CPAC has long been as much a social event as an opportunity to set the tone and agenda of the conservative movement. But in recent years, as Donald J. Trump has remade the Republican Party, CPAC’s attendance and cultural capital has declined, a trend heightened by allegations of sexual assault made in a lawsuit against the organization’s president, Matt Schlapp. (Mr. Schlapp has denied the allegations.)
In the days leading up to the convention, one longtime conservative activist told The New York Times in a text message that he would rather poke out his own eyes than attend, arguing that the event had turned into a veritable Trump rally at which no other views were permitted.
Those who did show up were quick to note that the CPAC party scene was also on life support.
“It’s dead,” said Michael R. Bartels, 28, the advisory chairman of the New York Young Republican Club. Mr. Bartels said that the conference was caught between an older generation of conservatives in the mold of Senator Ted Cruz of Texas and a younger, Trumpier wave.
CPAC [2024] Panel Singles Out Michelle Obama and Kamala Harris … for Some Reason
The conservative conference dedicated an entire “cat fight” panel to attacking the two most prominent Black women in Democratic politics
The lawsuit also names as defendants CPAC’s parent organization, the American Conservative Union, and its foundation arm. Schlapp, a prominent ally of former president Donald Trump; Schlapp’s wife and CPAC senior fellow Mercedes Schlapp; and general counsel David Safavian are also listed as defendants.
“The culture at CPAC was terrible, as Matt Schlapp and his wife, Mercedes Schlapp, ran the organization as if they were the King and Queen — like a dictatorship which ignored rules, laws, and basic decency when dealing with employees,” the lawsuit says. The lawsuit threatens to compound CPAC’s mounting legal expenses. Earlier this year, Republican operative Carlton Huffman sued Schlapp, accusing him of sexual battery and defamation in a suit seeking $9.4million in damages. Schlapp has staunchly denied any wrongdoing. Several veteran board members have quit in recent months while raising concerns about Schlapp’s financial oversight and heavy staff turnover.
Last week, the ACU board’s vice chairman, Charlie Gerow, resigned and urged fellow board members to launch an independent investigation into any additional allegations of sexual misconduct besides those in the lawsuit filed by Huffman earlier this year. Some board members and staffers have been told about other incidents involving Schlapp, 55, and two younger men, The Washington Post has reported. In the latest lawsuit, Bratton alleges a subordinate was repeatedly hostile and defiant toward her and told her that he didn’t like “working with or for women.”Bratton also said that as she tried to hire a diverse group of freelancers, the staffer complained that CPAC was “not an affirmative action employer.”
Matt Schlapp Held an Exorcism at CPAC Offices After Junior Employees Resigned
Matt Schlapp wanted to rid the CPAC offices of evil spirits, so he got a Catholic priest to sprinkle holy water on the office furniture and employees, multiple sources said.
The sentencing today of Oath Keepers founder Stewart Rhodes to 18 years in prison for seditious conspiracy for the Jan. 6 attack prompted me to dig into the TPM archives. We’ve been covering Rhodes and the Oath Keepers for a long time. But I couldn’t remember exactly how long. On closer look, I was pleasantly surprised to see that it was from virtually the beginning of his emergence on the national stage. But rummaging through our past coverage also helped me to re-familiarize myself with the context in which Rhodes founded the Oath Keepers.
Rhodes incorporated the Oath Keepers in 2009 (gee, who became president that year?), and you can’t divorce its creation from the then-emerging Tea Party movement.
The first mention of the Oath Keepers at TPM came in January 2010 in a story by Zachary Roth headlined: “Former Marine With Ties To Right-Wing Movements Charged With Child Rape, Possessing Grenade Launcher.” A lot going on there, no? Here’s an excerpt:
It’s not clear what Dyer might want with a grenade launcher. But he has declared himself a proud member of Oath Keepers, an organization that aims to enlist ex-military and law enforcement personnel, and has stoked fears that the federal government may try to seize Americans’ guns and round people up into concentration camps.
In this video, Dyer appears at a Tea Party event to promote the Oath Keepers and to rail against what the group — perhaps uniquely — sees as the federal government’s overzealous response to Hurricane Katrina.
A month later, in February 2010, Stewart Rhodes made his first appearance at TPM in a story by Eric Kleefeld about a Tea Party candidate for Texas governor in the GOP primary against incumbent Gov. Rick Perry and Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison:
Debra Medina, the Tea Party activist and candidate in the Texas Republican gubernatorial primary who has attracted attention for her favorable comments about 9/11 Truthers and Birthers, is also involved with another extreme ideological movement: The Oath Keepers.
Will Bunch at the Philadelphia Daily News points out that Medina will appear this Sunday at an event in San Antonio, called “Taking Back Texas.” The other two top-billed speakers are Stewart Rhodes, founder of the Oath Keepers movement, and Oather activist Richard Mack, a former sheriff of Graham County, Arizona.
You can see in each of those initial stories the adjacency, to put it charitably, of the Oath Keepers and the Tea Party, with a little birtherism and 9/11 trutherism thrown in for good measure. I’m not suggesting TPM was alone at the time in covering the flourishing of right-wing extremism, but to this day I don’t think it’s as widely understood as it should be that the cauldron of racial grievance, white resentment, transgressive extra-constitutionalism, and conspiracizing in 2009-10 was a precursor to the Trump presidency and ultimately to Jan. 6.
Our first closer look at Rhodes himself came a few days later in a story by Jillian Rayfield – “Too Extreme For O’Reilly? The Man Behind The Right-Wing Group ‘Oath Keepers’” – that pivoted off an appearance by Rhodes on Fox News’ The O’Reilly Factor.* Keep in mind here that less than a year after founding the Oath Keepers, Rhodes is being elevated into a primetime appearance on Fox News’ most popular show:
The Oath Keepers have some connections to the Tea Party movement, which itself has gained a lot of traction within the conservative movement. For one thing, Oath Keepers is part of the Friends for Liberty coalition, an umbrella group for such Tea Party-friendly movements as Glenn Beck’s 9/12 Project and the John Birch Society. Rhodes is even on the planning committee for the 2010 9/12 Project. …
Also, notably, Oath Keepers has a booth at the ongoing CPAC conference in Washington, D.C., where they are handing out a DVD called “For Liberty: How the Ron Paul Revolution Watered the Withered Tree of Liberty” (the ties between the group and Ron Paul don’t stop there – Rhodes himself is a former member of Paul’s D.C. staff, according to his Oath Keeper’s bio page).
