At CPAC

Two weeks before​ Donald Trump’s inauguration, I ran into a man who calls himself the Retribution Pastor by the swimming pool at Mar-a-Lago. Joel Tenney, who comes from the largest family in Iowa, had worked to turn out voters for the caucuses last January, and occasionally led the crowds at Trump rallies in prayer. ‘Retribution means justice,’ he liked to tell them. ‘And when Trump becomes the 47th president of the United States there will be justice for all who promoted evil in this country.’ We were at Mar-a-Lago for the premiere of a film about John Eastman, one of the lawyers who tried to overturn the 2020 election results. Buses were bringing in guests from the Hilton West Palm Beach; ‘red-carpet opportunities’ with Rudy Giuliani had been advertised. The film came out on the anniversary of the riot. ‘I’m here because of all the lawsuits against Trump,’ one guest said, drinking some champagne. Others paid to attend because, as one of them put it, ‘This is the centre of the universe.’

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.

Six weeks later, Trump was in the East Room of the White House to celebrate Black History Month. ‘You really are great, great people. What a great, nice group of – I have some people in front of me every once in a while, with all the problems that are caused all over the world, and they’re not nice, they’re not nice. But we’re making them nice, I can tell you that, and we’re making them nice rapidly.’ The crowd cheered for Tiger Woods and then booed Albert Bourla, the Greek-American head of Pfizer, which manufactured one of the Covid vaccines. Trump had signed an order on his first day ending all government diversity, equality and inclusion programmes; the Department of Defence then issued new guidance: ‘Identity months dead.’

‘Today is our fourth week,’ Trump said. In the first month of his presidency, he had pardoned the 6 January rioters, sought to expand presidential power over independent government agencies, pitched Gaza as the ‘Riviera of the East’, paused enforcement of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, ordered a judge to drop charges against the New York City mayor, Eric Adams, and slashed federal workers from the Department of the Interior, the Nuclear Security Administration and other agencies. After National Park Service cuts, the only locksmith who could free people stuck in bathrooms at Yosemite was gone. On the 108-minute flight from Washington to Palm Beach, Trump fired the national archivist, made himself chair of the Kennedy Centre and revoked Biden’s security clearance.

His administration was ‘flooding the zone’, as Steve Bannon put it in 2018. (‘The Democrats don’t matter,’ he said. ‘The real opposition is the media. And the way to deal with them is to flood the zone with shit.’) Almost daily, Trump was photographed at the Resolute Desk – made of oak from the Arctic exploration ship HMS Resolute, it was a gift from Queen Victoria – signing executive orders on everything from plastic straws (bring them back) to birthright citizenship (get rid of it). ‘Muzzle velocity’, as Bannon put it. ‘If you’re always consumed by the next outrage, you can’t look closely at the last one.’

Flooding the zone wasn’t about making policy. It was about instituting high-level ‘regime change’, as the MAGA influencer Jack Posobiec put it, by replacing the class of people who have long managed American institutions. Posobiec is something like an unofficial press secretary for the administration. When I saw him over the inauguration weekend, he told me that ‘you can’t define victory until the last day of Trump’s term.’ He phoned me two weeks later. ‘Every day is a new fight,’ he said. Elon Musk had just sent out an email with the subject line ‘Fork in the Road’, encouraging members of the federal workforce to resign. Posobiec, a former ‘govvie’, as he calls himself, enjoyed seeing government employees squirming with discomfort. He had just come back from a trip to the Canadian border with the new secretary of the Department for Homeland Security, Kristi Noem. ‘I was at Wawa and her team called me and was like, “Can you be ready for the flight in two hours?”’ The White House correspondent for War Room, Steve Bannon’s podcast, took over his show while he was away. Soon after, Posobiec accompanied the Treasury secretary, Scott Bessent, to Ukraine. The traditional press corps was replaced with ‘friendly media’.

