Trump the ‘dissident’ gets hero’s welcome at CPAC

National Harbor, Maryland

At the climax of this year’s Conservative Political Action Conference, former president Donald Trump took the stage hours late. No one seemed to care.

Trump energized a mostly patient crowd of fans gathered near the nation’s capital before jetting back down to South Carolina, where he’ll likely celebrate a win over the state’s former governor Nikki Haley — who skipped CPAC this year, as did several other Republican Party mainstays.

CPAC wasn’t always Trump turf — which seems unfathomable given that he just broke Ronald Reagan’s record thirteen appearances at the marquee conservative conference. But this year, attendees and sponsors were squarely behind the president. While there was no golden Trump statue this year — or even any of the new Trump sneakers! — you could see everyone from a Trump drag queen to Trump carolers to even a January 6 pinball machine. 

Trump proclaimed himself a “political dissident,” and laid out some priorities for a second term this afternoon, barely addressing Haley, his only credible primary rival. While there’s ostensibly a Republican primary still going on, his remarks almost exclusively honed in on his likely opponent, President Joe Biden. This continues his full-blown pivot to the general election, on which his allies are trying to nudge the Republican National Committee, to varying degrees of success. 

Shortly after Trump’s speech concluded, the political world shifted its gaze to South Carolina, where Trump rallied his troops at the Black Conservative Federation’s gala last night. During the BCF gala in Columbia, he completely ignored the state’s former governor during his stemwinder of a speech. Jackie Sackstein, chair of Maryland’s Young Republicans chapter, who made the trek down from Maryland, told The Spectator that “he barely mentioned Nikki and is 100 percent focused on winning in November… Trump spoke for two hours, sans teleprompter, and never missed a word, stopped for water, or anything.”

At CPAC today, Trump decried Biden’s “gang of thugs” while pledging an agenda of “sealing of the border, stopping the invasion, drill baby drill, [and] send[ing] Joe Biden’s illegal aliens back home.”

Miles from his former home on 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, Trump was book-ended at the conference by two Latin American leaders who are channeling their own versions of Trumpism: El Salvador’s Nayib Bukele and Argentina’s Javier Milei. The former urged American conservatives to “put up a fight” while the latter and his globally famous head of hair took to the stage to discuss his economic successes.

Bukele and Milei are coming off of both high-profile successes with regards to crime and their country’s economy, respectively. Bukele has seen his tough-on-crime policies transform his country from the murder capital of the world to a regional safe haven, and Milei posted the first budget surplus in nearly twelve years in Argentina, following a series of drastic budget cuts. 

While attendance seemed down at CPAC from previously years, the conference’s culmination left little doubt: this isn’t 2016 any more, when Ted Cruz won the event’s famous straw poll. It was Trump Central this go around, with his potential vice presidential candidates lauding him and his tenure, and his fans shouting their applause throughout his lengthy remarks.