Buckle up. The Trump menagerie is headed to Florida | Fred Grimm

Suddenly, Florida has a new raison d’ 1/4 u00eatre: America’s designated Trump sump, a depository for our departing (hopefully, please God, just make him go) president and his offspring.

After a subtle nudge from 81 million American voters, 59 unfavorable court decisions, 306 electoral college electors, followed by repudiation from both a congressional majority and his personal butler Mike Pence, the president and his clan are finally abandoning Joe Biden’s Washington for oh-so-indulgent Florida.

Here, they’ll find themselves embraced by a worshipful contingent of MAGA zealots, including (depending on the range of his court-ordered GPS ankle monitor) that grinning Manatee County rioter who paraded through the halls of Congress toting Nancy Pelosi’s lectern. (As Jimmy Kimmel noted Wednesday evening, “It took them a couple days to scrub the Florida off of it, but the lectern should be good to go.”)

According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, Florida hosts five chapters of the far-right bullies, the Proud Boys, AKA Trump Fan Boys. Proud Boys leader Enrique Tarrio, who still lives with his mother in Miami, staged a 300-person launch party for his failed 2020 congressional campaign at Trump’s Doral golf club. Last year, he served as state director of Latinos for Trump.

Miami has become Trump’s kind of town. The local Spanish-language radio stations went all out for him. In September, a prescient report in Politico warned that “the sheer volume” of pro-Trump, anti-Biden conspiracy theories spewing from Spanish-language media, including QAnon-generated lies about Democrat-run pedophile rings and foreign commie influences, could undo Biden in Florida. Indeed, it did. It was as if Miami’s Cuban exiles were choosing between Trump and the ghost of Fidel Castro.

Trump’s Florida welcoming committee also includes a Republican congressional delegation that couldn’t abide the notion that Trump should be accountable for encouraging his mob to storm the capitol. Not one of the state’s Republican U.S. reps voted in favor of impeachment Wednesday. Because Florida’s Republican politicians, from the governor on down, surely love Trump more than they respect Democracy. (Or perhaps they’re calculating what an influx of Trumps could do for Florida property values.)

Unless his wildly ineffective legal team or his rampaging vandals can effect a White House coup before the inauguration, our disgraced ex-prez will soon be sulking at home in Mar-a-Lago. (Plans for Trump to first visit one of his golf courses in Scotland this week were scotched by the First Minister, using COVID-19 travel as a convenient excuse.)

More Trumps are headed our way. Last month, Jared and Ivanka paid a modest $31.8 million for waterfront lot in Indian Creek, an uber-secure, uber-rich island community in Biscayne Bay, a place to relax after solving so many of the world’s problems.

Donald Trump Jr. and girlfriend Kimberly Guilfoyle — last seen dancing, laughing and mugging for the cameras as the family watched the storming of the capitol on TV — are home-hunting in Jupiter, according to the New York Post. The Post also reported that Tiffany Trump and her heir-to-billions boyfriend Michael Boulos were considering gaudy new digs in Miami.

Florida was once considered more enlightened than the more reactionary states of the Old South, with a political median somewhere between Lawton Chiles and Jeb Bush. Not lately. Not since the depressing realization that so many among the rabble who scaled the Capitol walls on Jan. 6 (like a reenactment of the zombie invasion in “World War Z”, but scarier) would be slouching home to Florida.

The FBI has compiled a growing list of Florida homeboys who helped disrupt the congressional certification of the presidential election and sent terrified elected representatives scurrying for safety. Identification has been made easier because the rioters, following Trump’s lead, refused to wear face masks that might have both protected them from COVID and defeated the feds’ facial recognition software. Instead, with cameras rolling, including for selfies, the barefaced mob smashed windows, doors, furniture. They smeared feces on the marble floors. They attacked cops. They ransacked offices. They ran about with bundles of plastic zip ties, intended for hostages. They chanted, “Hang Mike Pence!” though they would have settled for lynching any member of Congress deemed insufficiently deferential to a wanna-be president-for-life. They murdered a policeman. Then they posted selfies.

They might seem a hard bunch to love, but Trump told them, in his first taped statement to his rioters, “We love you. You’re very special. I know how you feel. But you have to go home now.”

For too many of the Trumps and Trump cultists in Washington that awful day, going home means they’re coming our way.

Fred Grimm, a longtime resident of Fort Lauderdale, has worked as a journalist in South Florida since 1976. Reach him by email at leogrimm@gmail.com or on Twitter: @grimm_fred