Inside the Mar-a-Lago Premiere of ‘Police State’: ‘We’re Already in One’

Donald Trump wasn’t at Mar-a-Lago for a red-carpet movie premiere Wednesday night, but his presence was felt — and celebrated — by around 500 conservative influencers, media personalities and politicians who partied at the former president’s Florida home without him.

The premiere was for Dinesh D’Souza’s documentary, Police State, about allegedly normal, harmless Americans who say they’ve been arrested, harassed or censored by various branches of the U.S. government.

While not there, Trump posted online his support for the film and midway through the party D’Souza read the message aloud to guests. The movie exposes “the witch hunt that the deep state has against me. And the police state is coming for you,” Trump wrote.

D’Souza also alluded to a civil trial where Trump is accused of exaggerating the value of his assets, including Mar-a-Lago, which Trump said was worth more than $1 billion while a judge has said it’s value is between $18 million-$27 million.

“It’s hard to believe this place is worth only $18 million,” D’Souza told the assembled in a large hall near the swimming pool.

“Maybe some of us should buy it; sell it for $400 million and use the profits to buy Fox News,” he joked to laughter and applause.

While progressives typically dismiss D’Souza’s work as conspiratorial, a Rasmussen poll in September found that 72 percent of voters are worried that the U.S. is becoming a police state, which the poll described as a tyrannical government that engages in mass surveillance, censorship, ideological indoctrination, and targeting of political opponents.

What Americans fail to agree on is from which side of the aisle the threat comes from. D’Souza’s film tries to make the case it is mainly from the left, though he does criticize a few Republicans — most notably former President George W. Bush — for their alleged contributions.

Progressives also often discount D’Souza’s movies because he pleaded guilty in 2014 to enlisting the help of a straw donor so that he could give more money than was allowed by law to a Senate candidate.

After D’Souza served his sentence, Trump pardoned him, and D’Souza briefly revisits the episode in his movie.

While Rotten Tomatoes gives the movie an 82 percent audience score at time of publishing, a critic at the progressive outlet, Mother Jones, calls it the work of “far-right fringe characters” and laments: “None of the alleged victims in Police State are innocent people like George Floyd or Breonna Taylor, who literally died at the hands of overzealous cops.”

But at Wednesday’s premiere, the movie earned a standing ovation.

Off to the sidelines, D’Souza told Newsweek that he has run into several odd problems in the distribution and marketing of the film, which he says has thus far played for two nights at mostly sold-out theaters, raking in about $1.5 million.

Most notably, he accused the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network of the U.S Department of the Treasury of “intercepting” a $106,000 payment to Salem Media to purchase ads for the movie.

“We now have to retrieve our funds, and it’s going to be a hassle,” he said.

Newsweek has reached out to the Treasury Department and will update this story should it respond.

D’Souza, a former adviser to President Ronald Reagan, is the right’s most successful producer of conservative documentaries. In 2012, his debut movie, 2016: Obama’s America, scored $33 million at the box office, enough to become the second most popular political documentary of all time, after Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11.

Partners in the film include YouTube competitor Rumble, which is streaming the movie, and talk-radio host Dan Bongino.

Ahead of the film, Bongino motioned toward Rumble CEO Chris Pavlovski and said: “His idea was to create a free speech, free idea platform…Make no mistake — this guy’s got a lot of guts.”

U.S. Senate candidate Kari Lake told Newsweek: “We are living in a police state. It’s pretty apparent. Look at January 6 and the two tiers of justice. Our rights are slipping away and more people are waking up to it.”

D’Souza said that authorities who claimed to be saving democracy, upholding the rule of law, fighting misinformation and saving lives with COVID restrictions have abused their power.

A police state is “coming to us in disguise. It’s coming to us marching behind the slogans of virtue,” he said. “The task of this film is to strip away the facade.”

When D’Souza introduced the families of some of those who were arrested during the January 6, 2021, riots at the U.S. Capitol, the crowd applauded.

Will Pope, who attended the premiere and the riots, and has been charged with several crimes associated with the latter, told Newsweek: “Nobody there that day was trying to overthrow the government. Most are normal people who don’t mean you any harm, and they love America.”

Actor Kevin Sorbo, who played TV’s Hercules in the 1980s and stars in mostly in faith-based films like God’s Not Dead nowadays, told Newsweek: “Free speech has been disappearing quickly. That’s the truth, but the truth is kryptonite to Hollywood and to Washington, D.C.”

Former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani, who is facing charges in Fulton County, Georgia, that allege he tried to subvert the will of voters in 2020, similar to charges against Trump, told Newsweek that the mainstream media is biased against conservatives.

“The coverage is consistent with the country. A large percentage of it, through Biden, is becoming fascist,” he said. “The coverage is despicable, disgraceful, unpatriotic and, at times, supportive of criminal conspiracies, and I include Newsweek.”

Fox News personality Leo Terrell, who switched from liberal to conservative in 2016, told Newsweek that Police State is a timely movie for all Americans, but added: “Liberals won’t watch it, but they should.”

Actor Nick Searcy, who plays a composite FBI character in Police State, was at the January 6 riots and made a documentary about it, dubbed Capitol Punishment. He told Newsweek that he’s working on a sequel.

“The suppression of free speech should concern both sides. The intimidation of everyday Americans can happen to anyone,” he said.