhelming majority of Americans thought the country was on the wrong track. They were fed up with inflation, immigration, and overseas conflicts, and they blamed the sitting president (and his vice president) for their feelings of economic and global insecurity. But the true story of the 2024 campaign is not so impersonal, and the outcome was not so predetermined. According to hundreds of interviews with the people closest to the Trump, Biden, and Harris campaigns, the election hinged on accidents and individual decisions that had enormous consequences and might just as easily have gone another way. If Republicans moved on from Trump like every other defeated expresident, or coalesced around a single alternative. If Democrats got clobbered, as expected, in the 2022 midterms, and Joe Biden never ran for reelection. If any of his advisers ever told him he shouldn''t.
If he faced a real primary challenge. If Trump never got indicted, or if Republicans didn''t respond by rallying to him, or if the prosecutions were more successful. If Trump and Biden didn''t agree to an early debate, or if Biden didn''t perform so poorly. If he stayed in, or didn''t endorse Ka mala Harris right away. If she inherited a better campaign, or had more time to run one of her own. If Trump gave in to the chaotic impulses that defined his previous campaigns and went through with blowing up his own operation in the final stretch. The result, however contingent, would affect nothing less than the lives of billions of people around the world and the course of human his tory. Biden saw Trump as an existential threat to the American way of life as a democratic, free society, and he expected a second Trump ad ministration to be more extreme and ruthless than the first.
He conceptualized.