Former President Donald Trump is spending his days in a surreal Mar-a-Lago fairy tale of worshipful fans who applaud him every time he enters a room, a reporter said Sunday.
“He is the center of the universe there,” said Washington Post journalist Josh Dawsey, who interviewed Trump at Mar-a-Lago last week.
“What’s striking there is he has hordes of people who surround him every night ... either working for him or paying to be there, or wanting his endorsements or having fundraisers there,” Dawsey told MSNBC host Yasmin Vossoughian.
“He really basks in adulation there every single night. Every time he walks in the room everyone stands up and cheers. When he leaves, everyone stands up and cheers,” recounted Dawsey.
The rarified atmosphere is not, however, reality, Dawsey pointed out.
“His presidency was a quite polarizing presidency. He had his deep and loyal supporters, but struggled to convert independents and moderates and others. That’s why he was a one-term president,” Dawsey said.
“But down there, everyone around him loves him. It’s kind of a surreal place to be where [with] everybody in every room, he is the center of the universe there.”
Trump — and his children — have in the past confused the adulation of hangers-on with the former president’s popularity in the entire nation. It doesn’t help his return to reality that Trump often grossly exaggerates crowd sizes at his rallies.
Early this year, he pointed to the size of a rally in Arizona as proof that he couldn’t possibly have lost the presidential election there — even though such crowds are self-selected Trump supporters, and represent a minuscule fraction of America’s or even Arizona’s voters.
He claimed at that rally that cars stretched out for “25 miles” to see him. “That’s not somebody that lost an election,” he declared.