One afternoon in early July, Marvin Peavy, a voluble self-made real estate mogul from Georgia, was standing on the fourth-floor deck of his beach house in the Florida Panhandle, the one that nearly everyone seems to call the Trump house.
He was beaming like a man who had just won a pie-eating contest. This was his summer to bask in victory.
Before him, spreading to the horizon, were the sparkling azure gradations of the Gulf of Mexico. Below him, vacationers puttered along the busy two-lane highway in golf carts and S.U.V.s. Many honked and hooted their appreciation for the giant pro-Trump banners that have long adorned Mr. Peavy’s home — ones that officials in Walton County, Fla., spent years trying to force him to remove.
One banner hanging that day described the president as “Daddy Trump” and wished everyone a happy Father’s Day. Another declared, “Welcome to the Gulf of America.” A third saluted American independence, with the tagline “Trump 2028.”
In a few minutes, Mr. Peavy, 65, would drop a new banner. He promised it would be something spicy. “You know what? We have the First Amendment right,” he said, a mischievous smile spreading on his face. “People can do whatever they want to do.”
In 2021, county code-enforcement officials determined that his banners had violated rules designed to ward off any hint of beach-town tackiness on
Scenic Highway 30A
, a stretch of vacationland that has taken to
calling itself
“the Hamptons of the South.”
We are having trouble retrieving the article content.
Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.
Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and
log into
your Times account, or
subscribe
for all of The Times.
Thank you for your patience while we verify access.
Already a subscriber?
Log in
.
Want all of The Times?
Subscribe
.