CPAC is the Conservative Political Action Conference.
It culminated yesterday in an erratic and delusional crescendo with former President
Donald Trump's first speech since leaving office on January 20th.
The speech started, of course, 70 minutes late for no good reason, endlessly delayed,
and was rife with all of the things we would expect from Donald Trump.
Lies about what he did, lies about what he didn't do, lies about what Joe Biden has done
so far, lies about what Joe Biden has not done so far, lies about immigrants, lies about
covid, lies about the economy of victimhood, complex that would be worthy of a few decades
of psychoanalysis.
And, of course, yes, false claims that Donald Trump actually won the election.
The speech was expected to be a Fidel Castro like two hours or more.
In the end, it was about 90 minutes.
Trump appeared to sort of skip a bunch of the end when he and the crowd seemed increasingly
bored by the things that he was saying.
The crowd was also bored and silent during many parts of the speech.
They were most riled up.
And this tells you a lot about the state of the Republican Party.
The crowd most titillated when Trump called covid the China virus.
They erupted with a standing ovation when Trump claimed he won the election, the crowd
went nuts.
And when Trump talked about the new wedge issue of transgender women in sports, the
crowd also gave a standing ovation.
Those were the things that were most interesting to the crowd.
I can't possibly cover the whole speech.
I want to touch on some key moments.
Donald Trump opened the speech by claiming that his presidency was the most successful
in history.
Despite losing and becoming one of only 10 one term presidents.
Trump says his was the most successful to so many wonderful friends, conservatives and
fellow citizens in this room and all across our country.
I stand before you today to declare that the incredible journey we began together, 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.
Interesting to take a presidency with no accomplishments, a globally humiliating failure on the pandemic
and a huge electoral loss.
And call it the most successful.
But OK, the crowd, I guess, liked it.
Most importantly, Donald Trump making it clear he is not starting a new party.
And the president, the former president rightly identifies that starting a new party would
make Republicans lose for a long time.
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.
That was fake news.
Fake news now.
Wouldn't that be brilliant?
Let's start a new party and let's divide our vote so that you can never win.
No, we're not interested in that.
So Trump's analysis there is correct.
The best assessment is the reports were accurate at the time.
Trump was thinking of starting a new party, but he was talked out a bit for this reason
that it would fracture the right and they wouldn't win for a very long time, which was
also our assessment of that idea.
As usual, Donald Trump cites out of context and apparently meaningless polling numbers
about how popular he is.
He can't get away from this.
Take a listen.
Mr. McGlocklin just gave me numbers that nobody's ever heard of before.
More popular than anybody.
That's all of us.
It's all of us.
Those are great numbers.
And I want to thank you very much.
Those are incredible numbers.
I came here and he was giving me 95 percent, 97 percent, 92 percent.
No one has ever been more popular than Trump, according to Mr. McLachlin.
The reality is Trump is the only president never to poll 50 percent approval throughout
his presidency and the only president to leave office with an approval so low it was 29 percent
approval when Donald Trump left office.
And then after all of these lies, Donald Trump pulls out the big lie that he won and maybe
he will even win the presidential election a third time, alluding to maybe running in
2024.
And the crowd goes nuts, but who knows?
Who knows?
I may even decide to beat them for a third time.
OK.
Importantly, though, Donald Trump did not announce his 2024 candidacy, it was rumored
he might at yesterday's speech, he said he might run and that we'll see.
We'll get to that later.
Trump again claims that if the election had been fair, he would have won.
I said it had we had a fair election.
The results would have been much different.
And then Donald Trump launched another brutal but completely ignorant attack on wind power.
You knew he would do it.
How bad is wind power?
So I talk about it all the time.
Like we went to CPAC.
Remember last as I said, we're going to watch the president.
Well, unless the wind is blowing, I don't believe we'll have any electricity.
Remember, we would we would kick.
But I wasn't actually kidding.
It's such an and it's such an expensive form of energy.
It's so bad for the environment.
It kills the birds.
It destroys the landscapes.
And remember, these are structural columns with fans on them.
They wear out.
And when they wear out all over the country, you see them.
Nobody takes them down.
They're rotting.
They're rusting.
How this is environmentally good for our country.
And it costs many, many times more than natural gas, which is clean.
It costs many more to and can fuel our great factories.
Wind can't do that.
And clearly, Donald Trump understanding nothing about wind power.
That's the take away.
A wind power is bad for the environment.
And he says it kills birds, that it's not bad for the environment.
Wind turbines do kill some birds, but fossil fuel power kills way more animals.
And Trump doesn't seem to care about that at all.
It's merely a talking point that does well with the uninformed crowd.
Then Donald Trump again claims he won the election twice and the crowd just loves it
and famous for the rest of their lives.
We won the election twice.
I mean, you know, think about the task for our movement.
And then Donald Trump introducing the new wedge issue gets a standing ovation.
The issue is trans women in sports.
No, I think it's crazy.
I think it's just crazy what's happening.
We must protect the integrity of women's sports.
So important after.
He then went into a mildly trans phobic rant about that issue and the crowd reenergized
by that.
Now, this next part is really important.
Donald Trump is not starting his own party.
I mentioned that earlier, but he's going out hard against Republicans.
He doesn't like Republicans.
He sees as not loyal enough to him.
And he calls out a long list of Republican senators and members of the House here.
Democrats don't have 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, Jami 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?
So while Donald Trump did recognize that starting his own party would be bad for the right,
he apparently doesn't think that attacking other Republicans will be bad for the right.
Maybe he's right.
I don't know.
I guess we'll have to wait and see what impact that has.
But Trump going very hard against other Republicans and then Trump plugging a website where you
can give money.
He now says he's committed to helping Republicans in 2022.
And he has a Web site where you can donate more money.
He pitches that next.
There's only one way to contribute to our efforts to elect America.
First, Republican conservatives and in turn, to make America great again.
And that's through Save America PAC and Donald J. Trump Dotcom.
So go out there and do whatever you can because we're going to help a lot of great people
now based on his grifting tens of millions of dollars to, quote, fight the election results,
which he just kept for himself just months ago.
I'm skeptical that your donations to this new grift are really going to go to what he
claims they're going to go for.
And then as the speech started winding down nearly 90 minutes after it started, Donald
Trump teasing that he might run in 2024.
With your help, we will take back the house.
We will win the Senate, and then a Republican president will make a triumphant return to
the White House.
And I wonder who that will be.
Who who will that be, I wonder?
So, yeah, the important takeaways Trump has learned nothing, he's still repeating the
same lies, the crowd still mostly loves it.
So maybe it's the correct lies to repeat.
I don't know.
He's not yet committed to running in 2024, but he's not starting his own party.
And he's very willing to attack Republicans who don't 100 percent lay down for Trump to
walk all over them.
Those are the takeaways.
And beyond that, the bit players during the entire CPAC weekend mostly sucked up to Donald
Trump or at least avoided direct criticism of Donald Trump.
So the overall takeaway is this remains the party of Trump for the time being.
And Mitt Romney's statement last week that the nomination is Trump's, if he wants it,
in 2024, as of today, March 1st still holds true.
Things can change.
I still think that if a lot of these Trump being elected officials like a Bobert, Marjorie
Taylor Green, Madison Cawthorn, now accused by like 30 women of harassment during college.
If they go down in flames in 2022, it starts to change the picture for Trump in 2024.
But we're getting ahead of ourselves.
After the break, we'll look at a few other key moments from CPAC.
There weren't that many.
And we'll also have more coverage of the coverage of this on the show's Instagram page.
Rapidly approaching 100000 followers on Instagram.
You can find us there at David Pakman,