Trump conquers CPAC 10 years after hostility

Sometimes, being a leader means watching where the line is going and rushing ahead.

That has been the approach of the Conservative Political Action Conference, the venerable gathering of right-wing activists that has turned into a full-throated MAGA celebration in recent years.

President Trump is scheduled to address the faithful Saturday. He will bask in adoration and unity that Ronald Reagan might have envied.

“People plan their CPAC schedule based on which day Trump is going to be here,” said Pam Roehl, 59, a retired real estate professional from Chicago. “When Trump’s around, he just Trumps everybody, you know, it changes the dynamic.”

Like so much of the rest of the political right, from Reaganism to the tea party movement, Mr. Trump has conquered CPAC and brought it into the broader MAGA fold.

“Am I tired of winning? No, I want to keep on winning,” said Christopher Martin, 56, of Springfield, Ohio.

Attendees cheered Mr. Trump’s avalanche of executive actions that have buried his political opponents and sent resisters within the federal bureaucracy to the courts.

“And I love seeing President Trump in the White House again. I’m really excited for him and for what he is doing for our country,” said Tracey Delaney, 51, a federal contractor from Maryland.

It’s a remarkable turnabout for the Republican Party leader, who was booed by the CPAC audience in 2015 and skipped the gathering in 2016. He later said he figured he was “too controversial.”

CPAC has reversed itself before. In 2008, it cheered Mitt Romney, viewed as the conservative alternative to Sen. John McCain in the Republican Party’s presidential nominating battle. Four years later, CPAC-goers derided Mr. Romney as a liberal amid an eclectic field of candidates.

Old CPAC hands say MAGA has changed the gathering.

It still serves as a rallying point for younger conservatives, helping link them to the broader movement, but gone are the days of policy fights between the flat taxers and the consumption tax acolytes. The values voters, defense hawks and libertarians don’t battle it out in breakout sessions anymore.

“It has the feeling now of a farmer’s market of politics,” said one longtime CPAC-goer. “The main function of it is to sell things to people.”

Matt Schlapp, chairman of the American Conservative Union, which stages the event, said he wasn’t troubled by worries that MAGA has subsumed CPAC or the broader conservative movement.

“The fact is the Republican Party needed a whole bunch of reforming,” he said. “Like the idea that we had to take controversial subjects and not talk about them and that would be the way forward. Trump had the opposite view, which is, take the controversial things [and] tell people your view.”

He said he sees CPAC now, at least the Washington incarnation, as more of conversations than speeches, but he lamented the disappearance of the freewheeling debates.

“I think it’s because of social media,” he said. “Everyone seems very nervous to do a debate and get caught in a bad moment, and then that becomes viral.”

That leaves Mr. Trump as CPAC’s unifying force for four years until he leaves the White House.

“I don’t know who can match that personal appeal of the president, but I’m thankful. I’m appreciative that he’s made the conservative movement cool again. He’s made it popular, kind of like Ronald Reagan did in the late ’70s and ’80s,” Mr. Martin said.

Dennis Mayo, 75, a retired rancher from California, said he was a lifelong Democrat but was drawn to Mr. Trump’s commonsense solutions.

He said it’s not that CPAC has gone MAGA — “that’s a liberal talking point” — but rather that the Biden administration exposed the paucity of Democrats’ answers.

“The public had to see that clear. I think Trump is a recipient of the fact that the Biden administration was so glaringly wrong,” he said.