The only membership qualification now, beyond the actual cost ($250,000, up from $150,000 before the presidency, plus a hefty yearly fee), is to be an abject Trump admirer. This may not be so much a political statement as an aesthetic one—the thrall of a supercelebrity.

In a sense, Trump is Rick in Rick’s Café Américain in Casablanca. Of course, a Rick without quite so much conscience or heart—though the Palm Beach set seems to believe in his heart (if not his conscience). Or, maybe it is more akin to Jack Dempsey’s bar in Times Square. Trump’s the fighter, sitting on his bar stool perch. Or, going bigger, he’s Sinatra, and Mar-a-Lago is the Sands Hotel in Vegas.

Out one door of the great room is the “Liberty Bar” with a formal portrait of Trump as a young man posed in tennis whites, a brilliant sun breaking through the clouds over his head, which does not seem to be treated as a kitschy joke—there might even be some reverence attached to it. Out the other door is the grand dinner patio—you can see the water in the distance. There are fifty or sixty tables. Trump has his dinner here most evenings. He appears just as the patio has filled, at which point everyone stands and applauds. Often, when Melania is here, they eat alone at a roped-off table in the center—looked at, somewhat, like zoo animals. No, no, that’s not right. They are like a newly married couple: every night is a wedding at which they spend their dinner greeting friends and well-wishers.

Mar-a-Lago is in the flight path of Palm Beach International Airport. All traffic was rerouted during the presidential years, but now it’s noisily back.

This, then, is the setting, the redoubt, of one of the most powerful political movements in the Western world—waiting only for its leader to decide on his next move.

He absolutely believes he has been forced out of office by an election coup that involves almost all aspects of modern society and its coordinated power centers organized against him. At the same time, he absolutely believes he is the single most powerful political entity in the United States, holding the power to anoint or de-anoint any Senate or House member in a Trump state. He is motivated by revenge—eager to punish and strike down anyone guilty of major or minor disses to him—and obeisance. With a little critical interpretation, it is not so much broad power that he seeks as much as specific submission and adulation.