All eyes on Trump as former president addresses Maga Republicans at CPAC – live
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I bumped into Nigel Farage, a British politician, broadcaster and demagogue, wandering the corridors and asked if he agrees with the conventional wisdom that CPAC feels flat and marginal this year.
Farage, who has been coming to CPAC for a decade, suggested that the only thing missing is young people. “Trump is not new,” he observed. It’s true that student activists have been unusually thin on the ground here. Notably Charlie Kirk of Turning Point USA, a fixture in past years, is not among the speakers.
Instead the big beast at CPAC is 69-year-old Steve Bannon, White House chief strategist turned far right podcaster. He seems to be broadcasting constantly on the Real America’s Voice channel from a stage set up just outside the ballroom that hosts the main stage.
Bannon – who is appealing his conviction and four month prison sentence for contempt of Congress – talks combatively into a microphone with a noisy “Maga” crowd gathered behind him, often blocking the corridor for people trying to get by. There is often more energy here than in the conference sessions themselves.
Today Bannon reprised his criticism of Fox News, “oligarch” Ken Griffin and Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell, his faint praise of Nikki Haley, Ron DeSantis and Mike Pompeo as “good people” and his contention that, when it comes to the 2024 Republican primary election, there is no time for “on the job training”.
He said Donald Trump had given America “four years of peace and prosperity”. No doubt the former president is grateful. But it does imply that CPAC 2023 is looking more to the past than the future.
