The Serious Takeaway from CPAC: Trump and Trumpism Are Still a Threat

During the 2016 Presidential race, one of the wiser things said about Donald Trump—by Salena Zito, in The Atlantic—was that he should be taken seriously, not literally. However fantastical, odious, and self-centered Trump’s campaign appeared to many members of the media, it struck some deep, dark nerves running through American society. But now, six and a half years later, after all that has happened, including disappointing election results for Trump and the Republican Party in 2020 and 2022, how seriously should we take him and his supporters?

Judging by press coverage of this year’s Conservative Political Action Conference, where Trump delivered the closing address on Saturday evening, the answer is not very seriously. Perhaps taking their cue from what used to be called “the Republican establishment,” key members of which boycotted this year’s CPAC, many media organizations adopted a dismissive tone, which was well captured by a headline at Politico: “CPAC’s road to irrelevance.”

Given the carnival atmosphere that has attended CPAC, an event once synonymous with Cold Warriors and Reaganites, as Trump acolytes have taken it over, plus allegations of sexual misconduct against CPAC’s current chair, Matt Schlapp—accusations that he has denied—it’s certainly tempting to dismiss the whole thing as an early spring break for MAGAs and charlatans, mere fodder for late-night comedians. (Jimmy Kimmel suggested that CPAC stands for “Clowns Periodically Assembling in Convention Centers.”) But what if treating Trump and his followers as a joke amounts to repeating the mistake that many political observers made in 2016?

In his closing address to the conference, which took place at the Gaylord National Resort & Convention Center in National Harbor, Maryland, Trump called Joe Biden a criminal, insinuated that Mitch McConnell was a Chinese sympathizer, and pledged that, if reëlected, he would deliver “retribution” for those who have been “wronged or betrayed,” a victimized group in which he certainly places himself. That sounds like typical Trump, you may say: the ex-President is nothing if not mind-numbingly repetitive. But, after January 6, 2021, familiarity with Trump’s charges and threats is surely no excuse for being blasé about them. From the CPAC stage, an ex-President promised to exact vengeance on his enemies if he returns to power. And, so far, virtually the only Republican who has raised any objection is Asa Hutchinson, a former governor of Arkansas, who told CNN that Trump’s remarks were “troubling.”

One purpose that events like CPAC serve is to remind us how far Trumpian language and Trumpian values have advanced since the future election-denier-in-chief rode down the escalator at Trump Tower in June, 2015. Hours before Trump’s address, Jair Bolsonaro, the former President of Brazil, whom Human Rights Watch has described as “an apologist for Brazil’s abusive military dictatorship” and a threat to Brazilian democracy, received a warm welcome from the crowd. After losing in his reëlection bid last year, and mimicking Trump by questioning the results, Bolsonaro pulled another Trump move and decamped to Florida. Walking back and forth across the stage like an over-amped TED-talk presenter, he got the crowd to its feet when he recalled how he didn’t “force anyone to be vaccinated in Brazil.” Turning to his reëlection campaign, he said, “I had way more support in 2022 than I had in 2018, and I don’t understand why the numbers reflected the opposite.”

Facing an official investigation into whether he inspired his supporters to ransack Brazil’s Congress and other government buildings in Brasília on January 8th, Bolsonaro refrained from explicitly claiming that the Brazilian election, which international observers have said was transparent and safe, had been stolen. Not so the speaker who followed him, the Trump donor and Big Lie promoter Mike Lindell—a.k.a. the MyPillow Guy. After telling the crowd that he monitored the Brazilian election with his team, Lindell said, “They stole over ten million votes that we know of there.” He also insisted that American democracy was lost unless voting machines were replaced by paper ballots. A bit later, Kari Lake, the former Phoenix news anchor who ran for governor of Arizona last year, expanded upon her baseless claim that she was defrauded of victory, and said that she had just filed a lawsuit with the Arizona Supreme Court. “We are exposing these criminals who are stealing our elections, and we’re exposing them every single day,” she added. Lake also claimed that some unnamed “powerful people back East” had tried, through an intermediary, to bribe her into stepping away from politics.

These weren’t even the loopiest speeches of the afternoon. That prize went to Gordon Chang, a conservative columnist and longtime überhawk on China. Addressing COVID-19, Chang said that the Chinese government “deliberately spread it beyond its borders to America and to the world, and that means every coronavirus death in the United States is a murder.” Should we take such claims literally? Obviously not. That way, madness lies. But they represent an integral part of a right-wing movement that long ago gave up on liberal niceties like truth and respecting democratic outcomes, and which remains an unavoidable feature of the American political topography.

During Trump’s speech, which meandered on for about an hour and forty minutes, he name-checked Chang, along with Marjorie Taylor Greene, Matt Gaetz, Mark Levin, Tucker Carlson, and other figures in the post-truth MAGA firmament. He also consigned the pre-2016 G.O.P. to history, saying, “We had a Republican Party that was ruled by freaks, neocons, globalists, open-border zealots, and fools, but we are never going back to the party of Paul Ryan, Karl Rove, and Jeb Bush.” He added: “People are tired of RINOs and globalists. They want to see America First. That’s what they want; it’s not too complicated.”

The “people” Trump was referring to are Republican voters, the vast majority of whom weren’t present at CPAC, or at the rival meeting this weekend in Palm Beach held by the Club for Growth, a conservative organization that has distanced itself from Trump. What do these voters really want? It’s hard to say for sure, but a significant number of them still appear to support Trump despite the fact that his reëlection campaign has had a slow start.

The two most recent polls of potential G.O.P. primary voters, which were carried out by Emerson College and Fox News, put Trump’s support at fifty-five per cent and forty-three per cent, respectively, with Ron DeSantis, the Florida governor, who has not declared himself a Presidential candidate, running well behind him, at twenty-five per cent and twenty-eight per cent. Of course, it’s still early—the G.O.P. Iowa caucuses are almost eleven months away—and current poll numbers may not have much predictive value. At a minimum, though, they suggest that we can’t afford to dismiss the continuing threat from Trump and what he represents, regardless of how absurd it sometimes seems. Yes, CPAC is nuts. But the movement it embodies is no laughing matter. ♦