CPAC. Glenn Beck. The John Birch Society. Ron Paul. The point isn’t that all the ingredients were there for what became seditious conspiracy. It’s not as simple as a pinch of Ron Paul and a dollop of Birchers and a cup of Tea Party and presto you have a coup. Rather, the point is that conservatism in America, or what passed for it in its various manifestations, went off the rails more than a decade before the events of Jan. 6. Barack Obama’s election was, we all know, a catalyzing event. But it didn’t start there, and it certainly didn’t start in 2016 with the election of Donald Trump.
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Letters from an American, Heather Cox Richardson
May 8, 2023
Beginning in the 1980s, Republican leaders found voters to support their “supply-side” economics, which cut taxes and regulations to concentrate wealth so investors could bolster growth, by turning their base against “liberals.” Calling those who opposed their policies “socialists” out to rig the system to redistribute wealth to minorities and women, they began the process of forging a base that considered itself the only real Americans. That process continued over the decades as right-wing media reinforced the idea. Still, though, leaders focused on their economic policies, especially tax cuts, and emphasized culture wars primarily to turn out voters.
Trump turned that formula on its head, playing directly to the base. He offered its members the anti-Black, anti-immigrant, and antiabortion measures it craved, in exchange for utter commitment to his leadership. His drive for authoritarianism dovetailed with a religious movement to create a new ideology for the Republican Party, one that explicitly rejects democracy.
That argument, articulated most clearly by Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán, is that the secular principles of liberal democracy—equality before the law, free speech, freedom to go to church or not, academic inquiry, a free press, immigration, companies that can make decisions based on markets rather than morality—destroy virtue by tearing down the sexual and religious guardrails of traditional society. In order to bring that virtue back, right-wing thinkers argue, the government must defend religion and self-sacrifice (although it’s hard to miss that they’re looking for other people to make those sacrifices, not themselves).
Last week, on May 4 and 5, the Conservative Political Action Conference met in Budapest for the second time, and once again, Orbán delivered the keynote address. The theme was the uniting of the radical right across national boundaries. “Come back, Mr President,” Orbán said of Trump’s 2024 presidential bid. “Make America great again and bring us peace.” Orbán claimed his suppression of LGBTQ+ rights, academic freedom, and the media is a model for the world.
Plenty of the people there from the U.S. seemed to agree. “Hungary,” Representative Paul Gosar (R-AZ) said, “is a beacon.”
In a recorded message, Trump said conservatives were “freedom-loving patriots” who are “fighting against barbarians.” “We believe in tradition, the rule of law, freedom of speech and a God-given dignity of every human life. These are ideas that bind together our movement,” he said. He called for the audience to “stand together to defend our borders, our Judeo-Christian values, our identity and our way of life.”
While conference organizers were celebrating Hungary as the only truly free country in Europe, they were taking advantage of Hungary’s suppression of the media to permit only hand-picked journalists to cover the event. Failed Arizona gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake said that “truth-tellers and peacemakers” were being destroyed by “fake news,” as they call every journalist who criticizes them.
Jacob Heilbrunn of the National Interest was one of those barred from the conference. He watched from his hotel room and wrote in Politico, “Throughout, the idea was clear: Liberalism is synonymous with tyranny.”
This ideology is behind the right-wing attacks on immigrants, LGBTQ Americans, the media, reproductive rights, and education. Florida, led by governor Ron DeSantis, has been out front on these issues, but other Republican-dominated states are following suit. Eager to stay at the head of the “movement,” Trump recently claimed that universities are “dominated by marxist maniacs & lunatics” and vowed to bring them under control of the radical right. “He will impose real standards on American colleges and universities,” his website says, “to include defending the American tradition and Western civilization.”
That formulation is also what enables the very people who are taking away others’ rights to claim that they are the ones being persecuted. The reference to right-wing death squads on Garcia’s vest refers to former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet, whose goons murdered thousands of political opponents, often by tossing them from helicopters. Since the 2016 Trump campaign, modern right-wing activists in the U.S. wear T-shirts offering “free helicopter rides,” and saying “Pinochet did nothing wrong.”
These ideas are embraced only by a minority in the United States, but that minority is working hard to cement its power by gaming the system. Election lawyer Marc Elias recently warned that “we cannot out-organize voter suppression” and that the myth that we can “minimizes the real world effects of repeated, targeted suppression laws. It shifts the burden from the suppressors to the voters. It suggests that victims of voter suppression simply need to be better ‘organized.’”
He notes that Ohio, Arkansas, South Dakota, Idaho, and Florida have all passed voter suppression laws this year and that the new laws put in place after 2020 have worked. Minority and youth voting have dropped significantly. Since 2008, Black voting in states dominated by Democrats has increased by 1.8 points; in Republican-dominated states it has dropped by four points. In Georgia, Black participation rates dropped from 47.8% to 43.2% between 2018 and 2022. Hispanic participation dropped from 27.6% to 25.1%, and the youth vote dropped from 33% to 26%.
Voter suppression is not “campaign tactics,” Elias warns. It is “the illegal and immoral deprivation of constitutional rights.”
Despite the emerging field of Republican presidential candidates willing to take on former President Donald Trump, this year’s CPAC was more unabashedly MAGA than ever.
But now CPAC has become the Trump show, and few Republicans here tried to diminish Trump’s star. Many potential 2024 candidates skipped the weekend entirely.
Introduced as “the next president of the United States,” Trump dished red meat to an adoring audience that leapt to their feet when he walked out on the main stage.
“We will finish what we started,” Trump told the audience.
“We will dismantle the Deep State. We will demolish woke tyranny and we will restore the American republic to all its radiant glory.”
This year’s CPAC attracted thinner crowds than in years past — making it feel like a ghost of the event that was once all-encompassing of the Republican Party’s many different groups.
Groups mingling in the halls were smaller. The auditorium for Haley and Pompeo — some of the conference’s most high-profile speakers — was sparsely populated during their speeches. While Trump attracted a larger crowd, even his presence at CPAC was not enough to fill the entire ballroom, as a wide section of seats in the back of the room remained empty.
Grievance politics take center stage
Throughout the multiday event, Trump and his allies used their platforms to promote unfounded claims of election fraud and target critics — many of them Republicans.
Steve Bannon, Trump’s former White House strategist, lashed out at Fox News and the Murdochs, alleging they weren’t covering the former president’s campaign enough, while also falsely referring to the 2020 election as stolen.
Trump himself repeated his unfounded election claims during his closing speech, and falsely suggested that Arizona gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake (R) lost her race last year due to election malfeasance.
