Here’s an economic indicator to share with any lingering “affordability crisis” doubters you encounter this holiday season: The five-bedroom house near Mar-a-Lago that cost the Trump administration $23,318 a month to rent back in 2020 now costs taxpayers an eyeball-gouging $120,000 a month, more than five times its cost five years ago—though don’t worry, that rate is frozen in place until 2029. The house’s owner, Vesna Oelsner, defended the $7.2 million four-year lease on her $8.4 million house as “appropriate for the area,” and she isn’t actually wrong about that. No matter where I turned for insight into the sadistic madness Trump 2.0 inflicted upon Americans over the first year of its Oligarch Revenge Tour, the Epstein State seemed always to be the headquarters of the devolution.
The Private Equity Hatchet Man Leading the Lost Boys of DOGE
First came the shock treatment administered by DOGE, which dispatched teenage sociopaths to hack into the Treasury Department’s payment systems and stop payment to anything deemed “woke,” change the locks and terminate the building access of dozens of employees and contractors at various federally funded institutes, spam two million federal government employees with taunting emails about how worthless they all were, and so forth. Elon Musk was the titular leader of that operation, but while the liberally narcotic-addled billionaire sat and swayed for photo ops with chainsaws and a ubiquitous little boy named X, the real dirty work was done by Tom Krause, a veteran private equity hatchet man in the Neutron Jack mold on loan from the Fort Lauderdale “software as a service” rollup Citrix. Read the story.
Runaway Tren
Then the ICE abductions began: of day laborers and hairdressers, anti-genocide protesters and independent journalists. Permanent residents, green card holders, Fulbright scholars, and other comprehensively documented legal noncitizens were informed they were being deported for running afoul of the “Alien Enemies Act” during a time of “war”; law-abiding Venezuelans who had migrated under an administrative parole program that gave work authorization to economic migrants from certain countries were shackled and flown to the world’s most famous torture chamber (and later Ron DeSantis’s more graft-laden CECOT homage “Alligator Alcatraz”). It turned out that that whole jaw-dropping episode, too, was the masterwork of Floridians, specifically an AIPAC-connected Fort Lauderdale crisis PR firm and a Tampa-based CIA agent turned astroturf regime turnaround artist, who had collaborated with the Miami-based right-wing Venezuelan permanent exile community to invent a shadowy menace called “Tren de Aragua,” whose supposed “invasion” of the United States became the justification for all of it: the illegal abductions, the illegal deportations, the illegal torture, and soon, an illegal dirty war. My story was about the Brooklyn slumlords who hired the Fort Lauderdale PR firm to concoct an “alibi” for the deplorable conditions they had imposed upon a portfolio of buildings they had purchased in and around Aurora, Colorado, and ended up unlocking the animating “theory” of Trump 2.0 immigration policy and foreign policy. Read the story.
The $30 Billion Identity Theft of Venezuela
Later in the year, I explored the ocean of grift that had consumed the aforementioned Venezuelan perma-exile community since Trump’s seemingly quixotic decision back in 2019 to recognize a nobody named Juan Guaidó—now living in South Florida, naturally—as the “legitimate” leader of Venezuela, and thereby the rightful custodian of the country’s tens of billions of dollars in assets frozen by a rather capricious and hegemonic branch of the U.S. Treasury Department known as the Office of Foreign Assets Control, which it turns out has been DOGE-ing out the economies of whole countries since before “Big Balls” was born. Through a still mysterious cocktail of incompetence, venality, and abject myopia, Team Guaidó managed to make billions of dollars disappear, and their performance is an almost irrefutable display of why even the most lunatic Ayn Rand devotees in Venezuela do not trust people like María Corina Machado to run Venezuela. Read the story.
Sugar Daddies
Unfortunately, Machado and her allies wield too much influence in the American political process for our policy toward the desperate country to be anything but maximally destructive to everyone who doesn’t run an oil services contractor or a regime change consulting firm. There is of course obvious precedent for this, which brings me to another insane corner of South Florida lore I explored in 2025: that of the Fanjul family, a terrifyingly powerful dynasty of billionaire sugar barons whose patriarchs have been driving foreign policy since the Spanish-American War; more recently, they convinced Trump to lean on Coca-Cola (and an old foe named RFK Jr.) to make American coke Mexican again. Read the story.
The Obamacare Boiler Room
Of course, Florida pulls as much weight in domestic policy as it does in Marco Rubio’s State Department, because its physicians, mobsters, private equity ghouls, and Bay of Pigs veterans have always led the nation in the high art of defrauding the American health care system, something the Trump administration has toiled every day to make even easier to do. As millions of Americans pray for an extension of the Obamacare subsidies, I also chronicled the scourge of illegal boiler rooms that specialize in signing up poor and vulnerable people for phony Obamacare health plans, then charging the government for the hysterically inflated premiums. Read the story.