POLITICS
Bewildered Conservatives Greet a Fallen British
Prime Minister
Former British Prime Minister Liz Truss spoke in a
hotel conference room that was less than half full.
By BEN
JACOBS
02/22/2024
07:00 PM EST
Ben Jacobs
is a writer based in Washington, D.C.
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2024/02/22/truss-at-cpac-00142807
On
Thursday, an ousted world leader went to a far-right political conference in
the United States to rage about how they and the conservative movement were
betrayed by enemies within.
No, it
wasn’t Donald Trump. It was Liz Truss.
The former
British prime minister who lasted just seven weeks in office spoke in a hotel
conference room that was less than half full, sandwiched between a social
conservative activist who insisted “there is no such thing” as transgender
children and a far-right author who insists that the January 6 attack on the
Capitol was “the biggest instance of police brutality” in the United States
since the Civil Rights movement.
Needless to
say, she was a long way from South West Norfolk.
Truss’s
appearance was perhaps the most incongruous part of the four-day Conservative
Political Action Conference (CPAC), an annual event held in a resort hotel just
outside Washington, D.C. The event had once been perhaps the premier conference
for American conservatives. But its stature has gradually declined in recent
years as it has come to be seen as a mere adjunct of Trumpism and, as its head,
Matt Schlapp, has fended off allegations of sexual misconduct and financial
mismanagement.
The result
has been a gathering with an increasingly shabby and low rent vibe. An
exhibition hall that once featured major corporate sponsors now has a January 6
themed electronic pinball game and sells vibrating boards that promise that
users can lose weight simply by standing on them. A hotel once packed with
attendees seemed half vacant as other conferences were held simultaneously —
including one for an outsourcing company, a fitting companion for a conference
that has increasingly outsourced its speakers from abroad.
Some of the
other foreign speakers were already well known on the populist right. Newly
elected president Javier Milei of Argentina was considered a major get for the
event — and it’s almost impossible to hold a conservative gathering in the
United States without former UKIP leader Nigel Farage. Truss was an entirely
different creature.
Many had
simply not heard of her. “Who is Liz Truss?” asked R. Gregg Keller, the former
executive director of the group that hosts CPAC and a veteran Republican
political operative. Mike Lindell, the pillow magnate turned election
conspiracy theorist, was just as befuddled when asked about her appearance. “I
didn’t know. ...I’m focused on machines,” he said, as he continued on a
diatribe about election fraud in the United States.
Matt
Whitaker, the former acting U.S. attorney general under Trump, when asked to
put Truss’s appearance at the event in perspective, said “the conservative
movement is finding its role and organization worldwide. Donald Trump has
motivated a lot of people to be attracted to his movement and translate into
their own unique thing.”
When asked
how Truss fits into that movement, he said “I don’t know. I have no idea.”
Even Clegg
Ivey, who ran a King George III themed booth in the exhibition hall that
compared Biden officials to the monarch overthrown by the American Revolution,
couldn’t quite muster an opinion. “It’s not really for us to have a position on
executives from other countries and other systems.”
When asked
about the incongruity of his booth criticizing a deceased British monarch, he
caveated, “that’s a very specific instance.”
There was
some Truss skepticism, however. Attendees were widely circulating a piece from
the website of Raheem Kassam, an Anglo-American Steve Bannon ally that trashed
her as too leftist for the venue. Joe Proenza, the political director for the
socially conservative group American Principles Project, was befuddled at her
attendance.
“Why are
you here?” he asked rhetorically. “There’s literally nothing you share with
conservatives in America, besides some vague tax policy agreements we might
have. What are you doing here?” Proenza disdainfully added that Truss will
likely be at the conference longer than she was in 10 Downing Street.
Truss spent
her 15 minutes on stage warning that there were only 10 years left to save the
West (which is incidentally the name of her upcoming book), while also deriding
“wokenomics,” Joe Biden and “the usual suspects” in the media and the corporate
world who undermined her during her brief stint as prime minister.
She ended
with a call for Americans to elect Republicans “who aren’t going to cave into
the establishment” and are willing to be unpopular with elites, even if it
means “they don’t get invited to any dinner parties.”
Attendees
seemed to appreciate her remarks. The room slowly grew more full as she talked
and her ovation upon leaving the stage was louder than when she entered. Bryan
Betancur, a Marylander wearing a QAnon shirt, said that the speech was
“educational.”
“You get to
learn a lot of things. For me as a conservative, it’s pretty inspirational,” he
said. Betancur said he hadn’t heard of Truss before, although did know of
several other former British prime ministers.
Gerri
Poplin of New Jersey, who was wearing an American flag scarf and multiple
pro-Trump buttons, thought Truss’s speech was “on the same parallel” and shared
many of the same frustrations that she had with American politics. Poplin, who
thought the 2020 presidential election was stolen from Trump, found
similarities between what the former president experienced then and the
struggles that Truss described on stage as she dealt with being undermined by
the administrative state as well as what she called “CHINOS, conservatives in
name only” — a nod to the American nomenclature of RINO, Republican in Name
Only.
After her
speech, Truss wandered up and down the hall of the event with a gaggle half
composed of British reporters trying to ask her questions and half of American
security guards trying to block them from doing so. Only a handful of attendees
stopped her for selfies on her journey, which included a brief video interview
with a conservative activist group that long pushed false claims of election
fraud.
One request
for a selfie came from Barbara Coward, a suburban Baltimore woman whose husband
was British and thought it would be a good memento for her half-British
children. Coward came away pleasantly impressed with the speech, although she
was well aware both that Truss was “not prime minister for very long” and the
British politician was hawking a book.
The other
selfie request came from Sami Gold, a George Washington University student, who
insisted to Truss that “I’m your biggest fan” as she walked by. He wasn’t, he
later revealed. Instead, Gold just thought it would be neat to take a photo
with a world leader and seeing her was part of the charm of showing up at CPAC.
“It’s 50
bucks for meeting some of the most insane people on Earth,” said Gold. “It’s great.”
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