The conservative movement in America now belongs to President Trump.
Thousands of activists will arrive in Washington this week for an annual gathering that will vividly display how Trump has pushed the Republican Party
and the conservative movement toward an “America first” nationalism that has long existed on the fringes.
“Every movement that gets dusty or sclerotic relies on an infusion of energy from the bottom up,” said White House counselor Kellyanne Conway. “It also takes a transformative individual to bring about change.”
Panels scheduled for the four-day conference include how the left does “not support law enforcement”; why the United States can’t have the same security standards as heaven (“a gate, a wall and extreme vetting”); and a discussion of “fair trade” that will put Breitbart editor Joel Pollak and progressive anchor Ed Schultz, who hosts a show on Russian-owned RT, on the same side.
That may sound like a celebration of a young presidency and the ideas that helped him win in November. But the event will also showcase the tension created as these new voices reshape conservative thinking.
By Tuesday afternoon, Yiannopoulos had resigned from Breitbart News, but the thinking behind his invitation remained. Matt Schlapp, the president of the American Conservative Union, which organizes CPAC, said the gathering this year will be an acknowledgment of the “realignment going on politically in the country” and of the rising import of “American sovereignty” to conservatives nationally.
The new nationalist energy has already embroiled this year’s CPAC gathering in controversy. Organizers invited the inflammatory commentator Milo Yiannopoulos to speak after protesters at the University of California at Berkeley rioted to stop one of his appearances. They disinvited him as controversy swirled over 2016 interviews in which he had criticized the age of sexual consent and joked about statutory rape.
This year’s CPAC schedule represents a marked shift toward Trump’s politics and penchant for showmanship. Nigel Farage, the pro-Brexit politician from Britain who spoke to an emptying room in 2015, will speak the same morning as Trump. Reality TV star Dog the Bounty Hunter will appear with a super PAC trying to draft Milwaukee County Sheriff David Clarke, a regular Trump supporter on the cable news circuit, into Wisconsin’s 2018 Senate race.
“There used to be Pat Buchanan’s people, the populist revolt-types and the establishment of the anti-establishment, who’d get a third of the vote in the primaries and we’d beat them back,” said Mike Murphy, a veteran Republican consultant who led a super PAC that supported former Florida governor Jeb Bush’s presidential campaign. “Now they’ve hijacked the Republican Party.”
White House chief strategist Stephen K. Bannon, who led Breitbart before joining Trump’s team and has been a standard-bearer for conservative populism, will speak Thursday alongside his colleague, White House Chief of Staff Reince Priebus. Bannon hopes to explain Trump’s actions in his first month in office, in particular, policies on immigration and the creation of manufacturing jobs, according to an official familiar with White House discussions.
By sitting with Priebus, the former chairman of the Republican National Committee, Bannon aims to showcase how the party guard and formerly obscure players on the right are in power and working together to enact a new kind of conservative agenda, the official said, one that is directed at reaching working-class voters who are disillusioned with the global economy and elites.
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