Trump’s Republican Hit List at CPAC Is a Warning
Shot to His Party
In his first public appearance since leaving office,
Donald Trump went through, by name, every Republican who supported his second
impeachment and called for them to be ousted.
TRANSCRIPT
Former President Donald J. Trump told the Conservative
Political Action Conference on Sunday that he would not form a new party, then
called for ousting Republicans who had backed his second impeachment.
Hello
CPAC, do you miss me yet? Do you miss me yet? [cheers] We went through a
journey like nobody else. There’s never been a journey like it. There’s never
been a journey so successful. We began it together four years ago, and it is
far from being over. And I’m going to continue to fight right by your side. We
will do what we’ve done right from the beginning, which is to win. We’re not
starting new parties. You know, they kept saying, ‘He’s going to start a brand
new party.’ We have the Republican party. It’s going to unite and be stronger
than ever before. I am not starting a new party. Instead of attacking me and
more importantly, the voters of our movement, top establishment Republicans in
Washington should be spending their energy in opposing Biden, Pelosi, Schumer
and the democrats. Grandstanders like Mitt Romney, little Ben Sasse, Richard
Burr, Bill Cassidy, Susan Collins, Lisa Murkowski, Pat Toomey. And in the
House, Tom Rice, South Carolina, Adam kinzinger, Dan newhouse, Anthony
Gonzalez, that’s another beauty. Fred Upton, Jamie Herrera butler, Peter Meyer,
John katka, David valadao and of course, the war monger, a person that loves
seeing our troops fighting. Liz Cheney, how about that? The Republicans do not
stick together the rhinos. That we’re surrounded with will destroy the Republican
Party and the American worker and will destroy our country itself, that right
now is, you know, Republican in name only. And that’s why I’m announcing that I
will be actively working to elect strong, tough and smart Republican leader.
Former
President Donald J. Trump told the Conservative Political Action Conference on
Sunday that he would not form a new party, then called for ousting Republicans
who had backed his second impeachment.
Jonathan
Martin Maggie Haberman
By Jonathan
Martin and Maggie Haberman
Feb. 28,
2021
Updated
9:21 p.m. ET
ORLANDO,
Fla. — After days of insisting they could paper over their intraparty
divisions, Republican lawmakers were met with a grim reminder of the challenge
ahead on Sunday when former President Donald J. Trump stood before a
conservative conference and ominously listed the names of Republicans he is
targeting for defeat.
As
Democrats pursue a liberal agenda in Washington, the former president’s
grievances over the 2020 election continue to animate much of his party, more
than a month after he left office and nearly four months since he lost the
election. Many G.O.P. leaders and activists are more focused on litigating
false claims about voting fraud in last year’s campaign, assailing the
technology companies that deplatformed Mr. Trump and punishing lawmakers who
broke with him over his desperate bid to retain power.
In an
address on Sunday at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Orlando,
his first public appearance since he left the White House, Mr. Trump read a
sort of hit list of every congressional Republican who voted to impeach him,
all but vowing revenge.
“The RINOs
that we’re surrounded with will destroy the Republican Party and the American
worker and will destroy our country itself,” he said, a reference to the phrase
“Republicans In Name Only,” adding that he would be “actively working to elect
strong, tough and smart Republican leaders.”
Mr. Trump
took special care to single out Representative Liz Cheney, the third-ranking
House Republican, and Senator Mitch McConnell, the minority leader. He called
Ms. Cheney “a warmonger” and said her “poll numbers have dropped faster than
any human being I’ve ever seen.” Then he falsely claimed he had helped revive
Mr. McConnell’s campaign last year in Kentucky.
Ms. Cheney
and Mr. McConnell have harshly criticized Mr. Trump over his role in inciting
the Capitol riot on Jan. 6, and Ms. Cheney has repeatedly said that the G.O.P.
should cut ties with the former president.
With his
refusal to concede defeat and his determination to isolate G.O.P. leaders who
criticize him, the former president has effectively denied Republicans from
engaging in the sort of reckoning that parties traditionally undertake after
they lose power.
Even with
Democrats controlling Congress and the White House for the first time in over a
decade, many of the Republicans who spoke at the conference here said
strikingly little about President Biden or the nearly $2 trillion stimulus
measure the House passed early Saturday, which congressional Republicans
uniformly opposed.
Mr. Trump
was the exception, repeatedly taking aim at the Biden administration. “In just
one short month, we have gone from America first to America last,” he said,
criticizing the new president on issues ranging from immigration to the Iran
nuclear deal. “We all knew that the Biden administration was going to be bad,
but none of us even imagined just how bad they would be and how far left they
would go.”
Yet even as
he dutifully read his scripted attacks on his successor, the former president
drew louder applause for pledging to purge his Republican antagonists from the
party.
“Get rid of
them all,” he said.
Mr. Trump’s
attack, and the enthusiastic response to his call for vengeance, illustrated
the dilemma Republicans find themselves in.
Mr. Biden
does little to energize conservative activists. Indeed, Mr. Trump and other
speakers at the event drew more applause for their criticism of Dr. Anthony S.
Fauci, Mr. Biden’s chief public health adviser for the virus and a figure of
enmity on the far right, than for their attacks on the president.