2024 could get ugly
While the GOP primary field is still solidifying, the event put into sharp relief the divisions within the Republican Party and pointed to a contentious general election as Trump framed the race in war-like terms.
Though DeSantis has been pitched by some Republicans as a formidable alternative to Trump, CPAC demonstrated that the former president still maintains a strong influence over the party and hinted at a potentially volatile primary.
The former president also suggested that his campaign to take back the White House in 2024 was a quest to get back at his adversaries on both sides of the aisle in Washington.
“In 2016, I declared, ‘I am your voice.’ Today I add: I am your warrior, I am your justice, and for those who have been wronged and betrayed, I am your retribution!” Trump exclaimed to the crowd.
How CPAC turned into a circus with Trump as ringmaster
As CPAC’s head faces sexual assault claim, other leadership concerns emerge
Matt Schlapp, who runs the Conservative Political Action Conference, has been backed by prominent Republicans but some staffers complain of the group’s culture
The current turmoil comes as CPAC grapples with corporate backlash over its embrace of the far right and concerns about a potentially lackluster turnout this year as Trump’s political future appears uncertain.
The Fox Nation streaming service is not returning as a sponsor, and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, an ascendant figure in the Republican Party and Trump’s emerging rival in the 2024 campaign, is skipping it.
The annual Star Wars bar scene of CPAC opens this weekend, but so does an alternative — the Principles First conference. (The Bulwark is a sponsor and will have a major presence, so we hope to see you there.)
When CPAC convenes this weekend, you’ll sooner find a golden statue of Trump than a conservative principle. Instead of rejecting the Nixonian corruption of our day, CPAC will hand Steve Bannon a microphone and Kari Lake an award. And if any ideas happen to find their way into the agenda, they won’t be conservative or even American. They’ll be the mindless musings of a rudderless illiberalism – like how the Constitution should be terminated, how we need a “national divorce,” how only lost elections are rigged, how our own law enforcement is a ‘deep state‘ bent on destroying us, or how America really shouldn’t care what happens in Ukraine.
America, writes Mayo, deserves something better.
That’s what we’ve built at the Principles First Summit – which will be held during the same dates as CPAC at the Conrad Hotel in DC starting this Friday, March 3 to Sunday, March 5. We’ll focus on America’s institutions – why they matter, why they are fraying, and how they can be preserved and strengthened. We’ll convene governors and state election officials from around the country who defeated election deniers and spoke truth about the vote. Former generals and ambassadors will discuss our foreign policy institutions and Putin’s war of aggression in Ukraine. Party leaders and former candidates will look at our parties as institutions – and ask whether innovation is possible. We’ll also tackle other of America’s institutions – Congress, the courts, the Constitution, the presidency, the cable news media and free press, and churches. The full agenda is available on our website.
Schlapp’s lobbying business has cratered. Now his Republican support is on thin ice. Good afternoon, Press Pass readers! Today’s edition is all about Matt Schlapp, the Republican influence peddler and chair of the Conservative Political Action Coalition (CPAC).
Schlapp’s allies in Washington span Republican politics and, once upon a time, a significant number of powerful corporations. But in the wake of a lawsuit that followed multiple news reports about allegations that Schlapp sexually assaulted a young man working for the Herschel Walker campaign, those close ties appear to be fraying—and fast.
Schlapp’s lobbying firm, Cove Strategies, has lost significant business over the past two years, but that can be chalked up primarily to his diminished influence at a time of Democratic control in Washington. After losing a hefty roster of corporate clients, Schlapp sent a letter a few weeks before the midterm elections offering CPAC’s support for candidates on the condition that they pledge not to meet with CEOs and lobbyists for corporations who have “gone woke.” Schlapp’s previous clients included major corporations such as Walmart, Samsung, and Comcast.
But Cove still held on to one client through last year: Oracle, the software giant (and proponent of DEI policies that Schlapp and his allies would probably deride as “woke”). According to a disclosure signed by Schlapp last Friday, he brought in $50,000 from Oracle at the end of 2022, bringing the total to $200,000 for the year. A spokesperson for Oracle did not respond to a request for comment.
Many Congressional Republicans are keeping Schlapp at arm’s length
CPAC’s main annual conference is making its return to Washington in March after several years in Florida, where it moved in protest of mask mandates. (CPAC also hosts other big meetings elsewhere, including a gathering in Viktor Orbán’s Hungary last year—an event it plans to repeat this year.) This year’s proceedings will take place at the Gaylord National Resort & Convention Center, a huge space just across the river from D.C. in National Harbor, Maryland. A spokesperson for Marriott, which manages the Gaylord Resort, did not respond to a request for comment.
Republicans in Congress have become ambivalent about Schlapp, with some waffling on any plans to attend the conference.
James Lankford, the Oklahoma senator who appears regularly at CPAC—last year, he led a Protestant service on the Sunday morning of the conference in Orlando—told me he’s received his invitation to attend, but right now he is unwilling to commit to a speaking engagement.
“We did get a reach-out from them,” he said. “But we’ve not even determined the schedule on that, so I don’t know.”
Sen. Mike Braun, who is currently moonlighting as a candidate for governor of Indiana, didn’t seem enthused at the idea of attending CPAC this year. Braun, who participated in a panel under the title “Obamacare Still Kills” at last year’s convention, made a point of telling me he had only ever been to CPAC the one time. He added, “We’re not scheduled to be on there. I went there [to speak on] health care only because I’d like to reform it.”
Florida Sen. Rick Scott, who just announced his re-election campaign, brushed off the allegations against Schlapp, telling me he would happily go to CPAC if invited.
“Everybody’s got to explain what happened, so we’ll figure it out,” he said. “My experience has been really positive with CPAC . . . I don’t know if I’ll get invited, but assuming I do, I’ll probably go.”
Freshman Ohio Rep. Max Miller, a former Trump administration staffer who played a role in organizing Trump’s January 6th rally on the Ellipse in front of the White House, said he’d, “have to look into it to make the assessment” on whether to attend CPAC. “In terms of the allegations, that’s unfortunate for Mr. Schlapp,” he added.
Rep. Ralph Norman, the South Carolina Republican who played a key role in stalling Kevin McCarthy’s journey to the speakership, participated in an interview with Schlapp after the allegations against him were already public and had been reported on by multiple media outlets.
Norman told me he will speak again at CPAC this year: “I’ve always been a supporter of [Schlapp’s] and CPAC’s,” he said. “So we’ll see how that plays out.”
