The Worst Place on the Planet
By 
I rode up in a golf cart to the front of Mar-a-Lago. Trump was using the club’s bridal suite as his office during the transition. In the drawing room, Mike Flynn, the former national security adviser who had suggested using martial law to keep Trump in power, was posing for photographs with fans in party dresses. Alan Dershowitz, in Hoka sneakers, was telling someone about magnesium supplements. By the pool, an artist was selling portraits of Steve Bannon inscribed with the Old Norse words ‘Berjask Ok Sigra’ (‘fight to win’, apparently). People sat on gold chairs at cocktail tables eating Peking duck and sliders. Eastman stood on the red carpet comparing the Department of Justice to Stalin’s secret police. Giorgia Meloni was said to be on her way to have dinner with Trump.
Inside, as the sun set, Flynn discussed electronic voting machines with a former Maricopa County election official. ‘Can we get back to the point that we feel safe again as citizens in this country?’ she asked. ‘I’m not sure we’ll ever get back to it,’ he replied. Joel and his wife were in black tie. ‘Retribution is success,’ he said to me. ‘It’s not about going after enemies. It’s about going after people who have violated the law. That is common sense.’ He told me Trump had stopped by their table while they were eating lunch, and Joel had suggested that the president-elect appoint him United States ambassador to Armenia, where he does missionary work.
Under sixteen chandeliers in the club’s White and Gold Ballroom, guests ate popcorn as they sat through a panel on subjects including ‘the conceptual Marxist level of lawfare’. When I turned my head, I noticed that Trump had slipped into the room, and was standing silently next to a column. He seemed restored after the final dark stretch of the campaign. His face looked less puffy, his hair was a crisper shade of blond. He smiled softly, and murmured ‘Thank you very much.’ For a few more moments no one noticed he was there.
And from CPAC:
In the exhibition hall, a downed Shahed-136 Iranian drone, used against Ukraine by Russia, was on display next to a booth for VibraTec, a ‘vibration plate’ for ‘individuals with joint discomfort’. People stood on the plates for demonstrations, their bodies pulsing slightly. The Men’s Equality Network passed out fliers: ‘Men are the backbone of civilisation.’ Speeches from just about every MAGA figure in the country repeated that Trump had won a historic victory, and made slightly lacklustre enjoinders to keep fighting (and buying tickets). ‘Arizona remains corrupt and captured,’ Kari Lake told them. Bannon co-hosted an opening night party where he was greeted like a Hollywood star. ‘Pick a side,’ a staffer snapped at me, as the room parted to make space for him.
The vice president had just gone to Munich and delivered a speech breaking with the world order CPAC had been railing against. ‘Our State Department can finally be more aligned with, like, Victor Orbán, than with Nato,’ a man hoping to enter the administration told me. Bannon made a gesture that put a number of journalists on ‘Nazi salute duty’, only for another speaker to echo it the next day. Jordan Bardella, leader of the French far-right party Rassemblement National, dropped out of the conference in protest.
The other kerfuffle of the day concerned the 6 January rioters. I had last seen them when they were released from a DC jail after being pardoned by Trump on the day he took office. Stewart Rhodes, founder of the Oath Keepers, an anti-government militia, hung out on the lawn by the detention facility to welcome the prisoners as they streamed out. According to the prosecutor at his trial, he had acted as ‘a general surveying his troops on a battlefield’ on 6 January, and had a ‘quick reaction force’ of armed militiamen waiting at a Comfort Inn in Virginia. At CPAC, Rhodes and Enrique Tarrio, the former head of the Proud Boys, were denied entrance, as were a number of other rioters. Rhodes managed to get in with a press pass. CPAC then hastily issued a statement insisting they were all welcome. On Friday, Tarrio and other ‘J6ers’ headed to the Capitol. They retraced the route some of them had taken in 2021, then held a press conference. ‘One of the things I want to work on now that I’m out is prison reform,’ Joe Biggs, a Proud Boy, told reporters. ‘A lot of us lost a lot of things and I know that pleases some of you but guess what, we’re still going to have good lives and do better things than most of you ever will.’ Further: ‘Get over it. We’re here. I don’t have much to say.’
Rhodes took the mic. ‘What man means for evil, God can use for good.’ Tarrio announced a lawsuit against the Department of Justice. ‘With the success of our crypto initiatives and the Proud Coin, we now have the means to fight this battle without relying on anyone else.’ He called up another Proud Boy to talk about their ‘innovative approach to crypto’. A former Green Beret introduced himself as the secretary of retribution. Afterwards, Tarrio was arrested by Capitol police for shoving the hand of a protester who put her phone in his face. He was back at the CPAC bar by dinnertime.
Dozens of the pardoned rioters were at the back of the auditorium, next to the media, for Trump’s speech the following day. ‘Thank you for the pardons,’ they shouted. A woman in the crowd said that Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer and members of the 6 January committee needed to ‘watch out.’ Joe Biden had pre-emptively pardoned the members of the committee just before he left office. ‘Treason is not covered by pardons,’ the woman said. ‘The hunters will become the hunted.’ I talked to Brandon Fellows, who had entered the Capitol through a broken window carrying a Trump flag and smoked a joint in a senator’s office. ‘Honestly, he’s doing a lot of intense stuff,’ Fellows said as Trump spoke. ‘I’m open to the retribution, and if we end up putting these people in jail, I’d just advocate for treating them better than we were treated. If they make Guantánamo better conditions …’
Commentary on this is not actually possible.