The Gulf of Mexico was now the Gulf of America. The Associated Press, which declined to include the change in their style guide, no longer had a seat on Air Force One. Steve Witkoff, Trump’s special envoy to the Middle East, announced plans for a ‘developers’ summit’ to consider proposals for refashioning Gaza. ‘I think when people see some of the ideas that come from this,’ he said, ‘they’re going to be amazed.’ The Department of Homeland Security announced it had budgeted as much as $200 million for a multimedia advertising campaign for border security message: ‘We will find you and deport you.’

At the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in Maryland in late February, Elon Musk was joined on stage by the Argentinian president, Javier Milei, who presented him with a ‘chainsaw for bureaucracy’. Musk, in sunglasses and a MAGA hat, waved the chainsaw at the crowds. As a ‘special government employee’ running the Department of Government Efficiency, Musk had put USAID ‘in the woodchipper’, halted the work of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, and attacked federal workers from weather forecasters to air traffic controllers. DOGE’s ‘Muskrats’ were in a cold war with ‘rogue bureaucrats’, as they called federal employees. ‘I was living the dream, and I was living the meme,’ Musk said. ‘My mind is a storm.’ A week earlier, Musk and Trump had brought reporters to the Oval Office to hear about what DOGE was doing. Musk’s four-year-old son, X, who often accompanies him, picked his nose and wiped it on the Resolute Desk while his father spoke. Trump sent out the desk to be cleaned.

In 2011, Trump was introduced at CPAC to the song ‘Money, Money, Money’, said America was the ‘laughing stock of the world’, questioned where Barack Obama was born and hinted he might run for president. ‘I am well acquainted with winning,’ he said. ‘We will be taking in hundreds of billions of dollars from other countries that are screwing us.’ Trump appeared again in 2023, during his exile in Florida, before it was clear that he would make a political comeback. ‘I am your retribution,’ he said. His supporters had retrenched during what they call Trump’s interregnum; now they were on stage with the national security adviser and the White House deputy chief of staff. If Trump ‘had gone from one term to another, he would not be anywhere near as effective,’ the head of Moms for America said. The Third Term Project, a Republican group that wants to change the constitution so that Trump can run again, had banners depicting him as Julius Caesar. Capitol rioters walked around with print-outs of their pardons. Mike Lindell, the CEO of My Pillow and a leading proponent of the ‘stolen election’ claim, was handing out a book called What Are the Odds? From Crack Addict to CEO. At a booth showcasing his inventions, one of Lindell’s employees was putting what looked like little metal hairgrips on the head of a conference-goer. ‘It’ll cross the brain blood barrier,’ the employee told him. ‘That man suffered,’ Trump said of Lindell in his speech.

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 …’ The night before, he’d had what he called a ‘Zelensky-Putin’ moment, when he went for a drink with one of the anti-MAGA protesters who usually followed him around with a megaphone. ‘It was like in World War One, when the enemies would play soccer together,’ he told me.

To get on the list for the DOGE appreciation party that night, guests were asked to select Yes or No from a drop-down menu. Do you approve of DOGE? ‘It’s a revolution literally: with us or against us,’ one attendee texted me. The party was held at a former school in north-east Washington. Police and anti-Musk protesters stood on a square of grass outside. Inside, people wore T-shirts that said ‘Make AI open source again’ and necklaces that read ‘own your data’; one man had a Ron Paul 2008 sweatshirt. Everyone was trying to find the actual DOGE engineers in the crowd of young men. ‘I’m sick of Elon,’ a political consultant told me. ‘He’s not funny. After he’s done doing all of this, he better give a billion dollars to the midterm elections.’ A senior State Department official was sandwiched into a corner at the top of the stairs. James O’Keefe, the founder of the far-right activist group Project Veritas, was the DJ.