Regarding the allegations, Norman said, “There’s two sides to every coin, and this is completely different from . . . the CPAC functions,” referring to policy issues like the federal budget.
“That’s his issue. He’s been accused of something,” Norman said. “He’ll have to finish that.”
Two regularly featured CPAC guests, Matt Gaetz and Lauren Boebert, refused to answer questions about Schlapp, opting instead to walk away in silence.
So far, there is one confirmed attendee who is himself no stranger to sexual misconduct allegations. Schlapp announced last week that Donald Trump will be a featured speaker. As of today, CPAC has confirmed two Republican members of Congress to speak: Tennessee Rep. Mark Green and Marjorie Taylor Greene.
Fox News has taken the Schlapps off the air
Schlapp has also quietly disappeared from the Fox News airwaves. Schlapp and his wife Mercedes, a former director of strategic communications for the Trump White House, were longtime fixtures on Fox, with both of them making dozens of appearances in 2022. (Mercedes was once a paid contributor.) But since the allegations were published in the Daily Beast and then amplified by NBC News, the duo has not appeared on the network, which has also not covered the allegations.
Zachary Pleat of Media Matters wrote a smart analysis of the Schlapps’ apparent hiatus, noting that the allegations have received substantial coverage on other networks, especially after the former Walker staffer filed his lawsuit against Schlapp on January 17.
Matt Schlapp’s power over the years has stemmed from his connections. His relationships with GOP members of Congress, his ability to curry favors with Republicans in power positions on behalf of corporations, and his role as a ticket-taker and ringleader of the CPAC circus, with its big crowds and media attention, have been key components of that. All of that has severely diminished in the last couple of years, since Trump left town and CPAC fled D.C.’s COVID restrictions. The allegations that Schlapp groped a young man, and the lawsuit that has lent further credence to those allegations, are not helping him reconsolidate his power now that Republicans have regained some sway in Washington.
Accuser’s Wife: Matt Schlapp Destroyed Our Marriage
Just hours after CNN confirmed The Daily Beast’s report that a former Herschel Walker campaign staffer had accused conservative powerbroker Matt Schlapp of sexually assaulting him, a Schlapp ally was trying to malign the accuser—publicly and privately.
In a text message to this reporter just after midnight on Jan. 12, a Republican fundraiser who’s been working for the Schlapps asked what she thought was a damning question about the accuser: “How’s his marriage going?”
But the answer may be damning for reasons that Wren did not comprehend. Rather than a point of shame, it may be an indication of the toll that the alleged assault has taken on the accuser and his wife—and an indication of the web of smears that Schlapp and his network are propagating against them.
The accuser previously told The Daily Beast that he and his wife were getting a divorce, which his wife confirmed in an interview with The Daily Beast last week.
But during that interview, the accuser’s wife blamed one person for the state of her marriage: Matt Schlapp.
“I think what this man did to him fucked us over,” the wife said.
“If that situation never happened, I don’t think we’d be getting divorced,” she told The Daily Beast. She added that she had “made peace” with the pending divorce, but noted she believes “in my heart” that the alleged sexual assault and the additional stress that came with it caused their marriage to unravel.
“I’ve been assaulted and I know how bad that can fuck with you,” she said. “And on a campaign, when you’re working with a bunch of strangers and you go back home to your bedroom, you’re lonely a lot, and then you add something like what happened to him on top of all of that, and if you already have a difficult situation in your marriage—that is literally what did it.”
The accuser, a lifelong conservative operative and former mid-level staffer with Walker’s Senate campaign, did not dispute his wife’s characterization. He told The Daily Beast he would “let her words speak for themselves.” Their divorce is now working its way uncontested through the courts.
Asked for comment for this article, Wren—who has boasted about raising millions of dollars for the Jan. 6 rally in Washington, D.C.—replied in a text message: “Exciting.”
“Please be sure to include my tweets,” she wrote, noting she was about to take off for a “5 hour flight.”
“Any statement I give you will include [the accuser’s] name. So if you intend to keep him anonymous then an on the record statement from me is pointless,” Wren wrote, making it clear in a subsequent text that she wanted as many people to know his name as possible.
Wren has outed the staffer by name in tweets, but The Daily Beast and all other media outlets covering this story continue to honor the staffer’s request to remain anonymous out of privacy concerns; he has said he will come forward publicly if Schlapp does not apologize.
While Schlapp has issued a general denial through his attorney, he has still not directly addressed the allegation, and his attorney’s denials have not specified what exactly is false.
“To be clear, I only asked about his marriage because any 39-year-old adult straight male I know would punch another adult male if they tried to touch them against their will, not go home and record a series of tik tok videos to release to the press three months later while claiming to want to be ‘anonymous,’” Wren wrote in one text.
(The videos, which the staffer recorded to memorialize the alleged assault while the details were still fresh, were first shared with The Daily Beast two months after the alleged incident, not three; they were not posted to TikTok or any other social media platform.)
The accuser’s legal complaint, which he filed last week, alleges in part that Wren had been “acting in concert” with the Schlapps and unnamed others to “impugn” the accuser’s reputation, and that she had “peddled false information to reporters.”
Wren, whom the accuser has served with a records retention notice, also texted this reporter a list of “Things I’m excited to add to the preservations request.” The list included claims that were factually false—his position with the Walker campaign, for instance—along with other disparaging remarks about his past, which she has echoed in tweets that the lawsuit called “defamatory,” and which the accuser says are lies.
Wren also claimed in the texts that she herself had never asked Schlapp whether the accusation was true. “I’m quite certain that Matt’s side of things will come out in court,” she said. (The staffer filed his lawsuit about six days later.)
But it also turns out that the accuser’s wife was one of the first people to hear about the allegation. She awoke the morning after the alleged incident to a video memo her husband had recorded when he got home and sent her via text message.
“He was doing what he called ‘babysitting,’ driving a VIP around from event to event. I knew he was with a VIP at the time, but didn’t know who it was, just they were going out for drinks and to talk,” the wife told The Daily Beast. “When I woke up the next morning, I checked my text messages and I had a video from him.”
She shared that video with The Daily Beast, along with text messages and call logs confirming she had been in communication with the accuser that day as he came forward with his account to supervisors and the campaign’s attorney.
The Daily Beast reviewed a copy of that same video before publishing the initial accusation earlier this month. In the video, the staffer memorialized events “in regard to Matthew Schlapp, chairman of CPAC, who approximately two hours ago put his hands on me in a sustained and unsolicited and unwanted manner.”
After she watched the video, the accuser’s wife said she “spent the next hour or two trying to get him on the phone.”
