The sense from early in the evening was that the rally-like crowd, drinking wine from a cash bar and eating spring rolls, was prepared to hail Trump as the winner, regardless of the outcome. He had a feeling they were prepared for the worst, given what they had seen their candidate do. On the way to the event, I ran into Joel Tenney, a pastor I met ten months ago at a church in Iowa where he was Trump’s “caucus captain.” After nearly a year of volunteering for Trump, Tenney was here as a special guest, dressed in black MAGA hat. At this time, Trump was leading in Georgia and North Carolina, and Tenney and his wife were in a very good mood. However, they wanted to talk about how they were sure they had “experienced voter fraud” in previous elections. “He gave us Sharpies because he knew we were Republicans,” his wife said of a poll worker. Tenney added: “The cars are made in Germany. And Hillary stepped in with Bernie Sanders.” As things began to look more secure for Trump, Tenney told me, “I can finally sleep again.”

The night before, on the way to Palm Beach, I saw a sign that said “Democrats Killed Democracy.” But there was no other visible evidence that an election that many described as a referendum on democracy was about to take place. At a trivia night held around the Colony Hotel pool, guests dressed in patterned Dolce & Gabbana split into teams to compete on questions like “How many pieces of candy corn are produced per year?”

On election day, I saw Rod Blagojevich in a heater getting coffee at the nearby Hilton. He was one of those MAGA characters who appeared everywhere during the campaign: at the check-in desk at my hotel in Milwaukee for the Republican National Convention; at the recent rally in Madison Square Garden, where he entered with Sarah Palin. Rudy Giuliani was another such figure; that morning in Palm Beach, he had pulled up to Trump’s polling station in a blue Mercedes convertible — which he had been ordered to give up as part of a defamation settlement. (“Rudy, are you worried about being homeless?” someone asked him as he stood outside the Trump compound. “I’m not worried about anything,” he said.) In a way, the question that the looming question of the day was whether Rudy and Rods would soon retire from public consciousness to the fringes and defend a former president in exile, or emerge as legitimate figures at the center of our politics, forgiven of all wrongdoing. I wondered the same thing when I saw Kristi Noem in a polka dot dress eating dinner at the Hilton before going to the watch party.

In the wee hours of Wednesday morning, as state after state projected a Trump victory, we kept hearing that his motorcade was about to leave Mar-a-Lago and head for the convention hall. Karoline Leavitt, the campaign’s press secretary, told one of the reporters working for Decision Desk HQ that they should just call North Carolina and Georgia for Trump so everyone can go to bed early. David Sacks and Marco Rubio appeared; Mike Johnson had been watching the election with his constituents in Louisiana and decided to fly to Florida. Earlier in the day, Trump promoted theories of “massive deceit“; now his food was gone.