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Tag: halcyon days

  • Trump Begins His ‘Final Battle’

    Trump Begins His ‘Final Battle’

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    Former President Donald Trump gripped the CPAC lectern as he workshopped a new sales pitch: “I stand here today, and I’m the only candidate who can make this promise: I will prevent—and very easily—World War III.” (Wild applause.) “And you’re gonna have World War III, by the way.” (Confused applause.)

    It was just one in a string of ominous sentences that the 45th president offered tonight during his nearly two-hour headlining speech at the annual conservative conference, which for years prided itself on its ties to Ronald Reagan, but is now wholly intertwined with Trumpism, if little else. Yet even amid cultish devotion, Trump seemed bored, listless, and unanimated as he spoke to a sprawling hotel ballroom that was only three-quarters full.

    For much of the speech, Trump’s voice took on more of a soft and haggard whisper than the booming, throaty scream that characterized his campaign rallies. His language, by contrast, was bellicose. Tonight’s address was among the darkest speeches he has given since his “American carnage” inauguration. Trump warned that the United States was becoming “a nation in decline” and a “crime-ridden filthy communist nightmare.” He spoke of an “epic battle” against “sinister forces” on the left. He repeatedly painted himself as a martyr, a tragic hero still hoping for redemption. “They’re not coming after me, they’re coming after you, and I’m just standing in their way,” Trump told the room. He pulled out his best, half-hearted Patton: “We are going to finish what we started. We’re going to complete the mission. We’re going to see this battle through to ultimate victory.” He was heavy on adjectives, devastating with nouns. “We will liberate America from these villains and scoundrels once and for all,” he said.

    This was only Trump’s fourth public event since officially entering the 2024 race last fall. Rather than lay out his vision for America, he found a mess of topics about which to complain. The White House, Trump said, “wasn’t the easiest building to live in.” He opined that “illegal immigrants come in, and we house them in the Waldorf-Astoria.” He characterized Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell as a “China-loving politician” and sounded legitimately disappointed when saying, “My wonderful travel ban is gone.” He lamented the halcyon days before he knew the terms “subpoena” and “grand jury.” He called Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg “racist” and griped about the “Department of Injustice.” Shortly before his speech, Trump told James Rosen of Newsmax that he intends to stay in the 2024 presidential race even if he is indicted in one (or more) criminal investigations. Relatedly, he promised to “totally obliterate the Deep State.”

    Adam Serwer: The FBI desperately wants to let Trump off the hook

    The audience, largely composed of Trump loyalists, hooted and repeatedly yelled “U-S-A!” A brief selection of the hats dotting the hallways outside the Potomac Ballroom: MAGA, ’MERICA, LET’S GO BRANDON, TRUMP WON, WE THE PEOPLE ARE PISSED. Trump’s solemn face was splashed across an array of comically dramatic acrylic paintings on display. (Kari Lake, the election denier who lost her race for Arizona governor last year, kissed one on stage Friday night.) Downstairs from the main stage, attendees could have their picture taken in a mock version of Trump’s Oval Office. Multiple people roamed the corridors in red, white, and blue “Trump 45” baseball jerseys. As the former president spoke, supporters waved bright red WE WANT TRUMP signs. But the man himself seemed only sort of into it, and very bitter.

    It was a strange and lackluster conference—more of a “1 a.m. at the party” vibe than “the greatest political movement in the history of our country” that Trump invoked tonight. Perhaps, years from now, 2023 will be remembered as “the last gasp of CPAC.” Gone was the FoxNation sponsorship; Newsmax hoped to fill the void. Attendees could also linger at pop-ups from The Epoch Times, Right Side Broadcasting News, America First News, OAN, Lindell TV, Proverbs Media Group LLC, and Patriot Mobile, which was pitching itself as a Christian cell-phone company.

    Aside from Trump, the CPAC lineup was missing many of its usual stars. And most of his potential 2024 challengers skipped the conference altogether this year, with several instead attending a rival Club for Growth event in Palm Beach, Florida. Trump spoke just a few hours after Jair Bolsonaro, the former president of Brazil, and Mike Lindell, the CEO of MyPillow, who announced the formation of something called an “Election Crime Bureau.” Representative Lauren Boebert of Colorado came next with a fire-and-brimstone speech peppered with Bible verses. “We must stand united in this battle against actual evil,” she told the room.