“It was difficult to get it out of him, because he was very upset. I had to calm him down to understand what he was telling me,” she said. She also told The Daily Beast he was “clearly distressed” and “talked a lot about how disgusting he felt, that he couldn’t believe somebody would do something like this to another person.”
“I explained that everything he was feeling was OK, that he had the right to feel what he was feeling, that it was normal. I told him that it’s OK to be angry,” she said.
The annual Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) is set to return to the Washington, D.C., area in March after spending the last two years in Florida and Texas.
Over the past several years, CPAC has materialized as something of a pep rally for Trump and his wing of the Republican Party. One big question surrounding this year’s event, however, is whether it’ll strike a different tone.
Led by recently elected Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, the Fratelli d’Italia (Brothers of Italy) is descended from Italy’s post–World War II neo-fascist movement, and its policy positions are comparable to those of other groups in the constellation of Europe’s populist far right.
The party’s members are not known for discretion about their views: One member was suspended after reporters uncovered a Facebook post praising Hitler. Meloni herself has insisted that migrant-rescuing boats should be sunk after their crews have been arrested and passengers repatriated.
The Fratelli have typically been backbenchers in Italian politics. Their fortunes changed dramatically last year following a series of events that culminated in the victory of Meloni’s coalition and her election to the prime ministership in the country’s September elections. When Meloni came to power, Republicans in the United States were elated:
“I’m so excited,” said Kari Lake, the election-denying failed Arizona candidate for governor, in an appearance on Tucker Carlson. “This is someone I can relate to.”
Former Trump confidant Roger Stone listed Meloni on his annual best-dressed list, saying the PM is “not a fascist; she’s a fashionista.”
Meloni also earned swift praise from the Senate’s hard right, such as Tom Cotton and Ted Cruz, who quote-tweeted a video of Meloni speaking with a one-word caption: “spectacular.”
“This is a party that’s rooted in the fascist tradition . . . the entire galaxy of the extreme right feels protected and galvanized now,” Italian journalist Paolo Berizzi said of the Brothers of Italy in an interview with the Intercept.
Recently, the Logan Circle Group, a consulting firm with ties to Matt Gaetz and other MAGA political candidates, retroactively registered under the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA) for a range of activities on behalf of Identity and Democracy, a European Parliament group consisting of of several of Europe’s far-right, anti-immigrant political parties, including Salvini’s League.
The Logan Circle Group is run by Harlan Hill, who previously made headlines for being dumped by Fox News after calling Kamala Harris “an insufferable lying bitch.”The French arm of Identity and Democracy Group paid Hill’s firm to establish ties with Republican politicians and make introductions at Matt Schlapp’s Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC).
These activities reflect a growing trend in American conservative politics, as a number of U.S. right-wing personalities have conducted paid work for Europe’s far-right governments, including those of Hungary and Russia. These days, the Republican party is open for just this kind of business. So don’t be surprised if more far-right organizations come calling, including those based in Italy, birthplace of fascism.
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OPINION
Matt Schlapp and Our Culture of Protecting Predators
The allegations show political institutions still prefer silence to accountability when it comes to standing up for powerless victims.
Jennifer Horn
[Excerpts:]
Last week The Daily Beast broke a story about a Herschel Walker campaign staffer accusing Matt Schlapp, chairman of the American Conservative Union, of making “sustained and unwanted and unsolicited” sexual contact with the staffer while in a car. As per the story: “The staffer said the incident occurred the night of Oct. 19, when Schlapp… ‘groped’ and ‘fondled’ his crotch in his car against his will after buying him drinks at two different bars.”
If the allegations are true, they’re part of a familiar, age-old narrative: people with power and authority targeting the more vulnerable, junior people in their circles of influence. Over the past few decades, our society has become more conscious of the degradation and damage many are subject to from such behavior.
If the allegations against Schlapp are true, they represent rank hypocrisy by a self-professed conservative who regularly lambasted Democrats for sexual improprieties while gleefully defending a Republican president who bragged about grabbing women by their genitals.
But worse than hypocrisy is the culture of abuse, propped up by institutions and enabled by silence. It must end.
Jennifer Horn is a registered independent who previously served as a co-founder of The Lincoln Project, New Hampshire GOP chairman, RNC Executive Committee Member, and GOP congressional candidate.
What the Rioters in Brazil Learned From Americans
Jair Bolsonaro’s supporters showed that antidemocratic revolutions can be contagious too.
Kelli María Korducki: In your essay, you use the term Autocracy International to describe a global cohort of antidemocratic influencers that includes figures from Donald Trump’s universe. Who are these people, and how do they factor into the Brazil riots?
Anne Applebaum: It’s mostly an online phenomenon. They operate in different languages—French; Dutch; Spanish; Italian; English, obviously; German—and they borrow one another’s memes and rhetoric. But they have some in-person meetings hosted by different religious and far-right groups as well. The Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC)—which is, of course, an American organization—held a meeting in Mexico in November, and a number of members of the Latin American antidemocratic right met there, including Eduardo Bolsonaro, the ex-president’s son, along with some Hungarians and several Americans; Steve Bannon joined by video. Already, at that meeting, Bannon was claiming that the Brazilian election had been stolen—a theme he has been repeating on his podcast for weeks, even before the results were known.
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Hungary’s racist strongman, and the Americans who love him
Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, an autocrat astride a country whose GDP is more meager than that of Kansas and whose population is smaller than Michigan’s, has become a role model for America’s right-wing populists who admire his blueprint for dismantling democracy.
Shunned in Western Europe, he naturally goes where he is appreciated — and next week will arrive to what is likely to be an adoring welcome at the annual Conservative Political Action Conference, in Dallas, where he will deliver a keynote address.
U.S. conservatives who lionize Mr. Orban appear unfazed by his racist, retrograde rhetoric. After all, it’s part and parcel of his brand as what he calls an “illiberal” democrat, although his adherence to democratic norms is tissue-thin, at best. Now they are shrugging at his latest jeremiad, in which he attacked the United States for its sanctions against Russia, joked about Nazi gas chambers and, borrowing a page from Nazi ideology, warned that Europeans must not “become peoples of mixed race.”
Mr. Orban’s words, in the course of an anti-immigration diatribe, triggered outrage across Europe. One of his longtime confidants, Zsuzsa Hegedus, who is Jewish, resigned, saying the speech would appeal to the “most vile racists.”
And yet, there was little upset among CPAC’s organizers, who treated the uproar over the Hungarian leader’s bigotry as if it were a tiff over regulatory policy. “Let’s listen to the man speak,” Matt Schlapp, CPAC’s chair, told an interviewer. “And if people have a disagreement with something he says, they should raise it.”
