Trumpworld Decamps in Biscayne Times Territory

Fresh from the deadly Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riot and failed coup by “very special” people, the Republic of MAGAstan is hoisting its flag in Biscayne Times territory.

How far this will go is anyone’s guess.

As President Joe Biden and company find and replace the broken crockery of four years, Donald Trump and family are down but far from out.

“We will come back in some form,” Trump promised on Jan. 20 before boarding Air Force One to the tune of the Village People’s “YMCA” and taking off to Frank Sinatra’s “My Way,” the very song he and Melania danced to at the inauguration Liberty Ball four years ago. As Trump was airborne, President Biden clutched his rosary at Mass at Washington, D.C.’s Cathedral of St. Matthew the Apostle. Taking up his new job at 78, he will need it.

Whatever form any Trumpian comeback assumes, this is a local story, for Trumpiana is everywhere. Trump, for now, retains his grip on the Florida Republican party, and no statewide GOP politician has dared to defy him or his outrages, although Sen. Marco Rubio has responded at times in passive-aggressive fashion with opaque Biblical verses through tweets.

Trump’s family is converging among us. Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner are decamping to Indian Creek Village, just across the Broad Causeway, 75 minutes south of her father and stepmother in Mar-a-Lago and close to Jared’s recently pardoned developer-father Charles Kushner in Bal Harbour. The younger Kushners bought 1.84 acres formerly owned by singer Julio Iglesias for $32 million. Neighbors will include car dealer, ex-Philadelphia Eagles owner and billionaire art collector Norman Braman, Tampa Bay Bucs quarterback Tom Brady and supermodel Gisele Bündchen, developer Jeffrey Soffer (Jackie’s brother and the “So” in Solé Mia), financier Carl Icahn and hedge fund billionaire Edward Lampert, among others. The 53 votes cast in the heavily guarded island went 79% for Trump in the last election – a red island, if you like, in a blue sea.

Recent Georgetown Law grad Tiffany Trump and newly minted fiancé Michael Boulos have been staying in the ritzy Setai Hotel in Miami Beach while house hunting in the area. Donald Jr.’s ex-wife Vanessa and five children live in Jupiter; he’s looking for a permanent residence in Palm Beach County with his significant other, former Fox News host (and California Gov. Gavin Newsom’s ex-wife) Kimberly Guilfoyle. As Kim herself might say: The best. Is yet. To come.

Real estate is South Florida’s coin of the realm, and the Trump-friendly Dezer Development has built six Trump-branded towers jutting skyward in the pre-apocalyptic Atlantis of Sunny Isles Beach, just a few miles north of Charles and “Jarvanka.”

And let’s not forget Fort Lauderdale’s Roger Stone, the recently pardoned dirty trickster who greeted the Trump motorcade in West Palm Beach and was once interviewed by the New Yorker’s Jeffrey Toobin (himself recently fired for onanistic Zoom staff meeting multitasking) at the Miami Velvet swinger’s club west of Miami International Airport. And we recently witnessed the domestic disturbance meltdown of fired Trump campaign manager Brad Parscale in the driveway of his home in Fort Lauderdale, captured by police cameras.

Then, too, we have Trump’s National Doral Golf Club, his biggest money-maker course, where revenue fell 40% over the first nine months of 2020, to $44.2 million. The Trump Organization took out $125 million in loans on the property from Deutsche Bank, which are due to be paid back in 2023. Deutsche Bank and New York-based Signature Bank, which called on Trump to resign after the insurrection, both announced they would no longer do business with his organization and affiliates, as did Professional Bank of Coral Gables, which loaned Trump’s family $11.2 million to buy a property next to Mar-a-Lago, and BankUnited of Miami Lakes, which holds two Trump money market accounts.

So, yes, this is as much a local South Florida story as melting Antarctic ice sheets, Haitian earthquakes, Venezuelan societal collapse, Colombian narcoterrorism, Cuban revolutions and boatlifts, and Nicaraguan civil wars.

Grave news is still very much afoot. The United States COVID-19 death toll has surpassed 400,000, will likely head to 500,000 in a month, and, by President Biden’s reckoning, 600,000 a month after that, approaching the number of lives lost from the Civil War or all of America’s wars of the 20th century combined. The attack on the Capitol and the pandemic’s deadly impact in the U.S. – the latter representing 4% of the world’s population and 20% of all deaths – have pummeled the nation’s standing and security. With the recent explosion of hate groups, one could find one, two, or maybe many Timothy McVeighs just a stone’s throw in any direction. So there is a good chance we are in a low-level insurgency and need to veer off politics and join community good causes with voters of all stripes, if not QAnon crazies or white supremacists.

It is also telling that, before COVID-19, the betting was 2-1 for Trump’s reelection, leaving his family intact in Washington and a nation barreling further into a full-fledged Eurasian-style authoritarian oligarchy with dysfunctional democratic trappings. Even deadly viruses may carry unintended blessings.

