From Trump, to Tucker Carlson, to Bret Baier: Which GOP pundits have called Florida home?

Florida has been a thinktank for far-right conservative legislation and commentary alike for an entire generation. The last Democrat to be the state's governor was Kenneth Hood "Buddy" Mackay in 1998, a lieutenant governor who took over when Gov. Lawton Chiles died that December.

From the time former Gov. Jeb Bush was in office all the way up through the present-day administration of Ron DeSantis, the Sunshine State has attracted many more Republicans — and GOP pundits — to its expensive South Florida shores.

Here's a quick roundup of some of the biggest-name Republicans who have called or still call South Florida home.

What's the history behind Donald Trump's Mar-a-Lago mansion? It once belonged to an heiress

A few decades before Donald Trump became the 45th President of the United States, the real estate mogul bought the Palm Beach mansion of late cereal heiress Marjorie Merriweather Post. She had intended it to be used as a warm-weather winter home for U.S. presidents upon her death. Mar-a-Lago, the property behind the former president's federal indictment, sits on almost 20 acres and cost Post $7 million to build in 1927 — that's over $121 million today.

Upon her death in 1973, she donated the 128-room mansion to the U.S. government. In 1980 it was named a landmark and the following year, the government returned the property to The Post Foundation because $1 million in upkeep costs each year was too much.

Trump purchased the property for around $5 million in 1985, paying an extra $3 million to keep Post's furniture and antiques.

Opinion: Mar-a-Lago is no simple private residence, I know first-hand

FOX news' Bret Baier, whose house used to be Tommy Hilfiger's home

Only five minutes away from Trump's Mar-a-Lago, FOX news anchor Bret Baier and his wife are selling their Palm Beach home that used to belong to Tommy Hilfiger. Bret and Amy Baier bought the 4,000-square-foot-plus home just over a year ago, in March of 2022, for $12 million. The house was recently listed at a higher price of $16.495 million.

Rush Limbaugh spent the last 25 years of his life in a Palm Beach mansion

The late host of the pioneering syndicated conservative radio talk show the Rush Limbaugh Show lived in his Palm Beach mansion from 1996 until his death in 2021. Limbaugh's home, a 2.7-acre waterfront property, quietly hit the market last year and sold in March for a whopping $155 million to cosmetics billionaire William P. Lauder. The North Ocean Boulevard home has around 250 feet of ocean bordering it and direct, private access to the beach.

Tucker Carlson has a home in Boca Grande

On the other side of south Florida, former FOX News host Tucker Carlson, who was ousted from the network in April, has a 2,812 square-foot home on 18th Street West in Boca Grande. The Lee County home cost the commentator around $5.5 million last August.

“Retirement is going great so far," the Daily Mail reported that Carlson told reporters outside the home in April, after being booted from FOX. For about the past month, Carlson has been commentating in videos he posts to Twitter. Several national news outlets reported earlier this month that FOX has told him to stop the videos because of a contract obligation.

Late FOX CEO Roger Ailes' died only a month after purchasing a $36 million Palm Beach home

The former FOX News CEO, who died at 77 in May of 2017, purchased his Palm Beach home on 6 Ocean Drive only a month before he died. Ailes purchased the 12,747 square-foot mansion and its 94 feet of beachfront for $36 million before injuries following a fall he took in the home caused his death.

His widow, Elizabeth Ailes, moved to another Palm Beach mansion in 2019 for $3.75 million. The historic home, new to her, was designed by modernist architect Howard Chilton in 1952 for noted Palm Beach physician David Newman. Ailes' widow renovated and restored the home and applied to have the home listed as a landmark.

"It was my passion and pleasure to bring the home back to its original beauty," Elizabeth Ailes told Palm Beach Landmarks Preservation commissioners last year. "Too often, we see something old, and it's knocked down. I have a love of the old. From 2006 to 2016, in the Hudson Valley, I restored eight buildings. One was 100 years old, one was a 1950s mid-century modern architecture.

"But it's the house at 4 Ocean Lane that was my most enjoyable and challenging project, and I had a great team," she said.

Sean Hannity bought a townhouse just two miles away from Mar-a-Lago two years ago

FOX News commentator Sean Hannity shelled out $5.3 million in 2021 for a three-bedroom, five-bathroom townhouse only a couple of miles from Trump's Mar-a-Lago. Hannity bought the two-story oceanfront townhouse for almost $1 million more than its previous, pre-renovation sale just a month prior.

Rudy Giuliani ditched New York for Palm Beach in the early 2000s

In 2019, the former New York City Mayor and his estranged wife listed one of their two Palm Beach Condos amidst a bitter divorce. Giuliani and his ex-wife, who were married for over 15 years, listed the condo at $3.3 million. The couple bought the 2,280 square-foot space in 2010 for $1.41 million. The listing was taken down and is still the Florida home of the former New York City mayor.

Giuliani said he could be ”a commercial for Palm Beach” and loves to play golf on Trump’s courses in Jupiter and in West Palm Beach, where he is a member, he told Politico in 2019.

"Rudy Giuliani at one time secretly stayed at Donald Trump's Mar-a-Lago Club, where he used an underground tunnel to go back and forth from the resort while he was depressed and drinking a lot after falling short in the 2008 Republican presidential primaries," Business Insider reported in August last year.

Giuliani's star-studded condo building: Billionaire Collier family member buys Palm Beach penthouse in same building as Rudy Giuliani

Arrival of FOX News' Neil Cavuto follows closely behind Hannity

In 2021, the FOX News host paid $7.25 million for a waterfront condo on Singer Island, near Palm Beach, only two weeks after Hannity bought his beachfront townhouse on the South end of Palm Beach. The five-bedroom Ocean Drive apartment boasts 7,977 square feet of living space. This isn't Cavuto's first condo in Palm Beach, though. He sold his other Singer Island condo for $790,000 just a few days before.

Lianna Norman covers trending news in Palm Beach County for The Palm Beach Post. You can reach her at lnorman@pbpost.com. You can follow her reporting on social media @LiannaNorman on Twitter.

This article originally appeared on Palm Beach Post: Republican media, politicians who called Florida their expensive home