In fact, most of the CPAC crowd, whose ranks are heavily populated by former president Donald Trump’s partisans, is unlikely to raise objections. To the contrary, many of Mr. Trump’s adherents, like those of Mr. Orban, are enamored of “great replacement” theorists, who regard immigration, pluralism and diversity as existential threats to Western — and White — civilization and a menace to what they consider the ethnic essence of the United States itself. Tucker Carlson, a Fox News pundit, is among the exponents of that view, and a devotee of Mr. Orban.
More broadly, the Hungarian premier’s stock in trade, and his apparent appeal to many on the American far right, is his deft dismantling of democratic institutions, a crusade he has undertaken in the cause of championing Christian civilization and attacking “woke” culture — which includes LGBTQ communities. He has scrapped the quaint idea that elected officials should represent all their constituents, while locking in a suite of laws, and a new constitution, that marginalize his opponents in what amount to rigged elections. Those maneuvers have left them with little chance to gain traction in campaigns or even be heard in national media outlets effectively controlled by the state.
Mr. Orban’s racism, embodied by his attack on the “mixed-race” menace he sees in Europe, is the antithesis of American values. It should get him disinvited from CPAC. Instead, there is every indication he will arrive in Dallas to cheers.
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MAGA Makes the Pilgrimage to Authoritarian Hungary
Viktor Orbán’s keynote speech at CPAC is a blueprint for how the American right can seize and wield power.
American conservatives are gathering in Hungary this week to celebrate and swap notes with Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, a far-right authoritarian who’s successfully undermined democracy in his home country.
Got that? Now pause, and read that sentence again.
Orbán’s keynote speech yesterday at the Conservative Political Action Conference, the American right’s most prominent meet-and-greet, has taken the long love affair that certain types of conservative intellectuals have with authoritarian Hungary to a whole new level.
Orbán counts among his admirers Tucker Carlson, Marjorie Taylor Greene, JD Vance, and Christian conservative writer Rod Dreher, who once favorably compared the autocrat to Donald Trump in an interview with the New Yorker: “Trump fights like a drunk falling off a barstool. Orbán fights like people say Trump fights.”
In Hungary, Cheap Russian Oil Fuels Right-Wing Culture Wars
More than $65 million of that will go to a privately managed education foundation that last year hosted the Fox News host Tucker Carlson at a festival of right-wing pundits in Hungary. It has also provided stipends and fellowships to conservative Americans and Europeans looking for a safe haven from what they bemoan as the spread of “cancel culture” back home.
Some of them featured this week at the first Hungarian edition of the Conservative Political Action Conference, or CPAC, a gathering of the right wing of American politics. The event, at which Mr. Orban gave the keynote speech, opened in Budapest on Thursday under the slogan “God, Homeland, Family.”
Hungary has for years served as a beacon for foreign conservatives who admire Mr. Orban’s hostility to immigrants, L.G.B.T.Q. rights, George Soros and liberals in general. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, however, has put severe strain on that role, stirring anger among some conservatives about Mr. Orban’s cozying up to the Kremlin.
Letters from an America, Heather Scott Richardson
May 19, 2022
Meanwhile, the Conservative Political Action Committee (CPAC), the influential right-wing PAC of the American Conservative Union, is holding its first European event, convening today in Budapest, Hungary.
Its leaders have chosen Hungary apparently because they see that country as a model for the society they would like to see in the U.S. under a strongman leader like rising authoritarian prime minister Viktor Orbán of Hungary.
Orbán is the architect of what he calls “illiberal democracy,” or “Christian democracy.” This form of government holds nominal elections, although their outcome is preordained because the government controls all the media and has silenced opposition.
Illiberal democracy rejects modern liberal democracy because the equality it champions means an acceptance of immigrants, LGBTQ rights, and women’s rights and an end to traditionally patriarchal society.
Orbán’s model of minority rule promises a return to a white-dominated, religiously based society, and he has pushed his vision by eliminating the independent press, cracking down on political opposition, getting rid of the rule of law, and dominating the economy with a group of crony oligarchs.
Led by personalities like Tucker Carlson, the American right wing embraces the Hungarian model, despite the corruption, lack of legal accountability, and attacks on the press that make Hungary the only member of the European Union no longer rated as “free” by democracy watchdog Freedom House. As if in illustration of Orbán’s policies, U.S. journalists were not allowed into CPAC today.
Orbán gave the keynote speech at the CPAC convention. In it, he embraced the “great replacement theory” that says white people are being replaced by immigrants of color. This is the myth that motivated the shooter in Buffalo, New York, last weekend, when he murdered ten people and wounded three others. It is the myth from which most Republicans have tried to distance themselves since the Buffalo killings.
And yet, when CPAC leader Matt Schlapp met U.S. journalists outside, he said that ending abortion rights would address the great replacement myth: “If you say there is a population problem in a country, but you’re killing millions of your own people through legalized abortion every year, if that were to be reduced, some of that problem is solved,” Schlapp said. “You have millions of people who can take many of these jobs. How come no one brings that up? If you’re worried about this quote-unquote replacement, why don’t we start there? Start with allowing our own people to live.”
Orbán told the attendees that the right wing in Europe and the United States must fight together to “reconquer” institutions in Brussels and Washington, D.C., before the 2024 election because those “liberals” who currently control them are destroying western civilization.
It is surprising to see folks who talk about American greatness take their inspiration from the leader of a small central European country of fewer than 10 million people, about the size of Michigan.
Yale philosophy professor Jason Stanley commented: “Oh come on US conservatives, stop embarrassing yourselves. Have some dignity and national pride.”
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It turns out that rationalizing atrocities can be bad for your brand, so now much of the pro-Russian right has shifted from pro-Putin to anti-anti-Putin.
A new manifesto from the rad-trad isolationists at Compact Magazine, for instance, blames “leading interventionists in the United States and Europe,” (not Putin) for “goading the West into an abyss of war and suffering.”
Increasingly, the right has also decided to launder its Putinism though their support for Putin’s leading European ally, Viktor Orbán.
Conservative Rod Dreher has long flirted with anti-Ukrainian and pro-Russian propaganda:
In his victory speech Sunday night, Orban lashed out at Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, who had urged Budapest to do more for its neighbors, placing the Ukrainian leader in a constellation of perceived leftist and liberal enemies of his Christian nationalist project. Orban said his triumph came despite the efforts of the “left at home, the international left all around, the Brussels bureaucrats, the [George] Soros empire with all its money, the international mainstream media, and in the end, even the Ukrainian president.”