As the Senate readies for a Feb. 9 impeachment trial, things for Trump could soon get sinister indeed. Why, as the New York Times and Wall Street Journal reported, did Trump – shortly before the insurrection – push to sack acting Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen and replace him with a loyalist to push the Supreme Court to overturn the election? Why did he stuff the Department of Defense bureaucracy top to bottom with Trumpsters in December, while blocking defense department assistance in a Biden transition? Did these events have any bearing at all on the slow-walk response to the deadly riot?

These are not idle questions. Conviction at this writing is a long shot, as Republican loyalties appear to be hardening. But the intent of impeachment is not only prescriptive and punitive, but proscriptive and preventive. Governance, like society, runs on norms, not just laws. And trials in courtrooms or legislative chambers, civil or criminal, are grounded on rules of ceremony and decorum to base decisions on a common set of facts. That is why the Trump election challenges at this writing are 1-for-62. By 2015, the U.S. electorate was ripe for a five-year Trumpian battering ram against norms, facts and reality itself – and eventually, on Jan. 6, the actual shattering of doors and windows at the Capital itself by a violent mob emboldened by their devotion to a leader who led them there.

These matters aim at the heart not just of the Trump brand, but of a Republican party that has veered into a cult that punishes apostates.

Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner’s December news of the Indian Creek Village move instantly prompted speculation that she will run for political office, possibly to primary Marco Rubio for his Senate seat in 2022.

On Jan. 21, Sen. Rick Scott, incoming head of the influential fundraising Republican Senatorial Committee, moved to thwart such ambitions, declaring his endorsement of Rubio and other incumbents. Scott, up for reelection in 2024, was one of seven senators to refuse to accept Pennsylvania’s certified Electoral College votes in January, putting him in the “Sedition Caucus” with Sens. Ted Cruz of Texas, Josh Hawley of Missouri, Cindy Hyde-Smith of Mississippi, Cynthia Lummis of Wyoming, Roger Marshall of Kansas and Tommy Tuberville of Alabama.

Add to that a thoroughly Trumpified and disciplined Florida Republican party, exemplified by Gov. Ron DeSantis, whose endorsement by Trump sealed the nomination that resulted in his 2018 victory. DeSantis has repaid the endorsement in kind, nursing along the election fraud fantasy by appearing in November on Fox News to encourage contributions to the Trump election challenges (again, that score is 1 win, 62 losses), and speaking alongside Trump at rallies, such as in November 2019 in Sunrise, where Trump praised war criminals, fetishized violence and spoke of his immediate predecessor as “Barack Hussein Obama or whatever the hell that was.”

DeSantis started 2020 as one of the nation’s most popular governors but received a record low Florida Atlantic University approval rating of 42% in November. That said, the Yale and Harvard Law grad is nothing if not resilient, and much can happen before November 2022. A formidable bench of potential Democratic candidates abound, including former Gov. Charlie Crist and Congresswoman Val Demings. South Florida’s own state Sen. Jason Pizzo, who represents the Biscayne corridor, has cultivated a statewide client-service following and done little to conceal his own ambitions for gubernatorial or higher office.

Of South Florida elected Republican congressional representatives, not one broke ranks in nurturing Trump’s election-fraud fantasy. Mario Díaz-Balart and recent Miami-Dade Mayor Carlos Giménez both voted no on certifying slates of electors in Pennsylvania and Arizona. Newly elected Rep. Maria Elvira Salazar, quarantined with COVID-19, did not vote, but she did join all Florida congressional members in voting not to impeach.

Evidence of MAGAstan’s southern salient is right here in Biscayne Times territory. There is billionaire Richard LeFrak, 75, co-developer of Solé Mia (LeFrak is the “lé in the name), the $4-billion mega development at 151st Street and Biscayne in North Miami. LeFrak is nearly seven months older than Trump, and patriarch of the 116-year-old LeFrak Organization, once New York’s largest landlord and based at 49 West 57th St., less than a block from Trump Tower at 725 Fifth Ave.

LeFrak, reported to be worth $3.6 billion by Forbes magazine to Trump’s $2.5 billion (which Forbes acknowledges is a guess), is one of Trump’s few longtime, if not intimate, friends. LeFrak has given $100,000 in contributions to Trump campaigns, though he has not spoken out about politics, and was approached to help head a stillborn infrastructure committee and build a border wall. As two men of equivalent age and fellow scions of New York’s largest postwar real estate developers and landlords, they can at least speak a common language.

If the Trumps are personae non gratae in New York and Washington, South Florida is a soft exile and launching pad. If reputable New York private equity giants such as Blackstone Group and I Squared Capital can make the move, so can the Trumps, for this is a forgiving place of year-round sunshine, liberal bankruptcy laws, no state income tax, love of bling and ease, and perpetual real estate optimism in the face of rising seas. This is a place of second, third and fourth chances, with a social network as porous and yielding as the oolitic limestone and high-water table on which we dwell.

Though it is said that to err is human and to forgive divine, here on Earth – even in South Florida – forgiveness is also finite.