    On Friday, former South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley and former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo gently distanced themselves from their old boss in their speeches. (Haley was met with chants of “Trump! Trump! Trump!” after she left the stage.) The businessman Vivek Ramaswamy, who is also running for the Republican nomination, paraphrased Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech before pledging to get rid of affirmative action, calling it a cancer. He took aim at the Georgia congresswoman and super Trump surrogate Marjorie Taylor Greene: “Do we want a national divorce, or do we want a national revival?” Trump, when rattling off thank yous and compliments early into his speech—Representative Matt Gaetz: “a great guy”; Dr. Ronny Jackson: “he’s a doctor!”—joked that Greene is a “low-key” person.

    The CPAC straw poll, once a pivotal moment in the GOP election cycle, wrapped up 10 minutes ahead of schedule tonight. (On cue, someone tried to start a “Let’s Go Brandon” chant during the unveiling of the results.) Unsurprisingly, Trump won with 62 percent of the vote, crushing his closest rival, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, who received 20 percent. Curiously, Trump never mentioned DeSantis in his speech. (Tomorrow, DeSantis is scheduled to speak at the Reagan Presidential Library, and both candidates are soon headed to Iowa.)

    Read: Does Trump stand a real chance to repeat 2016?

    Steve Bannon, proud recipient of a Trump pardon, was among the biggest celebrities of the weekend. Late Friday afternoon, Bannon marched out to the stage in all black, three pens clipped to his shirt, and attacked Fox News for its alleged “soft-ban” of Trump. He referred to the Murdoch family as “a bunch of foreigners” and said, “Note to Fox senior management: When Donald J. Trump talks, it’s newsworthy.” He fired up the crowd: “We’re not looking for unity. We’re looking for victory!” He pounded his hand on the lectern, summing up the theme of the weekend: “MAGA! MAGA! MAGA!”

    As Trump spoke, another of the gathering’s many “Let’s Go Brandon!” chants broke out, and the former president thanked the crowd. At one point, he play-acted a scene between President Joe Biden and his son Hunter discussing the “laptop from hell” and received genuine laughs. Trump warned that Biden “is leading us into oblivion,” then promised to single-handedly end the war between Russia and Ukraine. Nearly every topic he touched—border security, foreign wars—had a way of coming back around to him, Trump. “NATO wouldn’t even exist if I didn’t get them to pay up,” he said. He then spoke hypothetically about Russia blowing up NATO’s headquarters.

    “You know, I had a beautiful life before I did this,” Trump said wistfully at one point. “I lived in luxury. I had everything.” As the speech crossed the 90-minute mark, Trump was clearly losing the audience. He returned to the wartime language: “We will not yield. We will press forward,” he promised. “We will finish what we started.”

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    John Hendrickson

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  • The New Majority

    The New Majority

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    The last time Republicans won control of the House of Representatives with a Democrat in the White House, the two parties clashed so ferociously that Congress nearly crashed the economy with a first-ever debt default. But with the GOP’s majority-making victory, those bitterly partisan confrontations of the Obama era might seem like halcyon days compared with what’s to come.

    Republicans will assume control of the House in January, at a moment of deepening political turmoil. Trust between the parties is lower than it’s been in decades. A would-be assassin assaulted the husband of Speaker Nancy Pelosi last month. A majority of the GOP’s House conference refused to certify President Joe Biden’s 2020 victory, and party leaders have vowed to immediately disband the committee investigating the January 6 Capitol sacking that occurred just hours before that very vote. Republicans will launch their own investigations, into not only the actions of Biden’s administration but also the business and personal life of the president’s surviving son. Politically motivated impeachments of President Joe Biden and members of his Cabinet could be inevitable. “There are going to be fulsome investigations, and we will not take anything off the table,” Representative Elise Stefanik of New York, the House’s third-ranking Republican, told me before the midterm elections.