This is what the folks at CPAC are celebrating
Even as the bodies are still being gathered in the suburbs of Kyiv, as the death toll of children mounts, and Putin continues to target civilians in his campaign of genocide, CPAC has decided to go ahead with its festival of Orbánism.
April 5 (Reuters) – America’s most prominent conservative gathering, founded on ideals of personal liberty and limited government, convenes in Budapest next month to celebrate a European leader accused of undermining democracy and individual rights.
The May meeting of the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) is seen by some Republicans as a test of how closely American conservatives are willing align themselves with a global movement of far-right, Russia-friendly strongmen embraced by former U.S. President Donald Trump.
As it often does, CPAC is following the lead of the right’s entertainment wing. Tucker Carlson has emerged as Orbán’s leading American fluffer, broadcasting from Budapest last year, and airing a fawning interview of the new avatar of illiberalism.
“In the last few nights in Budapest,” mused Tucker Carlson, US rightwing media star, “I’ve run into a number of Americans who have come here because they want to be around people who agree with them, who agree with you. Do you see Budapest as a kind of capital of this kind of thinking?”
While Orbán’s appeal may be elusive to those of you who think that liberal democracy defines the West, his attraction for Tucker and other elements of the right is obvious. A substantial faction of the conservative movement now regards his government “which censors LGBT content, demonizes immigrants and ethnic minorities, extols the virtues of the traditional family, and feuds constantly with the supposed globalists of the European Union” as a political model.
In other words, Orbán gives them that sweet autocratic dopamine hit they so desperately crave, without the whole rotting corpse, war crime, genocide thing.
CPAC 2022: US conservatives show little interest in UkraineAnthony Zurcher
North America reporter @awzurcheron TwitterFebruary 28, 2022https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-60559403[Excerpts:]Some of the top Republican officeholders in the party, like Florida’s Governor Ron DeSantis, Texas Senator Ted Cruz and Florida Senator Rick Scott, didn’t mention Ukraine at all in their speeches.Donald Trump, who took the stage on Saturday night, offered a quick condemnation of the invasion, but spent more time defending his interactions with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky that led to his first impeachment and his statements earlier this week calling Russian President Vladimir Putin a “genius”. He added that Nato nations and current US leadership were dumb.One of Mr Trump more loyal supporters, Florida Congressman Matt Gaetz, went further, questioning why the US should be “footing the bill for Ukraine” by imposing sanctions that could damage the American economy.A MAGA gala, a far-right rally, and a plea for Jan. 6 justice: Trio of summits tests GOP’s futureAt the Conservative Political Action Conference and two alternatives, the question was how much the American right should stress cultural grievances harnessed by TrumpBy Isaac Stanley-Becker and Josh DawseyFebruary 26, 2022https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/02/26/cpac-trump-republicans/
Dan Schneider, executive director of the American Conservative Union, which hosts the conference, said in a text message, “Trump’s appeal to conservatives was a response to the desperation we felt as we witnessed the radicalized leadership of the Democrat party making the country unrecognizable to Americans.”
As CPAC positioned itself against the left, a challenge from the right was mounted at a hotel across town. A dueling conference was staged by Nicholas Fuentes, a 23-year-old far-right organizer and online provocateur who has promised a “tidal wave of white identity.” He stormed a CPAC event last year in Dallas, shouting “America first” and “white boy summer.” His contention, which has found some purchase among activists, is that CPAC, first held in 1974 with a keynote from Ronald Reagan, is too moderate.
But part of what motivated a two-day “Principles First” conference in downtown Washington, D.C., was a perception among organizers that the two groups gathering in Orlando have too much in common.
“CPAC is an embodiment of the intellectual degradation of the party,” said Heath Mayo, a New York corporate attorney who organized the event. He said he identifies as a conservative but opposes Trump, having supported Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) in 2016. “The slow dissent away from ideas toward personalities — it doesn’t really matter what you’re saying — ‘Can you entertain me? Are we going to own the libs?’”
Mayo said the conference had drawn “disgruntled Republicans and independents frustrated with CPAC who believe in reality, the Constitution and the rule of law.” Organizers distributed an 11-page “Truth Advocates Handbook” that encouraged people to “eat your veggies” by reading “reliable news,” to battle conspiracy theories and to engage respectfully with family members who believe in disinformation. Take the “C.A.L.M” approach, the booklet said, focusing on “community” and “listening.”
But conservative media cast their lot with CPAC.
The dominant news presence was Fox Nation, a streaming spinoff of the cable channel whose visibility at the conference — including a mammoth poster illuminated by floor lights — was not lost on attendees. Some cast it as a sign that the network had internalized criticism from Trump, who inveighed against Fox for not being supportive enough of his reelection campaign, and was making amends.
“It’s a mea culpa,” said John “Wolf” Wagner, a former Trump political appointee at the Food and Drug Administration.
The very first takeaway, of course, prominently featured, who else but . . . ?
Trump devoted large portions of his speech, which lasted more than 90 minutes, to false claims about election fraud.
He also said repeatedly that he could run for president again in 2024.
And he suggested his near-term political focus will be on exacting retribution against the 17 Republicans in Congress who voted to impeach him in the House or to convict him in the Senate following the January 6 insurrection at the US Capitol.
Trump named each of those Republicans, saving for last Wyoming Rep. Liz Cheney, whom he called a”warmonger.”He said they should all be ousted in 2022 primaries. “Get rid of them all,” he instructed the conservative audience.
Trump concluded his speech by predicting that in the coming years, “a Republican president will make a triumphant return to the White House.”
“And I wonder who that will be,” he said, in a typical nod toward a third campaign in 2024. “I wonder who that will be. Who? Who? Who will that be? I wonder.”
CPAC Chairman Matt Schlapp told the Associated Press the event would feature panels on election integrity and highlight “huge” evidence of illegal voting in states that swung the election in President Joe Biden’s favor. Fox29.com, Feb. 27, 2021
Another CPAC 2021 speaker slated to appear, Angela Stanton-King, has a history of pushing conspiracy theories linked to QAnon — and just days after the Capitol attack she posted a photo pushing the baseless conspiracy that the riot was “staged.”
CPAC 2021 will prominently feature former President Donald Trump’s false claims of voter fraud weeks after his stolen election lie fueled a riot that led to the deaths of five people.
