As families across America scale back traditional holiday gatherings or cancel them altogether, thousands of young conservatives are slated to spend the days just before Christmas mingling in and around Donald Trump’s South Florida resort. The occasion for this potential super-spreader gathering is the pro–Trump youth group Turning Point USA’s year-end gala, kicking off Friday night at Mar-a-Lago, and its annual Student Action Summit, also in West Palm Beach. According to a September email promoting the summit, which begins Saturday, some 5,000 students were expected to attend the four-day event. (For the record, The state of Florida reported 13,148 new COVID-19 cases on Thursday.)
It might be easier to understand why attendees are so willing to take on the potential risks of going—e.g., dead grandparents, permanently damaged respiratory systems, and acting as patient zeros in neighborhood or hometown outbreaks—when one examines the event’s speaker list, which features conservative A-listers Tucker Carlson, Laura Ingraham, Ted Cruz, Rand Paul, Matt Gaetz, Donald Trump Jr., and numerous other big names in the outgoing president’s orbit. “The Veritas Team is headed down to West Palm Beach,” the conservative activist group tweeted Friday, while promoting that its founder, James O’Keefe, was giving an “EPIC speech on Sunday morning!”
Students who choose to attend might very well end pap-pap’s life early, but they also might get lucky enough to take a selfie with Rudy Giuliani, hear one of Jesse Watters’s rants live-in-concert, and if 2019’s last-minute guest is any indicator, even hear one of Trump’s last teleprompter-less presidential speeches. They might also find themselves at the center of a monumental decision: in what direction the future of the party—a.k.a. its youth—will turn now that the 45th president’s days in office are numbered. In many ways, their decision will mirror that of party elders, who are reportedly torn between a wide swath of 2024 candidates and Trump, who is threatening to freeze the field with a run of his own. But in others it’s distinct, promising to override the path taken by the current powers that be as they come of age to control the levers of power themselves.
After covering Turning Point’s West Palm Beach bash in past years, I’ve concluded that “right-wing Coachella” is the most accurate way I’ve heard the conference described, encompassing the big-name lineups; the huge crowds of young people, many of whom travel hundreds of miles to be there, documenting every moment and every celebrity sighting on Instagram; the meticulously planned outfits, including Lilly Pulitzer elephant-pattern dresses and skirts paired with pearls, or tucked-in Trump campaign T-shirts; and the drunken, after-hours debauchery that goes on until the bars close, at which point students often go to pools or file into packed hotel rooms to continue drinking.
With COVID-19 case numbers in the U.S. reaching record highs, this week recording more than 247,000 cases and over 114,000 hospitalizations, Turning Point spokesman Andrew Kolvet assured the Palm Beach Post earlier this month that organizers are “reacting and adjusting our plans on the fly as information becomes available” and said that the group has made a “sizeable investment” in personal protective equipment, adding that students will be encouraged to only eat with and spend time around their respective pods, i.e. the group of attendees they are rooming with. In other words, Turning Point is employing a similar mitigation strategy that universities relied on, only to learn that telling thousands of young people to stay away from each other doesn’t work out well. (The New York Times reported last week that more than 397,000 coronavirus cases have occurred on college campuses since the pandemic began, an explosion that sometimes led to students bringing the virus back home.) Kolvet described the situation as “fluid,” and emphasized that “the national conversation was different” when the event was planned. Still, he argued that so many students are still eager to attend despite the ongoing pandemic because “kids want to get out—they know they’re not a super vulnerable cohort so there is probably a little more willingness to go out.”
Needless to say, the event could be detrimental to Palm Beach County’s COVID-19 mitigation efforts, especially since it is taking place right as local medical officials are begging residents to heed health guidelines. “We’re starting to stop doing those things that helped us at the beginning, and that includes everything from the hand-washing to the mask-wearing to keeping the social distance, so our message is to encourage people to continue those things,” said Kitonga Kiminyo, M.D., an infectious disease specialist at Palm Beach County’s T. Leroy Jefferson Medical Society. His statement was released the same day the Sun Sentinel published a report on the hordes of young people in Palm Beach County who are out at packed bars and clubs, not wearing masks, and generally acting like coronavirus does not exist.
This carefree living is, in part, allowed to go on thanks to Florida governor Ron DeSantis, who has refused to enforce mask mandates or limit capacities at bars and restaurants. One man who shares DeSantis’s view on COVID-19 is Turning Point cofounder and president Charlie Kirk. “Do not force me to wear a mask, it’s that simple. I’m not gonna do it, I’m not,” Kirk said during a rant on his podcast in July. “Every single time I go into one of these grocery stores, ‘Where’s your mask?’ I say, well first of all, the science around masks is very questionable, very questionable.” (It is not.) Kirk made the comments just days prior to the death of Turning Point’s other cofounder, Bill Montgomery, due to complications from COVID-19.
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