Donald Trump discovers it’s fun to stay at the CPAC
Donald Trump’s first speech since departing (you must not dare say “losing”!) the White House was nothing we hadn’t heard before. It was an hour and twenty-plus minutes of seething resentment directed towards… well, everybody. The caravans of illegal aliens were back, alongside the rapists, murderers, communists, drug runners, Supreme Court justices, transexuals, Chinese, coyotes, teachers, the “toxic” media, MS13, and, most pernicious of all, bird-killing windmills. At times it felt like Don Quixote had gone rogue on Adderall and had started tilting at Liz Cheney.
It would be wrong to say any of what followed was hugely political. Whilst Trumpism is a deficit of ideology, it is a surfeit of grievance. In some ways it was “typical Trump” but with an edge you would have been right to note was not there last year. He joked about keeping a sense of humour but said it with wild eyes. This is a man not taking unemployment with that much grace.
It did, however, make for a tone that suited the venue. Trump’s return was at a surprisingly batty CPAC conference, which is not to say that Conservative Political Action Conventions are normally subtle affairs. Not recently, at least. They’re run by the American Conservative Union which, in its current guise, is nothing like the organisation founded by, among others, William F. Buckley Jr. in 1964.
It is to be regretted that the man who once wrote that the “theater of modern politics” asks “someone running for President of the United States be a superior human being who on no account is permitted to display superiority” wasn’t around when Trump groped US flags at previous events, smothering them with his attention in a way meant to evoke patriotism but just evoking weirdness. It is a shame too that Buckley cannot render his verdict on the tasteless gold Trump idol wearing Star and Stripes shorts, which made a much-feted appearance this year. One might wonder, too, what Buckley would have made of the Union’s current chairman, Matt Schlapp, the kind of political opportunist who can turn his principals around on a slippery dime.
This year, Trump resisted the urge to get handsy with the flag and sought solace, instead, in playing with seductive counter-narratives. “Joe Biden has had the most disastrous first month of any president in history,” he told his audience, who were happy to overlook how demonstrably false this is. Irrespective of how you view the job that Biden has done, he has had a significantly better first month than Henry Harrison, inaugurated on 4th March 1841 and dead exactly a month later. Better too than Abraham Lincoln whose election provoked the Civil War.
Facts matter less in the Trump universe than the energy he devotes to his mischievous rhetoric. He proceeded to talk about the “new crisis on the southern border” in increasingly apocalyptic terms. “Hard to believe it’s happening”, he opined, which is certainly true. Hard to believe much given the mixture of truth and falsehood. When your compass is this far off, it proves impossible to find true north.
Yet nobody ever turns to Trump for detailed directions and certainly not this audience. His speech was as gestural as ever, with muck flung gleefully because he knows enough of it will stick. At his most effective, there is a manic energy to Trump. At his worst, a lethargy that makes you doubt his commitment. And it was certainly the latter Trump who turned up in Florida, over an hour late and then not lingering to enjoy the closing rendition of the Village People’s YMCA (the gay anthem still the most incongruous choice for this self-avowed macho president).
Yet if Republicans had hoped he could be contained, there was little evidence here that he would become an elder statesman of the party. He boasted about party unity and how “I will be actively working to elect tough strong Republican leaders”. Yet he then began to recite his enemies list, Part 4, Section 11, Subsection 3 (Congressional Republicans). These were the independent thinkers he intends to see ejected from the Party. They were the usual suspects, by which you might read “traditional conservatives”, such as Susan Collins, Pat Toomey, Mitt Romney, and Lisa Murkowski in the Senate, Adam Kinzinger and Liz Cheney in the House. “Hopefully they get rid of her in the next election…” he said. “Get rid of them all.”
He even stuck a shot across Mitch McConnell’s bow, crediting himself with the re-election of the new Senate minority leader. Clearly, lines were being drawn and it will be fascinating to see how the Republican establishment responds, if, indeed, it can respond given Trump’s biggest statement of the night, which was his promise that “a Republican president will make a triumphant return to the White House and I wonder who that will be… Who, who, who, will that be, I wonder…”
It doesn’t mean that Trump 2024 is a reality. It might never be. For the moment it remains an invitation to contribute to a SuperPAC and campaign peddling a new narrative on old themes. We “never imagined Biden would be this bad,” he said, accusing the President of “keeping our children locked in their homes” and being “anti-science and anti-women”.
If the speech was brazen, the messaging crude, then the most honest moment of the night was unscripted as the crowd started to chant “we love you”. Trump fell silent as if allowing Republicans time to appreciate the scale of their problem. This isn’t about politics but personality and something deeper, akin to faith but resembling celebrity. Trump, in turn, then riffed on Ronald Reagan in what appeared to be a desperate, if not rather sad, need to feel more loved than the most cherished figure in modern Republican history.
It all amounted to a need for validation bound up with Trump’s inability to accept defeat. It was quite telling how he had been introduced as the “45th President of the United States” with only a solitary secret service agent next to the stage to give the game away. “We won the election twice,” he said and also hinted “Who knows, I might decide to beat them for a third time…”
He probably won’t but he will hold back the Republican Party for as long as he needs that illusion – and their cash – to comfort him.