The Scene
NATIONAL HARBOR, Md. — On Thursday morning, Steve Bannon hosted his War Room podcast live from the Conservative Political Action Conference, with a special prop. A screen behind him showed live footage from the Senate floor, where Trump loyalist and frequent CPAC star Kash Patel was about to be confirmed to lead the FBI. Much less interesting, for the crowd gathered around Bannon in CPAC’s exhibit hall: Kentucky Sen. Mitch McConnell taking the floor to announce his retirement.
“McConnell and his cartel of consultants had a complete monopoly on the funding of Senate races, and they’ve lost more swing races than they’ve won,” said Caroline Wren, a GOP strategist who worked with 2024 Arizona Senate candidate Kari Lake. “What’s his legacy? I don’t think anyone gives a shit.”
CPAC’s transformation into a pro-Trump convention happened many years ago, changing what had been a messy meeting between Republican factions – libertarians and conservatives, war hawks and isolationists – into a celebration of America First nationalism. McConnell stopped coming to the conference after winning a Senate majority in 2014. His major triumphs, of blocking a 2016 Obama appointment to the Supreme Court and speed-running a 2020 Trump appointment, were very old news.
What was new, and exciting for this year’s attendees, was the Trump administration’s rapid deconstruction of the administrative state, a goal older than the 51-year conference. Even more thrilling was the idea of exporting this around the world. Elon Musk, handed a chainsaw by Argentina President Javier Milei, was praised by Republican leaders and foreign politicians for both slashing the government and turning Twitter into a “free speech” hub where liberal media outlets barely mattered.
“We want a Trump revolution in Britain,” said former British Prime Minister Liz Truss, who lost her seat in the 2024 Labour landslide and has spent her free time meeting MAGA conservatives. “We want Elon and his nerd army of Musk rats examining the British deep state.”
There was massive applause for a mention of Vice President JD Vance’s speech at the Munich Security Conference, where he warned Europeans against mass immigration “commissars” censoring free speech. (“I’ll take a standing ovation for a speech I gave already,” Vance joked.)
When McConnell was mentioned at all — or when his priority of support for Ukraine was mentioned — it was as a punchline. House Speaker Mike Johnson said he was grateful that McConnell had voted to confirm Patel, and praised Trump for trying to negotiate an end to the war in Ukraine on terms that were unpopular in Europe.
“Remember, he wrote The Art of the Deal,” said Johnson. Asked by his Newsmax interviewer whether there might be another Ukraine funding package, he scoffed.
“I think there’s no appetite for that!” he said, over a chorus of boos.
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David’s view
I’ve covered most CPACs since 2006, skipping a few only when the schedule didn’t work at all. The candidates who used to shell out thousands of dollars to win the presidential straw polls are gone; the foreign right-wing politicians who used to walk around as unknowns are now major stars.
The mood this year — intentionally so, as CPAC has spent a lot of time and money building conferences around the world — was jubilation at the world turned rightside up. The “national greatness conservatives” who wanted to spread democracy in a re-made Middle East have been exiled, or have self-deported. The soft power that interested people this year: Trump and Vance and Musk destroying the liberal consensus in Europe, and wherever else was necessary.
This meant Brazilian conservatives comparing the censorship of X in their country, and the prosecution of former President Jair Bolsonaro, to the “persecution” of Trump. It meant Korean conservatives informing attendees that election fraud might put their left in power; it meant Hungarian conservatives congratulating Americans for bringing Trump back, a help in their effort to halt illegal immigration and root the left out of institutions.
“We apologize to the good people of Hungary,” CPAC leader Matt Schlapp told Balázs Orbán, the political director for (unrelated) Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán.
American liberals had warned, for years, that Orbán’s dominance of Hungarian politics and society was a model that Trump and MAGA wanted to follow.
This is not a particularly controversial idea at CPAC, where the aggressor in European culture wars is George Soros, where immigration from the Middle East is an existential threat, and where any liberal complaints about the rule of law are ludicrous. (One booth sold separate T-shirts that celebrated the “full pardon for Jan. 6 patriots” and condemned the “January 6 fedsurrection,” the idea that the Capitol riot was a law enforcement plot.)
After Vance, the highest-ranking Trump official to appear at the conference on Thursday was Attorney Gen. Pam Bondi, interviewed by Texas Sen. Ted Cruz and his podcast co-host Ben Ferguson. She rebuffed Ferguson’s question about whether Joe Biden might be legally vulnerable over his handling of classified documents. “This is not about weaponization,” she said. But she gave a robust defense of a decision that has shocked New Yorkers and led to high-profile DOJ resignations: Dropping the case against New York Mayor Eric Adams, who had lobbied Trump for a favor.
“It was an incredibly weak case filed to make deportation harder,” said Bondi, adding (incorrectly) that “violent crime is at an all-time high” in the city. The Trump DOJ intervention in New York had dynamited Adams’ already weak political position, ahead of the June Democratic primary. What would other MAGA interventions do in Europe, Korea, and Brazil?
The View From Abroad
There’ll be a test this weekend, in Germany’s elections, of whether Trump, Vance, and Musk endorsing far-right European parties is a help or a hindrance. In Canada, Trump’s tariff threats and constant joking about annexation have revived the fortunes of the ruling Liberal Party, which was set to lose elections in a landslide this year. (Prime Minister Justin Trudeau will leave office before the election, after his party picks a new leader.) UK Reform Party leader Nigel Farage thrilled the crowd when he said his party was leading in polls, but elections there aren’t scheduled until 2029.
“Trump is very unpopular here but his no nonsense approach on wokery and government waste has its followers,” said Tim Shipman, the chief political commentator at the Sunday Times and the author of a quartet of books about Brexit. “Farage’s party is topping the polls but he himself is only popular with about 25% of the population. So while a broad cross section has approved of Trump’s confounding of liberals so far, support for Ukraine is extremely strong and people are utterly horrified by what he said yesterday. The government and those who have courted him on the right are now in a very awkward position, hoping that it’s a play, not a belief.”
Notable
- In the New York Times, Alan Feuer reports that Jan. 6 pardon recipients, omnipresent at the conference, got a “mixed” reception. After some were denied entry, “CPAC officials issued a cowed and apologetic statement, saying they supported the pardoned defendants and denying that they were keeping any from attending the event.”
- In Politico, Irie Sentner writes that Vance got the reception at National Harbor that he never got in Europe. “American culture ‘wants to turn everybody, whether male or female, into androgynous idiots who think the same, talk the same and act the same,’ he said.”