Approaching Mar-a-Lago, there is little to suggest you are nearing a nerve centre of global power. The drive into Palm Beach is indistinguishable from that of any mid-sized American city: it is a blur of chain pharmacies, ailing Subway sandwich shops, car washes and mildewed condominiums. There is every indication, however, that you are in Donald Trump territory. Exiting the freeway, a billboard advertising discount storage units promises to “Make moving great again”. Jumbo Trump signs cover houses, while smaller Trump signs litter lawns. But among the dilapidated stores and tangled foliage, you could still be almost anywhere in Florida. It is only as you get closer to the drawbridge leading to Mar-a-Lago that flashes of gilded affluence begin to appear. A Greek Orthodox Church with a giant golden dome rises inexplicably on your right. The cars grow noticeably more expensive, as do the taut faces of the women jogging past. Then there is the sudden presence of security checkpoints, dark cars and an awareness that you are being watched. In the months after two attempts on Donald Trump’s life, this small strip of premium real estate on Florida’s Atlantic coast has acquired the tense atmosphere of a police state.
Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort has been integral to Florida’s migration from the disowned periphery of US politics to its centre. Built in the 1920s by Marjorie Merriweather Post, heiress to the Postum Cereal Company (later General Foods Corporation), the sprawling estate was christened Mar-a-Lago – “sea to lake”– owing to its position on an expanse of Palm Beach Island that stretches between the Atlantic Ocean and Lake Worth. The estate, which boasts well over 100 rooms, took design inspiration from around the world: a Viennese sculptor carved animal motifs into the exterior, and parrots, monkeys and eagles are still visible today. Post transferred ownership of the estate to the US government prior to her death in 1973, as she hoped that Mar-a-Lago would become a “winter White House” for presidents and foreign dignitaries. Due to the extraordinary maintenance costs associated with the property’s upkeep – reportedly $1m annually – the government later transferred ownership to the Post Foundation. Trump purchased the estate in 1985 for an estimated $10m.
A decade later, Mar-a-Lago reopened as a members-only social club. Today, the resort caters to a minuscule clientele: an agreement with the city of Palm Beach has capped membership at 500; the initiation fee is $300,000. Yet it is one of the most well-known properties in the world. During the twilight of the Biden administration, Mar-a-Lago overtook the White House as the American pilgrimage site for the world’s most powerful. Recent guests have included the new secretary-general of Nato Mark Rutte, Italian prime minister Giorgia Meloni, Argentina’s Javier Milei, Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán, Reform leader Nigel Farage and outgoing Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau, along with a coterie of Silicon Valley tech barons, including Mark Zuckerberg, venture capitalist Marc Andreessen, Jeff Bezos and, of course, Elon Musk. In 2017, during his first term as president, Trump welcomed President Xi Jinping and his wife, along with a large delegation of other top Chinese officials, to the elite beach club.
But Mar-a-Lago is just the crown jewel in the Floridisation of US politics. A born and bred New Yorker, Trump switched his primary residence from Manhattan to Palm Beach during his first term, stating that he had “been treated very badly by the political leaders of both the city and state [of New York]. Few have been treated worse.” There was also a more practical rationale for becoming a Florida resident: lower taxes. Florida is one of just nine states that do not levy state income taxes on residents. According to a recent report by the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, it has the most regressive tax system in the US: low-income families pay almost five times as much of their income as the wealthy. (Florida ranks 49th in the nation for income inequality.)
The incoming administration will also be stacked with Floridian personnel. The Florida senator Marco Rubio has been chosen as secretary of state, while Trump’s national security adviser is Mike Waltz, a former congressman from Florida. Susie Wiles, Trump’s chief of staff – the first woman to serve in the role – is a seasoned political operative formerly employed by the Florida governor Ron DeSantis. When the former Florida congressman Matt Gaetz’s nomination for attorney general was derailed in December by allegations that he had used drugs and paid for sex with a minor, he was replaced with the former Florida attorney general Pam Bondi, a long-time acolyte of the president. Other Floridians joining the government are: the former county sheriff Chad Chronister as head of the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), physician Janette Nesheiwat as surgeon general, and Dave Weldon, another doctor and former congressman, as head of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
There are different explanations as to why Florida has suddenly featured so prominently in US politics. Over email, the historian Paul du Quenoy, who is president of the Palm Beach Freedom Institute, a right-wing advocacy organisation that promotes “civil rights, constitutional liberties, and the exceptionalism of the American experience”, told me it is because Florida “is leading the nation in economic growth, job creation, ease of doing business”. He continued: “It only makes sense that President Trump would rely on talented Floridians to advance America-first principles as he augurs in a new Golden Age.”
Conservatives like to point out that Florida’s crime rate recently dropped to a 50-year low, whereas Democrat state mismanagement has led to increases in places like New York. The Florida vs New York dichotomy illustrates a more global shift: centre-left parties have seen their electoral fortunes evaporate across the world, while the right is on the ascent. Moreover, blue states such as New York and California are losing people to red states like Florida – which is the state with the fastest-growing population in the country. This has translated into enhanced political power.
