That’s what a CPAC organizer says about the problem of how to deal with Trump post-presidency:
One of the premier MAGA gatherings in the nation is struggling to recreate the magic this year.
For decades, the Conservative Political Action Conference has been a staple of Republican politics. In recent years, the conservative confab has been the go-to stop for rising GOP stars, grassroots organizers and luminaries in the Trump movement.
But President Donald Trump’s election loss has created hurdles around programming and guest booking. Stringent coronavirus guidelines in Maryland have pushed the conference outside of the Washington area for the first time in nearly 50 years. Previous sponsors aren’t yet committed or have decided to forgo sponsorship entirely because of changes to the event’s format or disappointment in the return on their investment last year. And the president that attendees adored so much may not show up to the event at all.
Senior Trump adviser Jason Miller said Trump, whose Mar-a-Lago abode is less than 2.5 hours away from the Orlando hotel where this year’s conference will occur on Feb. 25-28, is not currently scheduled to make an appearance. Meanwhile, a senior American Conservative Union official would not answer whether Mike Pence, who drew MAGA world’s ire for certifying Joe Biden’s election, had been invited to speak. A spokesperson for the former vice president did not respond to a request in time for publication.
ACU Chair Matt Schlapp said he is convinced this year’s conference will be no different from past years. “CPAC is going great,” he told POLITICO on Tuesday, before then saying that his quote needed to be attributed without his name. Schlapp did not address questions about why some sponsors were not continuing their CPAC sponsorship. But after those questions were posed and additional questions were sent to CPAC sponsors — including whether the Jan. 6 Capitol riot impacted their thinking about sponsoring again this year — ACU general counsel David Safavian accused POLITICO of “tortious interference with business relationships” and attempting “to ‘cancel’ both CPAC and the American Conservative Union itself.” The group then tweeted a copy of a letter from Safavian that included a litigation threat.
“We fully intend to explore our legal rights to hold Politico fully accountable for what we see as tortious conduct,” the letter stated.
How well CPACgoes this year will provide one of the first public indications about the health of the MAGA movement with Trump out of office and with the Republican Party divided over just how loyal to the former president it should be.
One year ago, CPAC was in a far different place. The 2020 gathering was, for a brief moment, a crowning achievement for the conference’s organizer, Schlapp. Delivering a 90-minute, chest-beating victory speech, Trump showed up to hype his survival of his first impeachment. Pence came as well. More than 30 Trump aides and officials in all spoke at the conference, ranging from Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and Education Secretary Betsy DeVos to senior White House advisers Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump.
But within days, the appearances were overshadowed by news that an attendee who’d been in direct contact with Schlapp had tested positive for Covid-19. Organizers were forced to warn nearly 100 conference-goers of potential exposure and the president’s chief of staff went into self-quarantine, though only one case ended up being traced to the event.
The pandemic is even more of a complicating issue this year, compelling Schlapp to move the event to Florida because there are fewer restrictions on such gatherings in that state. Whether guest speakers will follow him will determine much of the conference’s success.
A full agenda and list of speakers will be posted two to three weeks before the conference begins, according to the CPAC website, but several past speakers contacted by POLITICO said they were still deciding whether to attend given the added distance and the possibility that Congress could be in the middle of negotiating another coronavirus relief package in late February. An aide to Donald Trump Jr. said he would “probably” attend, as he has done in past years, but that it was not currently on his schedule.
CPAC organizers did announce three speakers after POLITICO began inquiring about the lineup. In separate tweets on Tuesday from the @CPAC2021 Twitter account, it was revealed that former U.S. Ambassador to Germany Ric Grenell, former deputy national security adviser K.T. McFarland and South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem, a possible 2024 hopeful, would all deliver remarks at the conference next month. No other speakers have been announced as of the time this article was published.
For those planning this year’s CPAC, the main questions are not just whether Trump will be there, but how much his presidency and future should dominate the proceedings. Members of the planning committee began meeting virtually in November, after the 2020 election, and were expected to convene at least five times before the conference begins.
“Do we pull the Nancy Pelosi option and try to expunge Trump from public life or do we try to build on the movement he created and make it tenable? It’s messy,” said a person involved in the CPAC planning process.
CPAC trained hundreds, if not thousands, of GOP activists to be nasty pieces of work long before Donald Trump came along to mainstream the puerile insult brand of right wing political behavior and release the rabid MAGA animals on the American body politic.
They might as well run with Trump. He is them and they are him.
I wrote this about CPAC a couple of years ago:
For some reason, this year’s Conservative Political Action Conference, or CPAC, seems to have gotten more attention than usual. That’s saying something, since for the last 15 years or so it’s gotten much more attention than it deserves. CPAC is like a 10-car pile-up — frightening and horrible, but you can’t look away.
Salon’s Jeremy Binckes and Matthew Sheffield have each weighed in on this year’s event — with Binckes making the case that it shows that the GOP is now thoroughly Trumpified while Sheffield argues that it’s now Trump who’s been absorbed by the Republican Party. I think CPAC shows that the Trump strain has always been slithering around under the rock of conservative movement politics, and 2016 just turned it over and let it run amok.
