WASHINGTON — Former Indiana Hoosiers basketball coach Bobby Knight stepped up to a lectern in a half-full conference room to insult President Obama’s “pretty poor” golf game and work ethic. Former “Apprentice” contestant and incoming White House staffer Omarosa spoke at a press conference about urban street violence. Hall of Fame fullback Jim Brown, who raised eyebrows by paying an unexpected call to Trump Tower last month, sat on an office chair clutching a Cleveland Browns-themed cane as a pianist serenaded him with jazz standards.
Trump’s lieutenant Michael Cohen — who first shot to national attention in 2015 for threatening a journalist for reporting on a since-recanted rape allegation made against Trump by his first wife — shaking hands with well-wishers, told POLITICO he had not had a chance to try a “Putin’s Moscow Hacking Mule,” the featured cocktail at a nearby open bar.
“They should have a drink for me called ‘Not in Moscow,’” said Cohen, who recently denied unsubstantiated allegations made by a former British intelligence official that he met with Russian officials in Prague last summer on behalf of Trump. “It’s a Moscow Mule without the vodka.”
Scottie Nell Hughes, an early defender of Trump on cable news, where she famously proclaimed, “There’s no such thing, unfortunately, anymore of facts,” weighed the pros and cons of entering the administration. Pastor Darrell Scott, the organizer of Trump’s summits with black faith leaders, proclaimed joyously, “We won, God-dungit!”
And that was just one party on Thursday afternoon.
Every presidential campaign has its Joe the Plumbers and its Swiftboat Veterans for Truth, the minor characters who fill out the ranks of the country’s quadrennial drama. But no cast has been quite so sprawling or colorful as the one that strutted and fretted upon the national stage alongside Trump during his frenetic rise to power. This week, they convened in Washington from their disparate roosts to toast the figure whose campaign united them by catapulting them into, or back into, a strange sort of shared prominence. Their celebrations ushered the madcap atmosphere of the campaign into the capital, touching off an era in which old-school celebrity, social media prodigiousness and vocal loyalty to Trump could carry as much currency as Washington’s traditional markers of credibility.
“This is a combination family reunion, church convention and coming-out party,” said Scott at Thursday afternoon’s $1,000-a-head fundraiser for Brown’s Amer-I-Can foundation, co-hosted by former Baltimore Ravens running back Ray Lewis, who pleaded down a 2000 murder charge to obstruction of justice, at the K Street offices of K&L Gates.
It was a reunion befitting the sort of free-wheeling, do-it-yourself campaign in which the line between enthusiastic bikers and official campaign security sometimes grew blurry and a pair of North Carolina sisters who drank and rhapsodized about Trump on YouTube became top trail surrogates after staffers showed their videos to the boss.
As if to hammer home the point, Scott, the 58-year-old pastor from Cleveland, recounted his experiences wandering freely around Trump’s office and campaign headquarters on November 7 and 8, chatting with Melania Trump about his grandchildren and grilling Brad Parscale about early voting numbers as the campaign’s digital director sat on his desk, breezily tossing around a Nerf football.
“Donald Trump was able, in the words of Rudyard Kipling, to walk with kings and to keep the common touch. He kept the grassroots around him. He took us and made us national figures,” Scott said. “Rather than the elites and the snobs and the upper crust.”
Indeed, what the week’s festivities lacked in size — the Financial Times estimated a paltry inauguration showing of 250,000 — they made up for in the sheer improbability of the newly minted bold-faced names that did show up.
On Thursday night, many of these campaign-famous figures made their way through tight security at the National Press Club to attend Deploraball. There, attendees were directed to a side door and asked by police to produce identification before they could slip behind a barrier separating the building from F Street, where protesters, some with faces covered, held aloft a giant balloon elephant with the word “racism” written on it.
Inside, headshots of the press club’s usual staid denizens — like Bill Weld — lined the hallowed halls, gazing out at the white boys in red hats and black tuxedoes who had taken the building over. Ball-goers munched on finger food and made eyes at Lauren Southern, the 21-year-old Canadian activist known for being attractive and opposing feminism and immigration, who wore a blue gown.
Chants of “Lock her up” and “U-S-A” went up during speeches from blogger Mike Cernovich, prominent pusher of the #Pizzagate and #HillarysHealth hashtags, and Jim Hoft, publisher of Gateway Pundit, a site known for claiming that photos of the Cleveland Cavaliers’ championship parade were throngs coming out for a Trump town hall in Maine and for spreading the false claim that an Asian woman taking pictures of Rex Tillerson’s notes at his confirmation hearing was a Washington Post editor.
Hoft, resplendent in a rich burgundy jacket, announced that the Trump administration had promised Gateway Pundit a seat in the White House briefing room. Then he introduced Lucian Wintrich — the artist behind the erotic “Twinks for Trump” photography that decorated the Republican National Convention’s surreal “Gays for Trump” party — as the site’s White House correspondent, prompting chants of “real news” from the Deploraball attendees.
Gavin McInnis, the Vice co-founder and creator of the pro-Trump, “Western chauvinist” fraternal organization the Proud Boys, greeted Trump’s election as a moment of male liberation. Milwaukee sheriff David Clarke, in a tuxedo and formal cowboy hat, said of Democrats, “The only reason I’ll be reaching across the aisle is to grab one of them by the throats.”
Undercover video activist James O’Keefe, who pleaded guilty in 2010 to entering a federal building under false pretenses, received a hero’s welcome after publishing a video on Monday that apparently exposed protesters’ plans to drop stink bombs at the ball. O’Keefe announced that the next target of his undercover videos would be the mainstream media. “We are inside their newsrooms,” he said.
