Donald Trump posed for a photo and shook hands with a convicted far-right German politician, who allegedly appeared in professional pornographic films, at Mar-a-Lago on election day.
Phillipp-Anders Rau, 41, a Bundestag candidate for the populist Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) party, was found guilty of stealing from a hotel in 2009 and was thrown out of university in 2015 for doctoring his high school transcripts, according to legal records. He denies appearing in porn movies.
The Secret Service, which has been under pressure since a failed assassination attempt against Trump in July, told The Daily Beast that the controversial guest had been allowed to get alongside Trump because he had a formal invitation to the club. The former president has previously come under fire for hosting white supremacist Nick Fuentes at a Mar-a-Lago dinner that also featured Kanye West.
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Rau visited Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida on Nov. 5, where the now-president-elect greeted him and several other Germans, their social media profiles show.
Among them was the far-right influencer Leonard Jäger, a homophobic COVID-19 conspiracist who has expressed sympathy with the Reichsbürger movement, a loose association of extremists who deny the legitimacy of the modern German state.
“Being able to shake @realdonaldtrump’s hand as the one and only AfD member there on the day of his victory will be an everlasting memory,” Rau wrote in an Instagram post. “Let’s hope Donald Trump creates the renewal for his country that we in the AfD are planning for our country.”
The AfD is a far-right, anti-immigrant party that Germany’s domestic intelligence service considers a “suspected extremist” organization. Last year, four senior figures participated in a meeting alongside neo-Nazis to discuss mass deportations.
Riding a far-right tide swelling across Europe, the AfD has surged to second place in opinion polls, behind only the center-right Christian Democratic Union (CDU). A German federal election is planned for Feb. 23.
Trump’s election to a second term ignited enthusiasm among members of the far right around the world, whose rank and file the president-elect has consorted with in the past.
Pornos, Stolen Towels and Cocaine
Rau is the rare officeholder whose propensity for personal scandal is nearly on par with Trump’s.
To that end, the diligent reporting of local regional paper Volksstimme has dogged the AfD politician in recent months.
It began in August, when Rau claimed it was “not true” that he had performed in adult films when asked about the rumor at an AfD conference.
Weeks later, however, Volksstimme said its reporting had confirmed there were indeed publicly available pornographic videos featuring him online.
Rau took legal action to block the paper’s coverage. A German court, however, sided with Volksstimme’s reporting and ruled in October that Rau “cannot invoke the fundamental protection of privacy” because “he took part in a professional porn video shoot that was clearly intended for publication.”
Records obtained by Volksstimme in August also show Rau was kicked out of the east German Magdeburg-Stendal University of Applied Sciences in 2015 after it was discovered he had doctored the grades on his high school transcripts.
He launched a failed legal bid against his expulsion. Just like his effort to stop the reporting on his porn career, it ended in a humiliating disclosure: his lawyer claimed he couldn’t be held responsible for his actions because he was addicted to cocaine at the time, Mitteldeutsche Zeitung reported.
And prosecutors in Munich confirmed to Volksstimme in September that, with an accomplice, Rau stole 100 towels, 80 bedsheets, and 21 soap dispensers worth roughly €1,500 ($1,590) from a hotel in October 2009.
He was convicted of theft and given a one-year suspended sentence and five years probation.
To add default to injury, Rau is currently in bankruptcy proceedings set to end later this year.
So, how did a member of a suspected extremist party with a criminal record end up posing with Trump at his members-only resort?
“In this instance, this individual was physically screened and permitted to enter because he was included on a formal invitation,” said a spokesperson for the United States Secret Service, who noted Mar-a-Lago “is a private club that is open to members and their guests” in addition to being Trump’s official residence.
They did not provide details on who invited Rau.
The spokesperson added the agency “works to ensure that all individuals entering a protected facility do not pose a safety risk.”
Rau did not respond to a request for comment made through his local AfD council group. The Trump-Vance transition team did not respond to a request for comment.
But videos shared by conservative young Germans with whom Trump also posed offer clues as to how he, and the others, got there.
The ‘Heretic’ at Mar-a-Lago
The most well-known among the Germans whom Trump greeted was social media provocateur Jäger, who uses the online moniker “Ketzer der Neuzeit” or “Heretic of the New Age” and frequently produces anti-feminist and anti-LGBT videos for his hundreds of thousands of followers.
He has touted chemtrail conspiracy theories, and—according to right-wing extremism watchdog Endstation Rechts—has appeared multiple times alongside antisemitic conspiracy theorist Hans-Joachim Müller, in one video nodding along as Müller rattles off conspiratorial tropes about Jews controlling the world.
Footage posted by Jäger from Mar-a-Lago shows Trump was aware he had visitors from Germany, though it’s unclear if he knew anything about them beyond their nationality.
“Hello everybody, so where’s my German friends?” he asked after stepping outside to greet the group, which also included Beat Ulrich Zirpel, a lesser known right-wing streamer, and Fabrice Ambrosini, a young activist with the center-right CDU.
When they gathered for a group photo, the Germans began to chant in a nod to Trump’s raised-fist reaction to the assassination attempt against him in July: “Fight! Fight! Fight!”
Someone off-camera asked them to do it in their native tongue. They obliged: “Kampf! Kampf! Kampf!”
Trump then shook hands with everyone.
Jäger documented his journey to the heart of Trumpworld in a series of in-depth videos posted to YouTube.
He and Zirpel hatched a plot to convince the Trump campaign to accredit them as media at a Nov. 2 Virginia event, which they hoped could get them in turn into Trump’s election night party and the exclusive Mar-a-Lago resort.
It worked. The video shows Trump campaign press advance staffer Lisa Shoemaker granting them access—with a caution that they be on their best behavior because they weren’t in the campaign’s system. Shoemaker did not reply to a request for comment.
Press pass in hand, Jäger is shown with a green bar on-screen indicating an increase of his “chances of getting into Mar-a-Lago.”
The day before the Nov. 5 election, Jäger and his pal received invitations to Trump’s Election Night rally at the Palm Beach County Convention Center.
They showed off the invite in another of their video diaries.
As the far-right German influencers got their invitations, the Trump campaign was banning journalists—including from Politico, Axios and Puck—from covering the event.
Their way into Mar-a-Lago, meanwhile, was Ambrosini, the 23-year-old fellow German and CDU activist who is apparently remarkably well-connected to the MAGA orbit.
A video posted to YouTube by Jäger shows them talking over drinks with Ambrosini at a restaurant in Miami Beach on Nov. 3.
There, Ambrosini told them he knows several Mar-a-Lago members—without disclosing their identities—and was working to get Jäger, Zirpel and their cameraman access through his contacts.
The connections came through. When they visited the resort on Election Day, Ambrosini joined them.
Rau, the AfD politician, also appears with Ambrosini in the background of several shots Jäger took throughout Mar-a-Lago, including at a reception.
(Whether Rau also sourced his invite through Ambrosini or via his own MAGA connections is unclear. Ambrosini did not respond to a request for comment.)
Trump campaign operatives, meanwhile, were clearly familiar with Jäger and Zirpel by the time they arrived at Mar-a-Lago.
Ryan Coyne—whose right-leaning marketing firm Starboard LLC was paid by Trump Super PAC MAGA Inc. to make digital campaign ads, according to FEC records—greeted them after their meeting with Trump.
Later, after Jäger and Zirpel moved to the election night rally in Palm Beach, they ran into Shoemaker, the Trump staffer who gave them their first press passes in Virginia.
“We loved having you guys,” she told them.