The first CPAC was organized to bring young conservatives and political activists together for a conference to map out movement and electoral strategy. It took place in 1974 in the midst of the Watergate scandal, which divided the conference between those who thought Richard Nixon was toast and those who wanted him to fight on. It was, by all accounts, a very lively disagreement. They turned to the man they all agreed was the Great Conservative Hope, Gov. Ronald Reagan of California, who was the keynote speaker and gave one of his most important speeches, heralding his strong primary run against Gerald Ford in 1976 and his winning campaign in 1980.
Reagan introduced three former U.S. military prisoners of war in that speech, one of whom was John McCain, to reverent, thunderous applause. This year the longtime Arizona senator, who has a brain tumor and may well be near the end of his life, was insulted by the president of the United States from the CPAC podium. That shouldn’t have come as any surprise. The CPAC podium, for at least the last couple of decades, is where decency and humanity go to die.
I won’t go into the horrors of the 1990s. The party under former House speaker Newt Gingrich was as aggressively obnoxious as it is today: That was the height of the “vast right wing conspiracy’s” power. Let’s just say that in 1994 CPAC was where Paula Jones made her debut and leave it at that.
It was during the glory years of the George W. Bush administration that the media started paying close attention to what was really going on there. Michelle Goldberg wrote for Salon in 2003 that there were “t-shirts with the words ‘Islam: Religion of Peace’ surrounding a photo of a bomb with the word ‘Allah’ on its timer,” among dozens of other hideous anti-Muslim items for sale that were flying off the shelves. Remember, this was during the time Bush was telling his followers that Islam was a religion of peace.
But it didn’t matter. CPAC attendees may have hated Muslims but they loved Bush. In fact, they loved him almost as much as the sainted Ronald Reagan, whom they continued to worship like a god. The Iraq war got their blood pumping wildly and this was how they wanted to see their president:A
One of the biggest attractions at the conference for many years was the odious Ann Coulter, who packed the room with rapturous fans screaming with delight at her indecent commentary. Back in 2003, she made one of her most famous shocking statements, which has since been taken up by none other than her hero Donald Trump: “Why shouldn’t we go to war for oil. We need oil.” In 2006 she got into her groove with, “I think our motto should be, post-9/11, ‘raghead talks tough, raghead faces consequences.’” In response to a question about her biggest ethical dilemma, Coulter said, “There was one time I had a shot at [Bill] Clinton. I thought ‘Ann, that’s not going to help your career.’“
She really hit her comedic stride in 2007, however, when she dropped this bomb:
I was going to talk about the other Democratic candidate, John Edwards, but it turns out that you have to go into rehab if you use the word “faggot.”
She got a huge ovation for that one, but it seemed to upset some of the old guard and Coulter was disinvited the next year. Organizers replaced her with an even bigger draw in 2009, Rush Limbaugh, who gave a memorable, rambling speech bucking up the crowd to oppose anything the new President Barack Obama wanted to do. Down in the bowels of the conference where the merchandise was being flogged they were selling racist pictures of Obama dressed as a witch doctor.
In 2011, when Donald Trump made his first appearance and started the original buzz about his potential candidacy, he said in his speech, “Our current president came out of nowhere. Came out of nowhere. In fact, I’ll go a step further. The people that went to school with him never saw him; they don’t know who he is. Crazy.” He went on Bill O’Reilly’s show that night and said he had investigators in Hawaii looking for Obama’s birth certificate. The rest is history.
It’s been getting a little stranger than usual lately, even by the racist, far-right standards of CPAC. In 2016, the event was overrun with neo-fascists who booted them to the margins. In 2017, the thrill of Trump’s unexpected victory was still fresh, and the “alt-right,” in the form of Steve Bannon, who was the big draw. This year the global far right got its turn in the CPAC spotlight, with Marion Maréchal-Le Pen of France and Nigel Farage of Britain as big draws.
And the CPAC tribes love Donald Trump with the same passion they felt for Bush and Reagan. These people really aren’t that choosy.
CPAC used to pretend that it was a conference about “ideas” and the “conservative agenda.” But as NeverTrump conservative Ben Howe said on MSNBC on Friday, it’s really just about making liberals cry. Frequent CPAC star Dinesh D’Souza put it this way, in his 2002 book “Letters to a Young Conservative”:
One way to be effective as a conservative is to figure out what annoys and disturbs liberals the most, and then keep doing it.
Nothing could disturb and annoy liberals more than Donald Trump.
It sounds innocuous enough. Maybe liberals should just stop crying and these people would stop being so obnoxious, right? But there’s something more sinister about this than at first seems obvious. That attitude lies at the heart of something ugly and dark that’s grown up in our culture and around the world.
There was one young white supremacist marching in Charlottesville last year who, when things got scary, stripped off his white polo shirt uniform and tried to blend in with the crowd. When he was asked by a journalist why he was doing what he’d been doing, he said:
It’s kind of a fun idea. Just being able to say, like, “Hey man, white power!” You know? To be quite honest, I love to be offensive. It’s fun.
One of his cohorts thought it might be fun to mow down a bunch of people with his car that day and ended up killing someone. That desire to be “offensive” isn’t a joke, and neither is the offensiveness of CPAC. Look where it’s gotten us.