    Read: How a GOP Congress could roll back freedoms nationwide

    Yet Republican leaders will be presiding over a majority sure to be far smaller than they were hoping for or expecting. When I spoke to Stefanik in the run-up to Election Day, she was confident bordering on cocky. “This is going to be a historic red wave, so buckle up, Russell,” she assured me. What transpired in last week’s election was instead barely a trickle. Stunning most pundits as well as Republicans, the race for the House majority was so tight, the vote-counting took a week to make clear the GOP’s slim victory. The Republican margin in the House could be so small as to make it nearly impossible for Kevin McCarthy, who is likely but not guaranteed to become speaker, to govern.

    Democrats, meanwhile, will have one last opportunity in the next six weeks to pass legislation, in a lame-duck session of Congress. After that, Biden’s progressive agenda is dead—at least for the next two years. Lacking a majority in the Senate, Republicans will have to strike deals with Biden and the Democrats just to keep the government running, let alone to make their mark on policy. Few lawmakers in either party have much hope for a grand bargain. McCarthy is more of a campaigner than a legislator, with little record of bipartisan dealmaking. He’ll have to corral a caucus that includes many Republicans who are far more loyal to former president Donald Trump than to him; some of them, such as Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, began making demands for more power weeks before the election and are sure to reject any hint of compromise with a president they consider illegitimate. “Governance will be a challenge,” Representative Tom Cole of Oklahoma told me. “Everything over the next two years will have to be a deal of some bipartisan agreement. Achieving those always creates some frustration on the two wings of the political spectrum, because you can’t have absolute victories.”

    Cole, a 20-year House veteran long allied with the Republican leadership, sounded a more optimistic note about the incoming majority. Compared with the Tea Party class of 2010, which helped the GOP capture the House during Barack Obama’s first term, he noted, this batch of newly elected Republicans is more diverse in terms of race, gender, and ideology. Many of them represent districts that Biden won, and more of them have previous legislative experience, which could lead to more pragmatism. “I would hope that we don’t fall into the trap that I would argue the Democrats fell into [under Trump] and turn ourselves into the impeachment caucus,” Cole said.

    That might all prove to be wishful thinking. Although Biden struck several significant bipartisan deals during his first two years, most of those were with Senate Republicans, and they passed over the objections of House GOP leaders, including McCarthy. Many House Republicans seem focused on investigating over legislating. The next two years will also play out against the backdrop of the 2024 presidential campaign, and now that Trump is running again, he will likely oppose any agreement that Republicans hammer out with the incumbent. Stefanik evinced little interest in bipartisanship when I spoke with her, insisting that Republicans would dictate the terms of the policy debate. “We’re going to pass good legislation and send it to the president’s desk, and he’s going to have to choose [if] you work with us or not,” she told me.

    The first major test for House Republicans may come over the same issue that defined their confrontations with Obama a decade ago: the debt ceiling. McCarthy and other Republicans have already said they will again try to use the required lifting of the nation’s borrowing limit as leverage to force fiscal restraint. Fearing the economic fallout from another round of brinkmanship, Democrats have begun talking about raising the debt ceiling—or eliminating it altogether—in the lame-duck session, before Republicans formally take power. The GOP would surely criticize Democrats for such a move, but many in the party might quietly accept it as a gift. “That,” Cole conceded, “would make it easier.”

    David A. Graham: The divided states of America

    As for what Republicans actually want to do with their newly acquired power, Stefanik pointed to the “Commitment to America” agenda that McCarthy unveiled in September. It’s a broad-brush list of priorities that is light on legislative detail. The GOP wants to lower inflation, fight crime, and secure the border. But absent good-faith negotiations with Democrats, any bills they pass won’t become law. An effort to tackle border security, for example, could be an invitation to reengage in talks over a larger immigration-reform package of the kind sought by the two parties for decades. Again, Stefanik wasn’t interested: “You have to secure the border before you even talk about broader visa reforms.”

    Such a response could become familiar over the next two years. Republicans are coming to Washington not to legislate or to govern, but to fight. That’s one promise, at least, the new House majority should find easy to fulfill.

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    Russell Berman

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