The agenda for the Conservative Political Action Conference, the influential right-wing summit best known as CPAC taking place in Florida this weekend, provides attendees multiple forums that perpetuate conservative mythmaking around the 2020 election as well as ways to discuss the new wave of voting restrictions pushed by the Republican Party.
MICHELLE COTTLE
CPAC: A Bacchanal of Right-Wing Pageantry, Passion and Grievance
While U.S. leaders are dealing with war in Europe and disruption of the global order, the leading lights of MAGA America are in central Florida this week for that annual bacchanal of right-wing pageantry and passion known as the Conservative Political Action Conference.
With all the serious challenges the nation has faced of late, now seems like a perfect moment for serious conservative thinkers and activists to come together in pursuit of serious solutions. That, alas, is not what happens at CPAC.
Put on annually by the American Conservative Union, whose name pretty much explains its aim, the confab may once have been about ideology or actual policy. But for years, the gathering has been better known as a multiday fringe fest featuring some of the most outrageous players on the political right.
This time, it promises to be largely a celebration of former President Donald Trump and his angry MAGA vision for the nation — which makes it less distinct from the broader Republican Party than it once was. But such is the debased state of modern conservatism, and — for those who have the stomach for it — this circus can tell you a lot about the state of American politics.
For most of its nearly five decades, CPAC was held in the Washington, D.C., area, the better to lure Very Important Politicos to the festivities. Last year, the Covid pandemic drove it out of the region — way too many local mandates for this freedom-loving crowd — and the event landed in Florida, the adopted home of one Donald J. Trump. But even if the former president were not a Florida Man, there is arguably no place more conducive to letting one’s freak flag fly than the Sunshine State. And providing a safe space to fly those flags has long been at the heart of CPAC.
This year’s lineup provides the same caliber of thought-provoking offerings that the conference’s fans and foes alike have come to expect. Among the scheduled panel discussions are “The Moron in Chief” and the more baroquely titled “Put Him to Bed, Lock Her Up and Send Her to the Border.” The latter session will feature crack analysis by Jack Posobiec, the conspiracymonger known for scampering down the rabbit holes of crank theories such as Pizzagate.
Asinine titles aside, the presentations offer a glimpse into what is obsessing the G.O.P.’s activist base. Among this year’s hot topics is clearly the threat of wokeness, inspiring multiple offerings, including “Awake Not Woke,” “Woke Inc.” and “Fighting Woke Inc.” A legal chat about “defending the canceled” seems to fit the theme as well.
There are several presentations related to schools, including “School Boards for Dummies,” “Domestic Terrorists Unite: Lessons From Virginia Parents” and a town hall on the fittingly misspelled “Pupil Propoganda.”
Mock if you will, but Republicans will wrap these culture war issues around Democrats’ necks in the coming midterms. CPAC is a prime venue for test-driving their material.
Some offerings are more incendiary than others. Take “The Truth About Jan. 6: A Conversation With Julie Kelly,” who wrote the book “January 6: How Democrats Used the Capitol Protest to Launch a War on Terror Against the Political Right.”
Then there’s “Lock Her Up, for Real,” featuring the former representative and enduring Trumper Devin Nunes; Kash Patel, a Nunes aide turned controversial Pentagon staff member; and Lee Smith, the author of a book purporting to show how Mr. Nunes uncovered the secret deep state plot to bring down Mr. Trump. So. Much. Fun.
The conference set list includes some classics as well. “Obamacare Still Kills” should provide a warm dose of nostalgia. Ditto “I Escaped From Communist North Korea.” The enduring menace of Communism is always a crowd-pleaser at CPAC.
The gathering’s educational component should not be pooh-poohed. Attendees tired of all the pandemic hubbub will want to catch the Saturday morning breakout session “Lock Downs and Mandates: Now Do You Understand Why We Have a Second Amendment.” And aspiring public servants surely learned a lot from the session “Are You Ready to Be Called a Racist: The Courage to Run for Office.”
A couple of the presentation titles go so far as to name-check individuals who really rile up conservatives, so it is illuminating to see who rises to that level of distinction. This year’s honorees are the CNN host Don Lemon (“Don Lemon Is a Dinosaur: The New Way to Get Your News”) and Stacey Abrams, the Democratic candidate for governor of Georgia (“Sorry Stacey, You Are Not the Governor”).
The lineup of speakers is as telling as the panels and town halls. Who’s in? Who’s out? Who’s got the loser time slots? This year features appearances by conference old-timers like Wayne LaPierre, the National Rifle Association’s longtime frontman, as well as rising MAGA stars like Donald Trump Jr., who scored the closing speech, and his fiancée, Kimberly Guilfoyle, an infamously high-octane orator. (One word for her: decaf.)
An array of presumed presidential hopefuls/Trump lickspittles are having have their moments as well. Senators Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley and former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo are all on the program. Former Vice President Mike Pence is not, having declined his invitation.
Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida is generating the most buzz, mostly because the chattering class is giddy at the prospect of spotting even a hint of friction between Team DeSantis and Trumpworld. Mr. DeSantis is considered a top — maybe the top — 2024 presidential contender.
Unlike some 2024 hopefuls, he has not pledged to sit the race out if Mr. Trump runs. This has not gone over well in Trumpworld. It is perhaps unsurprising then that the governor was given a not-so-great speaking slot this week: early on the opening afternoon, wedged in between a presentation by Matt Schlapp, the chairman of the American Conservative Union, and a speech by Florida’s lieutenant governor.
Mr. Trump will speak at 7 on Saturday evening, serving as basically the keynote of the gathering.
As the convention unfolds, look for breathless updates on the dynamic between the governor and the former president — especially as the time draws nigh to announce the results of the annual straw poll on who should be the next president.
Last year, Mr. DeSantis was the solid winner when Mr. Trump was not among the options. This year’s results are likely to get more scrutiny than President Biden’s upcoming Supreme Court pick (OK, maybe not quite so much). That said, it’s worth remembering that, in the pre-Trump age, Senator Rand Paul won the poll three years running — 2013, 2014 and 2015 — with a Cruz win in 2016. So it’s best not to get too wrapped up in the predictive power of these things.
Until recently, it was best not to take CPAC in general that seriously as a political barometer. But with the G.O.P. eaten alive by Trumpism, there isn’t much left of the party beyond its raging MAGA base. Which makes this four-day spectacle as representative of Republican politics as any event.
Just one more thing to keep you up worrying at night.
Research note: “Examining false beliefs about voter fraud in the wake of the 2020 Presidential Election,https://misinforeview.hks.harvard.edu, Jan. 11, 2021
“Real power is — I don’t even want to use the word — fear.”
