more hairspray, royal palms and white wine. He’s been working that meme all fall. Trump’s first campaign rally in the state was at Trump National Doral, a golf resort outside of Miami, in October, when he launched his first unprompted attack on Ben Carson (who had just overtaken him in Iowa polls). Wearing a pink tie and blue suit, Trump bragged about negotiating the purchase price of his Miami-area golf course down from $170 million to $145 million, and promised to win the Latino vote despite a round of controversial comments about immigrants. “I love the Hispanics,” he told his crowd.

Last week, Trump held a news conference at the lavish Mar-a-Lago Club, his trademark property in the state—if not the world—where rooms rent for more than $1,000, and come with a promise of an “incomparable, royal lifestyle.” At the Mar-a-Lago event, Trump reserved the first two rows for members of his clubs, a characteristic display of marketing and showmanship that gave his VIPs—many of them club board members—an actual front seat to the most talked-about story in America. It's a first-class perk.

And Tuesday night, as results rolled in from Michigan, Mississippi, Idaho, and Hawaii, the scene was repeated at Trump National Golf Club Jupiter. Guests sipped martinis at an open bar on the patio as waitresses dressed in tuxedoes served cocktail weenies, Beef Wellington, and mini-lobster rolls to ravenous reporters. “I like Mr. Trump a lot,” said Paul O'Neill, the former New York Yankee who, dressed in a open-collar shirt and dark suit, was among the 200 or so club members in attendance on Tuesday. “We play golf together. I belong to his club. I hope he does well.”

The upscale scene in Jupiter, lit by a sea of chandeliers, was very different than the rawness of his public rallies, where trails of port-a-potties point the masses toward the event site. And just in case you missed the blatant marketing ploy of featuring his Florida properties on election nights, Trump was flanked Tuesday night in Jupiter by stacks of his Trump-branded wine (red, white and rosé), Trump water and a pile of Trump steaks.

 

“You've been touring my properties,” Trump joked with reporters on Tuesday. “We've been giving you the Trump tour. Very impressive, right?”

 

Back at the West Palm Beach golf course, another doctor introduced himself, in distinctively Trumpian cadences. “Who are you?” he asked. “I’m Dr. Eric Kaplan. I have 346,000 Twitter followers. Bigger than any other. Dr. Oz has bigger than I have. Do you want to ask me a question? Why am I here supporting Donald?”

Kaplan, who has authored several books, including one about the time he and his wife together fell into a coma from a Botox treatment gone bad, had plenty of thoughts on the question. “People have to ask themselves, why is he running for the job? He doesn’t need the job. He doesn’t need to the money. And stress? When everybody calls you an ass, you need that?” Kaplan says. “After you’ve had a whole life of invincibility, who needs that?”

 

Kaplan reflected the sense of the room: In more than two hours of interviews, as Trump waited in the back room for the election results, the attendees spoke, at times emotionally, about the sacrifice Trump was making in running for president.

To a person, they were surprised and impressed that Trump was putting himself through the grind of a national political race when he could be doing almost literally anything else. Amazement that the detail-oriented Donald they know—have you seen the greens lately!?—is mocked on stage as a know-nothing brute.

The club members and other Palm Beach denizens were not without criticism of their standard-bearer. Many were upset with the name-calling and demagoguery, unfit for the normal parameters of a presidential campaign and certainly for the rarified air of the rich, where such takedowns are more easily digested in private conversations, or at least whispered.