Downstairs, a conservative law clerk was introducing himself to Stewart Rhodes as a fellow Yale Law School grad. They compared notes on different professors. The law clerk asked how his time in jail had been. Rhodes put down his beer and pulled up his sleeve to reveal a tattoo of Trump, bleeding after the shooting in Butler. ‘No president in our lifetime has showed physical strength. This is like going back to Teddy Roosevelt or George Washington,’ the clerk said. (After being shot while campaigning in Milwaukee, Roosevelt kept speaking for fifty minutes while blood soaked his shirt.) Musk had just sent out an email asking federal workers to detail what they had accomplished at work that week or be fired. (‘Elon is doing a great job, but I would like to see him get more aggressive. Remember, we have a country to save!’ Trump had posted earlier in the day.) Musk pulled up to the party after midnight, but apparently decided not to come inside after his security made a sweep of the perimeter. The host was devastated. The downstairs tenants in the building, contestants on the reality show Love Is Blind, were furious about the number of people trying to use their bathroom.

The same weekend, at a hotel near the White House, the annual Principles First summit met to discuss what to do about Trump. The gathering promised to ‘showcase the nation’s leading voices in defence of classical liberalism’. Attendees met for welcome drinks in the basement bar, where the night before a Grateful Dead cover band had performed. A lapsed Trump voter spoke as people mingled over crab cakes and mac’n’cheese bites. There was a stack of print-outs headed What Can You Do?, with suggestions such as ‘take a lot of pictures and post them’, ‘form groups and maintain them’, ‘have small gatherings’ and ‘contact your members of Congress’. By the bar, people talked about bringing the Democrats to ‘more rational and moderate positions’. The next Trump defector took the stage. ‘An immense amount of buyer’s remorse is coming,’ he said. ‘MAGA has traumatised every square inch of the country.’ Narratives of redemption and healing would, the organisers hoped, bring people over to their side. (During the campaign, when I asked Rep. Jamie Raskin what it would take to bring the Capitol rioters and their followers back into the fold of American democracy, the conversation turned to the idea of cult deprogrammers.) I stood next to a woman wearing a T-shirt with the slogan ‘You’re not allowed to give up.’ A man walked up to me with a flier for ‘Keep Nine’, a proposed constitutional amendment to fix the number of Supreme Court justices at its current level. He told me this bipartisan citizens’ movement would keep the Supreme Court independent by preventing court packing. This was the way he planned to resist Trump. ‘The courts are our last guardrail of democracy, but this administration is already lining everything up to thumb their nose at that,’ a lawyer standing with us said. ‘The court is a decider, not an enforcer.’

Most Democrats seemed to be relying on legal challenges to executive actions. This wasn’t causing any alarm to Conservative lawyers, who were discussing whether the Supreme Court might issue a ruling to forbid nationwide injunctions issued from lower courts. No one seemed certain how long Trump would listen to the courts anyway. J.D. Vance, in a frequently quoted podcast from 2021, said he hoped Trump would ‘fire every single mid-level bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state.’ He added: ‘When the courts stop you, stand before the country, like Andrew Jackson did, and say, “The chief justice has made his ruling. Now let him enforce it.”’ (It was actually Horace Greeley, the editor of the New York Tribune, who said this, describing Jackson’s insouciance in ignoring a Supreme Court decision.) Trump had already signed so many executive orders that, despite the lawsuits that had been filed in response to some of them, many remained untouched; Stephen Miller, his deputy chief of staff and architect of many of the orders, had reportedly prepared the administration for far more litigation.

Enrique Tarrio showed up to heckle attendees at the Principles First conference. The next day it was interrupted by a pipe bomb threat.

On the path up to the White House, each major television network has a little green hut it broadcasts from. The area is called Pebble Beach. When world leaders visit, the press gathers outside the West Wing to watch the president greet them. Netanyahu brought Trump a golden pager, in reference to the Israeli operation against Hizbullah; Starmer arrived with a letter from King Charles. On Friday, 26 February Zelensky got out of his car wearing a black tactical sweater. ‘Oh, you’re all dressed up,’ Trump said. They went to the Oval Office to begin their meeting. The usual pool of White House journalists had been expanded to include Russian state media and pro-Trump outlets such as Real America’s Voice. Its host, Brian Glenn, got one of the first questions. ‘Just want to see if – do you own a suit?’ he asked Zelensky.

