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Donald Trump took the stage of the grand ballroom at Mar-a-Lago Tuesday night to claim Florida, the day's biggest electoral prize, as his own.
In true Trump fashion, this was an atypical political event attended by a well-heeled group of club members who had filed into the ballroom, posing for photos while making the “T” Trump sign in front of the flag-adorned stage, with barely a notice of the evening’s earlier political results and speeches.
Palm Beacher Rosemary Harder walked the room in a straw hat adorned by a beehive of white lights and a “Make America Great Again Sign” on it.
“The United States is depressed and he can bring it back again,” Harder said.
Trump echoed those sentiments during his speech, while thanking voters.
“Florida was so amazing,” he said.
Trump’s resounding Florida victory was evident by his supporters in Palm Beach County, who showed up in droves on Tuesday, relishing their roles as destroyers of politics as usual and giving him 52 percent of the Republican vote in the county. Florida U.S. Sen. Marco Rubio, his closest competitor, took 24 percent with 835 or 845 precincts reporting.
“We’ve got to get politicians out of government,” said Dick Wiggins, 77, a Boca Raton insurance adjuster who voted for Trump on Tuesday morning. “The problem is that all those other guys have too much government experience.”
Wiggins paid no attention to Stuart Marks, a 55-year-old Ted Cruz voter, who stood outside the Boca Raton Library.
“I’m a Republican,” Marks shouted to arriving voters. “If you’re going to vote, I’m begging you, please vote for anybody but Trump.”
Rozilda Greene, 65, stopped to tell Marks she was certainly going to vote to Trump.
Greene, who emigrated from Brazil, later explained why she liked Trump.
“He talks like me,” she said. “If I have the truth to tell, I tell it.”
Mark Lawrence, a 52-year-old health care manager from Highland Beach, said he started out as an admirer of Marco Rubio, but was won over by Trump.
“Getting a few minutes of every night to see him on TV, usually in one-on-one interviews, made me see his genuineness,” Lawrence said. “The establishment needs to be shaken up.”
Ed Gonzalez, 58, of Hypoluxo, woke up Tuesday morning still debating over whether he would vote for Trump or Cruz.
“This is a very confusing election,” Gonzalez said. “We might as well just vote and pray, ‘Hail Mary.’”
But there was something appealing about Trump to this Filipino immigrant.
“You know that Billy Joel song?” he said.
Then he started singing the lyrics: "You may be right. I may be crazy. But it just may be a lunatic you're looking for."
Then Gonzalez paused.
“Maybe we’re looking for a lunatic,” he said.
And that wasn’t even the most unconventional reason offered as a rationale for voting for Trump.
Lou Poveromo, a 48-year-old plumber from Wellington, showed up with a couple of his friends to vote for Trump, but they were turned away because they’re registered as independents.
“That’s three votes for Trump right there that went down the tubes,” Poveromo said, saying that he never realized that becoming an independent meant that he couldn’t vote in the closed party primaries.
Poveromo explained that his support for Trump’s presidency dates to an event that happened to Poveromo on the streets of New York 29 years ago. As a teenager, he passed out Bibles with dollar bills inside them to homeless people in Manhattan, and one day he encountered a seemingly homeless man who he came to believe was “an angel of God.”
The man/angel told Poveromo’s girlfriend, who is now his wife, to “watch the Trumps and Clintons” while telling Poveromo to visit a rabbi, Poveromo said. Then he disappeared.
Poveromo has since converted to Judaism and now it appears that the Trump and Clinton advisory might be coming to fruition, he said.
“For the first time in history, I believe in a candidate,” Poveromo said.
Trump’s support is sometimes faith-based in other ways.
For example, do Trump voters believe Trump will get Mexico to pay for an immense wall on the southern border?
“I don’t care if they build the wall,” said Ricky Smith, 67, a retired Publix worker from Boca Raton. “Trump’s going to do something. He’s powerful. He has a mission and he believes it.
“He’s the only candidate who has ideas for the future. Everybody else just wants to argue about what happened in the past.”
This was a group of voters who turned a deaf ear to the constant drumbeat of anti-Trump political ads playing on their TV sets the past week.
“They can throw a dumpster at him and it wouldn’t affect me one bit,” said Michael Ross, 72, a Trump voter at the Delray Beach Community Center.
Ross, who cast his ballot with his emotional support cockatoo, Louie, said it’s time to run America like a business.
“We can only hope that Trump is the real deal,” Ross said. “We’ve got to hope it’s not a setup by George Soros and the Democrats to get one of theirs in.”
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