The Scene
On Monday afternoon, a few blocks from the White House, conservative legal scholars discussed how to strike back against Donald Trump’s enemies. These subversives, they said, had waged “lawfare” against the Republican nominee, thrown out 2020 election challenges, and blocked scrutiny of a Biden administration that might be gone in six months. What could conservatives do about that, if they won back power?
“We’ve got to start impeaching these judges for acting in such an unbelievably partisan way from the bench,” said John Eastman, a California attorney who was disbarred last year over working with Trump to challenge the 2020 election.
“People who have used this tool against people like John or President Trump have to be prosecuted by Republican or conservative DAs in exactly the same way, for exactly the same kinds of things, until they stop,” said Berkeley Law professor John Yoo.
“I don’t say that we should be the mafia,” said Will Chamberlain, a senior counsel at the Article III Project who’d formerly worked for Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis. “But as a political party, if we aren’t willing to dish anything out, then we can just expect to keep taking it.”
The debate in Atlanta had thrown Democrats into a party-wide panic — and made Republicans more confident than ever of a Trump restoration. And that mood permeated the National Conservatism conference, organized by movement thinkers whose populist politics were brought from the fringe to the White House in 2016.
The MAGA thinkers, policy entrepreneurs, and conservative activists who gathered on Monday were over the moon about Trump’s odds of victory and completely unbothered by Trump’s recent efforts to distance himself from their agenda. They expected to return to power soon, assume influential positions in the administration, and use the federal government to punish their political enemies as harshly as their interpretation of the law would allow.
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As NatCon kicked off, Trump and his campaign were moving to separate the candidate from the conservatives whose rhetoric might worry swing voters.
On Saturday, Trump wrote on Truth Social that he knew “nothing” about Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation’s plan to staff and craft executive actions for a second Trump administration — led by policymakers who worked for Trump and saw him stymied by bureaucrats. On Monday, the Republican National Committee rammed through a revised platform that dropped specific language about abortion and entitlement reform that Trump disagreed with, and that the campaign saw as politically risky.
None of that worried the crowds at the Capital Hilton. Trump administration veterans mingled with conservative writers and think tankers who had conquered the old “Bush-Romney” Republican Party. When Joe Biden was mentioned at all, he was a punchline. When Trump was mentioned, he was a conquering hero who’d have a confident, well-trained movement behind him next year.
“Trump comes back in January, I’ll be on his heels coming back, and I will run the biggest deportation force this country has ever seen,” said former ICE director Tom Homan at a panel on immigration policy. “They ain’t seen shit yet. Wait until 2025.”
Stephen Miller, a Trump policy advisor who’d spent the Biden years suing to stop race-conscious programs in the public and private sector, indicted the Democratic Party in a conspiracy to “hide the fact that Joe Biden is a mental vegetative state.” Biden had let the country be “run by secret unnamed Democrat Party interests and staffers for three and a half years, as we inched closer to World War III.” But that party was about to lose the election.
“This is the first conservative conference in memory where we can look around at our country and the world and say: We’re winning,” said Rachel Bovard, a vice president at the Conservative Partnership Institute, founded in the first year of the Trump administration to train the growing MAGA movement. “National conservatives are and must be constitutionalists. But for the constitution to matter again — ever, at all — the right must be prepared to fight on the left’s absolute terms.”
Project 2025 itself was rarely mentioned, but Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts repeatedly praised Trump in his remarks to the conference, saying the media had worked to discredit and destroy him, alongside leftists who “imagined themselves the founding fathers and mothers, with varying pronouns.” In 2024, Trump was in a position to save America, with a conservative movement that he’d “revived” since he “came down that escalator” in 2015.
“Libertarians may not like populism, but the left’s new America will erase individual freedom altogether,” said Roberts. “Neo-cons may not like the new right’s prudent foreign policy, but the only alternative are those Death to America chants at pro-Hamas rallies.”
There were disagreements at the conference; Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley used a Monday night speech to defend “Christian nationalism,” while warning that some advocates for the idea had gone too far by pining for a “protestant Franco” and “blood and soil” totalitarianism. The country could be saved without that, and Trump’s criticism of Project 2025 wasn’t a real impediment to the mission.
“I’m not too worried about it,” said Mark Krikorian, the executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies. “It was Trump asserting that he’s the one in charge of his own operation.”
David’s view
Democrats are trying to shove the media’s klieg lights off of Biden and onto Trump’s conservative movement. Their bet: Voters are deeply worried about the president’s age, but not ready to hand America over to the sort of right-wing populism that’s advanced in Europe and dominated the Biden-era GOP.
But Republicans haven’t been in such a strong position, this close to the election, in a very long time. At this point in Trump’s two prior campaigns, he trailed Hillary Clinton and Biden in public polls. Not since 2000, when Al Gore was facing a reinvigorated GOP and losing votes on his left to Ralph Nader, has a GOP nominee led in polls after the Fourth of July holiday.
Conservatives see a generational chance at victory here, and Trump’s public squeamishness about some of their ideas doesn’t bother them. Even some anti-abortion groups that wanted the party to keep their language in the platform shrugged when it was removed; as written, the platform subtly encourages states to grant constitutional rights to the unborn.
Notable
- The Daily Signal published Hawley’s entire speech to the conference, though the prepared remarks didn’t include his opening joke about the Biden family. “Hunter Biden alone has such incredible expertise. He could be the drug czar. He is an expert on human trafficking, and prostitution, and also on a foreign relations, in the biblical sense.”
- In The New York Times, Ruth Graham looked at how The Claremont Institute, a force on the right and at the conference, is preparing for power. “Their ambitions paint a picture of the country they want should Mr. Trump return to the White House — one driven by their version of Christian values, with larger families and fewer immigrants.”
Correction
This article originally referred to a Heritage Foundation booth that went unstaffed. While no one manned the booth during some of the conference’s session breaks, a spokesman for the think tank said it was staffed both days.