When a political party loses the presidency, it normally casts its eyes toward the future. Not so this year. Donald Trump’s speech to the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) this coming weekend sends the message that he is the “presumptive 2024 nominee,” according to Axios. Knowing Trump, this is not surprising. What is weird is that he is being allowed to do it. After all, vampires can only enter your house if you invite them in.
Is this the first example of how Trump is slowing the momentum for change and freezing out the future? During these post-election years, CPAC—generally held in late winter—has traditionally served as the unofficial coming-out party for the next wave of GOP presidential aspirants. You’d have to go back to the 1993 CPAC to find the last time an incumbent Republican president had lost re-election, but absolutely nobody at that conclave was clamoring for more George H.W. Bush.
And we (obviously) don’t have to go back far for examples of how CPAC has handled presidential defeats. In 2009 (the year Rush Limbaugh was the keynote), Mitt Romney won their straw poll. After Romney’s loss in 2013, the GOP released its “autopsy” report, and CPAC’s theme focused on the “next generation of conservatives.” There were speeches by Marco Rubio, Scott Walker, Jeb Bush, Ted Cruz, and Bobby Jindal, and Rand Paul (who won the straw poll), just to name a few.
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The slogan suggested a forward-looking party. But that won’t be the case this year. This year’s conference will serve as Trump’s proclamation (official or implicit) that he is still running the show, that he is his own successor, and that he is the party standard-bearer. In short, he ain’t going nowhere—which means the GOP isn’t, either. They cannot break free of him and move on. But what can be done about a Patty Hearst party that identifies with its captor? We can thank Matt Schlapp, the head of CPAC, for inviting the vampire back inside our house.
I don’t want to pretend Trump is the interloper who rained on our parade/party. CPAC has long been a hot mess—an annual canary in the coal mine revealing the things about the party we wished weren’t true. During a 2007 speech, Ann Coulter referred to John Edwards as a “faggot.” For a few years afterward, the focus was on whether the gay conservative group GOProud would be allowed to co-sponsor the event. (In 2011, Andrew Breitbart threw them a gay-themed ’80s party to make up for the snub.)
Skip forward to 2017, when Milo Yiannopoulos was invited and then disinvited after comments about pedophilia surfaced. In 2018, populism and nationalism were the backdrop for the big speaker dustup over Marion Marechal-Le Pen, niece of right-wing French populist Marine Le Pen. (The other controversy involved a CPAC staffer saying Republicans elected Michael Steele RNC chairman “because he was a Black guy.”)
Last year, impeachment was the story, and Mitt Romney was publicly disinvited from CPAC over his support for hearing witness testimony. This year, someone named Young Pharaoh (not to be confused with a Kentucky Derby favorite) was disinvited over anti-Semitic remarks. Based on CPAC’s track record of canceling speakers, it’s more than a tad ironic that this year’s theme is “America Uncanceled.”
I’ve skipped a lot for the sake of brevity. But in this short history, a couple of other notable things happened. From a personal standpoint, in 2012, I was named CPAC’s “blogger of the year.” This was at a time when blogging was perceived as both an influential and up-and-coming gig, which explains why I felt so honored. More importantly, the fact that I won (as opposed to, say, Gateway Pundit) tells you how much it has changed.
True, at the time, I was working at a conservative outlet. But even back then, I was seen as a sane conservative—a description that would be seen as a disqualifier today. But there’s a second data point. The very next year (much to my chagrin), Donald Trump, who at the time was leading the charge of “birtherism,” was invited to address CPAC. This, like Trump’s later CPAC invites, served to cleanse and baptise him into the conservative movement.
In just the past week, I have written about how Rush Limbaugh and the rise of the Tea Party conspired to help explain the rise of Trump, so I hesitate to add Trump’s CPAC speech to the list of things that helped give Republicans Trump. But it’s true. Of course, Trump’s large donations to CPAC’s parent organization were, of course, just a coincidence—just as it was a coincidence that Trump hired the wife of CPAC’s aforementioned chair to work in his White House comms shop. (Just as it was a coincidence that her husband, CPACs chair, was paid $750,000 to try and procure a presidential pardon for a client.)
It could be said that CPAC opened the door to Trump’s presidential hopes in 2013, and it is still keeping the presidential aspirations of this thrice-married, twice-impeached, one-term president alive well past their 2021 expiration date. CPAC helped give us Trump, and now, it is working to make sure we can’t escape him.
Simply put, inviting Trump to speak at CPAC—so soon after he has lost—screams, “We Are Still Trumpists!” Whether you think the GOP needs to move past Trump for the sake of electoral survivability—or for the sake of restoring conservatism’s reputation as a respectable alternative liberalism—this has serious ramifications for 2022 and 2024.
I’m not sure who said conservatism was a hidebound philosophy with a soft spot for stray cats and lost causes. Whoever they were, CPAC is working hard to prove them right.