There is a corresponding transformation happening within the GOP. In many ways Marco Rubio, a Latino from Florida, represents the new face of the party. Rubio helped secure Trump’s unprecedented share of the Latino vote, a demographic long regarded as steadfastly Democrat. Trump won 46 per cent of the Hispanic vote, an increase of 14 percentage points over the 2020 election against Joe Biden; among Hispanic men, he won 54 per cent of the vote, up 18 points from four years earlier. A week before the election, Rubio proved himself especially useful in neutralising the fallout from Trump’s controversial Madison Square Garden rally, where a comedian called Puerto Rico “a floating island of garbage”. The senator stepped in to do damage control, addressing crowds in Spanish in heavily Puerto Rican communities such as Allentown, Pennsylvania, and appearing on CBS’s Face the Nation to deflect criticism.
Rubio will also be the first Floridian, the first Latino and the first Cuban-American to serve as secretary of state. The selection brings into focus what Joan Didion described in her 1987 non-fiction book Miami: “There are certain stations at which the converged, or colliding, fantasies of Miami and Washington appear in fixed relief.” Didion’s book chronicles what she calls Washington’s “seduction and betrayal” of Florida’s many Cuban exiles. An especially cruel episode took place in 1962 when the CIA trained Cubans with the aim of overthrowing Fidel Castro. The operation was botched, and instead of revolution, many of the men were killed or taken prisoner by Castro’s forces at the Bay of Pigs. The failed regime-change effort had rendered Miami an American city “populated by people who also believed that the United States would betray them again”.
As an ultra-hawkish opponent of Cuba’s communist government, Rubio has already helped shape Trump’s approach to the country. He was one of the most outspoken critics of Barack Obama’s 2014 attempt to establish diplomatic relations with Havana. During his first term, Trump reinstated restrictions on travel and commerce. In his second, he has already reversed Biden’s 2024 decision to remove Cuba from the terrorism list.
[See also: An abomination of an inauguration]
Didion’s depiction of Florida gave Miami the feeling of “a Latin capital, a year or two away from a new government”. The city seemed as aligned with metropolises like Bogotá and Managua as it was with any city in the US: at once thoroughly American and alien. Perhaps because it carries this whiff of the foreign, Americans elsewhere have always looked down on Florida. The words “Florida man” have become shorthand for a type of erratic and headline-grabbing behaviour perpetrated by the state’s destitute, often while in an alcohol- or drug-induced delirium. There is even a website where you can search the headlines for “Florida man” by your birthdate and see a list of news stories that alchemise poverty and mental illness into entertainment: “Florida man attacks mom with corn on the cob”; “Florida man brings live gator into convenience store, chases customers”; “Florida man breaks into home, gets naked, cooks spaghetti”.
Florida is America’s soft underbelly and its dead end, where all the country’s darkness is illuminated by the omnipresent sun. “Florida from its beginnings has served as a catch basin for the world’s detritus,” the American writer Russell Banks wrote in 2022. “It’s where you go when your prospects elsewhere have ended.” But this reduction of Florida to national punchline is at least partly a product of blue-state cultural elitism, transforming a state with a population of more than 23 million into a receptacle for socially sanctioned classism. The Trump insurgency, organised from Florida and fuelled by the aspirations of immigrants, the interests of the very rich and the resentments of the working class, is the state’s dignity fighting back.
Before Palm Beach was Trump’s “winter White House”, it was John F Kennedy’s; he and Jackie often used his family’s Palm Beach estate, known as La Querida, to get away. Florida was also the setting for one of the century’s biggest political dramas: the contested 2000 presidential election between George W Bush and Al Gore, wherein Bush purportedly won by just 537 votes. Indeed, Florida was a competitive swing state until recently, going from blue for Obama in 2012 to red for Trump in 2016. When Hillary Clinton lost there, it was the earliest indication on election night that Trump would win the presidency. Florida has been Republican ever since, no longer classified as a swing state.
That the seat of power has migrated south along with Trump also isn’t without historical parallels. George W Bush’s ranch in Crawford, Texas, once served a similar purpose as Mar-a-Lago; two months after 11 September, when the war on terror briefly prompted the convergence of Russian and US foreign policy objectives, Vladimir Putin visited the Texas ranch. Bush also brought a corps of trusted Texans to Washington, including loyalists who filled prominent cabinet positions. During Ronald Reagan’s first term as president, he brought with him what the LA Times called “a California cadre of long-time trusted aides” who had previously worked with him as governor in Sacramento. Yet, the extent of Florida’s dominance in Trump’s new administration remains singular. “I don’t know that we’ve ever had one state become so prominent in an administration, even Texas during the Bush era,” said Whit Ayres, a veteran Republican political consultant, in a recent interview with the outlet US News and World Report.
More significant than the long list of appointees the state has provided, Florida has also served as an incubator for ideas. During the pandemic, Governor DeSantis became an “anti-public health crusader”, opposing strict lockdowns. Trump’s withdrawal from the World Health Organisation and embrace of vaccine critics such as Robert F Kennedy Jr demonstrate how Florida is shaping national policy. Similarly, it was one of the first states to crack down on “woke indoctrination” in schools and eliminate diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) programmes in public universities. On 21 January, Trump signed an executive order banning DEI programmes at colleges and other institutions. He has even floated the idea of abolishing the federal income tax.
With each passing day, Donald Trump’s America increasingly resembles the Sunshine State, as the new administration remakes the country in Florida’s image. Democrat states, lethargic and disorientated from loss, have yet to mount a defence against it. The future is Florida.
[See also: Trump’s America is a gangster’s paradise]
This article appears in the 29 Jan 2025 issue of the New Statesman, Class War