The pool is often ushered out after the opening pleasantries, but this time they stayed for forty minutes. A few minutes before the end a ‘spat’ broke out, as the print pooler, who was sending out quotes in real time, described it. ‘You don’t have the cards now … Your country is in big trouble … You’re buried there … You’re not acting at all thankful. And that’s not a nice thing.’ The Ukrainian ambassador had her head in her hands. (‘More coming, it’s quite lively,’ the pooler wrote.) After a few more minutes, Trump told the cameras to get out. ‘Great television,’ he said. ‘I will say that.’

‘Honestly, I don’t know if it’s going to happen at this point,’ a staffer told me, when I asked about the press conference, ‘based on how it’s going in there.’ The East Room was set up for the signing of the minerals deal; in the West Wing, chefs were laying out the plates for lunch. A few minutes later, Zelensky and his team were shown the door. White House staffers ate the rosemary roast chicken and crème brûlée that had been prepared for the Ukrainian delegation.

Most Fridays, the press gathers to watch Trump leave for Mar-a-Lago on Marine One, the presidential helicopter. ‘It can be a real spectacle,’ one journalist told me. ‘It’s a vivid symbol of where we’re at.’ Over the course of that afternoon there were rumours that the departure might be delayed because Zelensky was coming back to the White House. ‘Really up in the air,’ a source said. But at five o’clock the door to the White House opened and Trump walked to the South Lawn in a red MAGA hat. Close to a hundred reporters stood behind a rope shouting questions about Zelensky. ‘He said he wants to come back right now, but I can’t do that,’ Trump said. The helicopter landed to pick him up. Zelensky, staying across the street at the Hay-Adams Hotel, would have seen Marine One take off. Several minutes later, the roads were closed for his motorcade. ‘This was supposed to happen much later,’ a cop securing the sidewalk said. ‘But after that meeting …’

At Joint Base Andrews in Maryland, the FBI was preparing to return documents seized during the raid on Mar-a-Lago in 2022. Boxes were marched ceremonially up the steps of Air Force One by White House staffers. The plane took off with the TV tuned to Fox News.

Over the weekend, Trump hosted a candlelit dinner at Mar-a-Lago for his MAGA Inc. PAC. Seats cost $1 million. (People now pay up to $5 million to meet with him one-on-one at the club.) Around the country, clips from town halls were going viral, as constituents showed up to events with Congressional Republicans to protest about Musk’s actions and government cuts. The House Speaker advised lawmakers to stop holding in-person town halls in their districts. Tesla superchargers were being set on fire. In Washington, ahead of Trump’s first speech to Congress, Democrats were plotting how to resist. They decided to wear co-ordinating pink outfits to signal their protest.

One of Trump’s first orders when he returned to office was ‘to provide a grand celebration worthy of the momentous occasion of the 250th anniversary of American Independence’, in 2026. There are plans to build a ballroom modelled on Mar-a-Lago. The Rose Garden will be ripped up and turned into a patio. ‘He’s producing the presidency,’ a regular White House visitor told me. ‘It’s like: “Move those flowers out of the background of the shot, I don’t like how that looks.”’ He still hopes to receive the Nobel Peace Prize. ‘I deserve it,’ he has said. ‘But they would never give it to me.’

When Trump began his address to Congress, Representative Al Green of Texas stood and waved his cane at the president before being escorted out. ‘We have accomplished more in 43 days than most administrations accomplish in four years, eight years – and we are just getting started,’ Trump said. He rattled off supposed DOGE savings: ‘$14 million for improving public procurement in Serbia; $47 million for improving learning outcomes in Asia. Asia is doing very well with learning. We … should use it ourselves.’ ‘I love the farmers,’ he said, mentioning tariffs on agricultural products. ‘So, to our farmers, have a lot of fun.’ He spoke for nearly two hours. It was the longest presidential address to lawmakers in history. The Democrats waved little signs saying ‘False’ and ‘Save Medicaid’. When Trump brought up the assassination attempt in Butler last summer – ‘I was saved by God to Make America Great Again. I believe that’ – Nancy Pelosi muttered ‘Oh my god’ to her neighbour.

7 March