Under impeachment cloud, Trump finds solace in Florida’s Republican retiree haven

Oct. 3--THE VILLAGES -- Hounded by a burgeoning impeachment inquiry on Capitol Hill, President Donald Trump escaped the political bubble of Washington Thursday and wrapped himself for one afternoon in the comforting blanket of his part-time home state.

Far from the stifling confines of the White House, Trump basked in the sunny glow of The Villages, a massive Central Florida retirement community where the president can do almost no wrong.

"A really special place," Trump said, as he took the stage before a crowd of about 1,000 packed into a performing arts center. "I was thinking about moving to The Villages, but I just couldn't leave Mar-a-Lago."

Trump's visit to The Villages -- coming coincidentally as House Speaker Nancy Pelosi stopped in South Florida -- couldn't have come at a better time for a president beset by impeachment-minded Democrats and searching for leakers in his inner circle.

Among his supporters in this sprawling collection of planned 55-and-over communities -- where two out of three people voted for him in 2016 -- impeachment is considered a joke. And the real scandal involving Ukraine isn't whether Trump pressured the government to investigate his rivals, but whether former Vice President Joe Biden tried to squash a foreign probe of a company that employed his son.

Trump, to the hundreds who flocked to the town of Lady Lake to hear him speak about Medicare, is a man fighting to preserve America with a strength they compare to the Almighty's.

"Among all the negativity that surrounds him from so many different kinds of people -- from Antifa to the radical Democrats -- he still gets things done," Becky Lampinen, a retired teacher from Iowa, said while waiting for Trump to arrive Thursday morning in an old-fashioned town square. "I don't think there's any man I've ever known that could do that, other than God."

The Villages, advertised as the largest retirement community in the U.S., is one of the biggest reasons Trump won Florida in 2016 -- a role the community could play again in 2020. Located about an hour to the northwest of Disney World, it is the beating heart of the Republican Party in a state Trump's team believes he must win to secure a second term.

"He's taking all these daggers in the back in Washington. We're on his side," said David Ekaitis, a 70-year-old retired financial manager from Indiana. "We're not going to abandon him."

Spreading over 32 square miles, The Villages is a thriving haven for Middle America's baby boomers, where census data shows hardly anyone lacks health coverage or lives under the poverty line, and many of the 130,000 residents get around on electric golf carts. Overwhelmingly white, it has been one of the fastest growing metro areas in the country over the last half-decade, becoming a crucial counterbalance for Republicans in the nation's most important swing state as liberal Northeasterners and Latin Americans flock to South Florida.

According to Let's Preserve the American Dream, a political nonprofit that specializes in voter research around the country, an analysis of voting at precincts in The Villages from the 2016 election shows that 68% of voters here went for Trump over Hillary Clinton. In the tri-county area surrounding The Villages -- including Lake, Marion and Sumter counties -- Trump's 115,000-vote advantage over Clinton was greater than his final margin of victory in Florida.

To the Trump supporters who waited for the president Thursday, the America they wake up to every day is different from the one described by the Democratic presidential candidates. Mostly living on pensions and protected by Medicare, few are worried about their own healthcare, or jobs, fretting instead about their kids. But despite the serene setting, with lakes and golf courses in all directions and the southwest border thousands of miles away, they're worried about illegal immigration and the rise of socialism.

Robert Dreyfus, a retired 83-year-old anesthesiologist who left Miami for Central Florida in 1973, believes that the U.S. "will never recover" if democratic socialist Bernie Sanders were to be elected.

"The culture has changed so dramatically compared to when I was your age, it's barely recognizable," said Dreyfus, who showed up for Trump's event dressed in an American flag shirt and carrying a sign equating liberalism with communism. "It may already be too late for America."

Trump's visit Thursday -- rescheduled this summer in the wake of mass shootings in Texas and Ohio -- was officially a White House stop, with the president signing an executive order that his administration said will expand access and options for seniors under Medicare. But Trump kept things lively, cheekily admonishing a man who yelled "Lock her up!" and encouraging the crowd to troll Democrats by chanting "eight more years."

He quipped that he could have drawn 25,000 people if he held the event outdoors.

Outside, a massive screen was set up in the town square for the throngs who didn't receive White House invitations to The Sharon L. Morse Performing Arts Center, known locally as just "The Sharon." Anti-Trump protesters were in the crowd, and clashed at times with the president's supporters.

Inside the two-tiered, 1,000-seat concert venue -- named after the late, first wife of Villages developer H. Gary Morse -- invited guests treated the event as a chance to rally around their commander in chief as he announced the signing of an executive order that swore to protect "Medicare from Socialist Destruction."

"Leading Democrats have pledged bringing healthcare to illegal immigrants," Trump told the crowd. "They put them way ahead of American citizens like you, who obey our laws. I will never allow these politicians to steal our healthcare and give it away."

Trump's latest executive order is part of a strategy to thread the needle on healthcare. After pushing to dismantle Obamacare, he now plans on -- as Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar put it Thursday morning to reporters -- "protecting what's worked in our system and fixing what's broken."

Democrats pushed back Thursday, arguing that he plans on cutting roughly $500 million in Medicare spending over the next decade.

"He thinks he can distract Floridians from his anti-health record with theatrics, but we see right through it," said Daniela Martins, a spokeswoman for the Florida branch of the pro-Democrat Priorities USA Super PAC.

But Trump's message was well-received in The Villages, where fewer than 3,500 people are enrolled in Obamacare. Meanwhile, in the surrounding three counties, federal data show close to 300,000 people are enrolled in Medicare. (Florida ranks third in the number of Medicare enrollees among states, behind California and Texas.)

"If you believe the media, he's going to come here and cut Medicare," said Jerry Prince, the 72-year-old president of The Villages Republican Club. "Cut Medicare? I don't think so. ... He's not going to come down here and shoot himself in the foot in front of a bunch of friggin' seniors."

Prince says he has no worries that Trump won't be reelected. Nor does Lampinen, the retired teacher from Iowa who showed up early Thursday to see the president arrive. Lampinen, who at age 68 owns a Smith & Wesson .380 EZ, says she's more concerned about whether the Republican Party can find a successor.

"With Trump, we keep our right to free speech, to free worship, to bear arms and to hold onto that Constitution that our forefathers had so much insight in developing. To take that away, we'd become another Venezuela," she said. "I hope that after his second term we'll find another one like him."

Tampa Bay Times reporter Emily Mahoney contributed to this report.

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