Pharmaceutical executive Martin Shkreli, currently under indictment for securities fraud, camped out by a buffet table and responded to a question about how he felt about the inauguration by ordering me to “leave the premises,” to no avail. Then he picked up some cheese and told a New York Magazine photographer, “I don’t find you lovely at all.”
Dirty trickster Roger Stone was slated to attend, though as news broke in the New York Times that a joint federal investigation into his possible ties to Russian interests included reviews of intercepted communications and financial records, he was nowhere to be found, apparently due to a dispute over ticketing his entourage. A table stacked high with copies of Stone’s latest book stood outside the main ballroom, where an aide hawked them to partygoers.
North Carolina consultant Bill Mitchell, who abandoned his career during the campaign to devote himself full-time to tweeting his support of Trump and hosting a homemade radio show about the New York billionaire, also attended Deploraball, before making his way Shelly’s Back Room, a cigar bar near the White House, where he got into a heated confrontation with white nationalist alt-right leader Richard Spencer, in which Mitchell maintains Spencer’s friends shoved him and in which Spencer says only heated words were exchanged.
Spencer, who had been banned from Deploraball lest his racist views taint the event, lamented that Shkreli was permitted to attend. “Someone who up-sells AIDS medication is welcome,” he said. “I care about my race and civilization and yet I’m verboten.” The next day, while he gave an interview to the Australian Broadcasting Corporation near the site of anti-Trump street protests, Spencer was punched in the face on camera by a demonstrator.
Down on the waterfront at Fiola Mare, usually the haunt of Georgetown sophisticates, Willie Robertson, the “Duck Dynasty” star who spoke at the RNC, donned a white bandana atop his tuxedo and rubbed shoulders with the likes of Rand Paul. British nationalist Nigel Farage, who rode the tailwinds of Brexit across the Atlantic to soak up the limelight in debate spin rooms, the RNC and an August Trump rally in Mississippi, hosted a party at the Hay-Adams. Earlier on Thursday, Farage huddled with West Coast donors in the Benjamin Franklin room of the St. Regis Hotel to plot what some backers are calling “Calexit,” according to people familiar with the meeting. One backer of the initiative described it as a plan to “spread liberty to California” by breaking it up into multiple states.
While Trump stewed over the lack of A-list talent at the inauguration, he also touted the participation of the Bikers for Trump, grassroots supporters who offered volunteer security at campaign rallies and scored tickets from the campaign to debates and the RNC. On Friday, the group put on a concert featuring bagpipes along the parade route on Pennsylvania Avenue in front of the District of Columbia Court of Appeals.
As he set up the concert, the group’s leader, Chris Cox, wearing a crocodile skin hat with crocodile teeth around the brim, chomped on a cigar, and in true Trump fashion, expressed his displeasure with the wording of a POLITICO headline from April (“Meet the vigilantes who patrol Trump’s rallies”).
Earlier in the week, Cox made what might end up being a more enduring linguistic contribution to Trump’s inauguration than the president’s own inaugural address when he vowed on Fox News that the bikers would form a “wall of meat” to protect well-wishers from protesters during the festivities.
After the house band for Easyriders magazine played, Al Baldasaro — a friend of original campaign manager Corey Lewandowski’s from New Hampshire who became a regular warm-up speaker at Trump rallies and made headlines in August when he said that Hillary Clinton “should be shot in a firing squad for treason” — addressed the bikers, some of whom shouted profanities at student protesters, but who were not involved in any major incidents on Friday.
After making a video about packing for Washington, sisters Diamond and Silk, YouTube vloggers-turned-campaign trail fixtures, dinned on croissants at Trump Hotel, donned gowns for the balls and even filmed an inauguration video mid-oath from the Capitol lawn. “Yes, yes, I feel these showers are blessings,” one said when raindrops begin to fall during the oath, spinning in real time.
At the Washington Hilton north of DuPont circle, boxer Floyd Mayweather, who has called Trump a “friend” and also recently praised Obama as a “good president,” hosted a benefit for the Moblze Foundation, which works on urban revitalization (the name is pronounced “mobilize”). Trump’s pick for Housing and Urban Development, Ben Carson, stopped in for a brief photo opportunity. With campaign manager Armstrong Williams in tow, Carson expressed the belief that if Trump’s inauguration could bring together such a diverse cast of characters, then the country could heal its divisions. “I hope it means we can start thinking about the fact that we are not each other’s enemies,” he said.
After the official festivities wrapped on Friday night, Trump’s sons, Hope Hicks and several Fox News personalities gathered at a private party at the Trump Hotel, according to an attendee.
And for those partying into the night, Paolo Zampolli, the Italian-playboy-cum-modeling-agent-cum-U.N.-ambassador-from-Domenica who takes credit for introducing Trump and Melania in the ’90s, rented out the Living Room off McPherson Square. The party, co-hosted by two-time presidential candidate Steve Forbes, brought New York’s nightclub scene to Washington, with the usual old men in tuxedoes supplemented by an unusual number of fashion models – including Zampolli’s towering wife Amanda, a former Brazilian model turned U.N. ambassador from Grenada — dancing to the beats of a house DJ in the dimly lit underground space.
Zampolli — who once embarked on a business venture with Trump over dinner at Manhattan’s Cipriani Downtown in the presence of magician David Copperfield — arrived after midnight and delivered a warm message to the television channel Fashion One 4k, which had dispatched a camera crew.
The American carnage of nearby anti-Trump riots that had rocked the surrounding blocks all day was nowhere to be seen, and Zampolli, who came to campaign prominence last summer as questions emerged about Melania Trump’s immigration history, saw only smiling faces. “Today,” he said, “everybody is happy.”
Katie Glueck and Daniel Lippman contributed to this report.
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