The
attention surrounding Mr. Trump and his potential plans for the future are
forestalling a focused attack on Mr. Biden and the Democratic-controlled
Congress.
Senator Ted
Cruz of Texas, who used his speech on Friday to hail Mr. Trump’s leadership of
the party, said in a brief interview that his party’s voters would pivot to the
present once Mr. Biden’s agenda became more clear.
“As the
American people see the bad ideas that destroy jobs and strip away our
liberties, there’s a natural pendulum to politics,” Mr. Cruz said, predicting
that Republican activists would “absolutely” pay more attention to the current
administration later this year.
Mr. Trump
made a specific pitch for people to donate to two committees associated with
him, a notable move given that he has been the Republican National Committee’s
biggest draw for the last four years. He gave an explicit description of
“Trumpism” as a political ideology focused on geopolitical deal-making and
immigration restrictions, and painted the Republicans who voted for impeachment
as decided outliers in an otherwise united party.
More
consequentially for Republicans, the attention-craving Mr. Trump, denied his
social media weaponry, knows he can reliably energize the G.O.P. rank-and-file
and draw publicity by excoriating his intraparty critics.
In some
ways, the former president’s re-emergence at CPAC represented a full-circle
moment. He first tested the right’s political waters in 2011 when he appeared
at the conference and used his speech to belittle other Republicans and
denounce China as a growing power.
To the
delight of the party’s current lawmakers, however, Mr. Trump announced on
Sunday that he would not create a breakaway right-wing party. “We’re not
starting new parties,” he said of an idea he was privately musing about just
last month. Less satisfying to many Republican leaders, at least those ready to
move on, was the former president’s musing about a potential run in 2024. “Who
knows, I may even decide to beat them for a third time,” he said, bringing
attendees to their feet.
Mr. Trump,
of course, lost the election last year.
But that
did not stop him from repeatedly, and falsely, claiming in his speech that he
had won. After mostly sticking to his prepared text for the first hour of his
90-minute speech — and listing what he said were the accomplishments of his
tenure — the former president grew animated and angry as he veered off the
teleprompter to vent about his loss.
“The
Supreme Court didn’t have the guts or the courage to do anything about it,” Mr.
Trump said of a body that includes three of his appointees. He was met with
chants of “You won, you won!”
At one
point, Mr. Trump did something he never did as president — expressly called on
people to take the coronavirus vaccines that he had pressed for and hoped would
help him in his re-election effort. But he mocked Mr. Biden for stumbling
during a CNN town hall event and attacked him over comments the president made
about the limited number of vaccines available when he took office.
At one
point, Mr. Trump mocked transgender people who participate in women’s sports.
The comments represented a much more forceful attack on transgender people than
his remarks while in office, when he placed significant restrictions on
L.G.B.T.Q.-related rights.
The former
president’s aides had been looking for an opportunity for him to re-emerge and
debated whether to put on a rally-type event of their own or take advantage of
the forum of CPAC, which relocated to Mr. Trump’s new home state from suburban
Washington because Florida has more lenient coronavirus restrictions.
Mr. Trump
and his aides worked with him on the speech for several days at his newly built
office above the ballroom at Mar-a-Lago, his private club near the Atlantic
Ocean. Without his Twitter feed, Mr. Trump has been using specific moments —
the death of the radio host Rush Limbaugh and Tiger Woods’s car crash — to
inject himself into the news cycle.
Outside
prepared statements, though, he has said far less since Jan. 20 about the
future of the G.O.P. and his own lingering ambitions.
Interviews
at CPAC suggested that a number of conservatives, while still supportive of Mr.
Trump, are ambivalent about whether he should run again in 2024. That was borne
out in the conference’s straw poll, during which the former president enjoyed
overwhelming approval — but also more uncertainty about whether he ought to
lead the party in three years.
Thirty-two
percent of those who participated in the straw poll — a heavily conservative
and self-selecting constituency — said they did not want Mr. Trump to run again
or were unsure if he should.
A number of
would-be candidates, most notably Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida and Gov. Kristi
Noem of South Dakota, enjoyed rousing receptions at the conference.
Yet Mr. Trump
has essentially frozen the field for the moment. And he made clear in his
speech that for now, he is serious about a third bid.
This is new
territory for Republicans, who were mostly eager to move on from their losing
nominees in 2008 and 2012.
For now,
though, Mr. Trump and the 2020 election are far more resonant. From the start
on Sunday, the crowd provided Mr. Trump with the adulation he craves, chanting,
“We love you! We love you!” at one point. And he made clear that he believes
that news organizations, and his supporters, still want the sugar high of his
appearances.
After
stepping up to the lectern, Mr. Trump, gone for just five weeks, asked the
room, “Do you miss me yet?”
Jonathan
Martin reported from Orlando, Fla., and Maggie Haberman from New York. Erin
Schaff contributed reporting from Orlando.
Jonathan
Martin is a national political correspondent. He has reported on a range of
topics, including the 2016 presidential election and several state and
congressional races, while also writing for Sports, Food and the Book Review.
He is also a CNN political analyst. @jmartnyt
Maggie
Haberman is a White House correspondent. She joined The Times in 2015 as a
campaign correspondent and was part of a team that won a Pulitzer Prize in 2018
for reporting on President Trump’s advisers and their connections to Russia. @maggieNYT
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