Sad! Donald Trump speaks to sparsely attended CPAC.

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Imagine yourself in a darkened grand ballroom of a Marriott conference center on a late winter Saturday dressed in business-casual attire. You finish watching your 16th consecutive speech of the day, from 8:30 am, about the need to fight the RINOs. You take a break and go to the atrium market, get a wet chicken Caesar salad wrap, and eat alone on a bench. You wander around the vendor area to check out Trump apparel and investment opportunities for gold or cryptocurrency, and then take the escalator back. Through high-paned glass windows, you can see, empty, the brownish-gray Potomac River and an empty Ferris wheel. It was an unpleasant temperature outside, 47 degrees. Go back to the grand ballroom and sit for another four hours.

You paid hundreds of dollars for it.

You are an attendee at the Conservative Political Action Conference. And this year there are fewer of you.

CPAC, the conservative movement’s regular gathering, returned to the DC area this year after several years in Florida during the pandemic. The confab previews focused on how the CPAC stars have shrunk in stature on the right. In past presidential election cycles, any candidate, of any ideological leaning, would attend the rally to prove themselves to the party’s conservative base and right-wing media watchdogs. It was at CPAC in 2012, for example, that GOP presidential frontrunner Mitt Romney went before the judges and awkwardly described himself as a serious conservative.

But CPAC can be skipped this year for potential presidential candidates and attendees. The main contenders, such as Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, did not show. (Former Vice President Mike Pence also did not attend CPAC.) Part of the lighter attendance was the fact that the man who runs CPAC, lobbyist and operative Matt Schlapp, is under investigation for a sexual assault allegation. that is misconduct. But CPAC has also become more of a show for Trump, and those in the right-wing universe who profit from him, than anything else.

It is a content machine for the right-wing media ecosystem, a former Romney adviser told the New York Times.

The most striking images of CPAC, then, are those that show what appears to be a consistently half-empty ballroom. And what are they listening to? Well, the hard sell of investment opportunities is no longer limited to shady operators in the vendors room. Kimberly Guilfoyle, the conservative media personality and girlfriend of Donald Trump Jr., does it herself on a teleprompter.

But even with limited attendance from presidential hopefuls and, you know, general attendees, does this scammier-than-usual CPAC offer any traditional news, in terms of the presidential advance -cycle plotlines? A little.

DeSantis and other presidential hopefuls didn’t want to show up for what was, essentially, a Trump rally. Still, Trump certainly showed up, giving a 90-minute speech on Saturday. In the speech, the former president laid out the themes for his 2024 run, which he called the last battle.

The themes you might expect for a battle of such finality are pretty grim!

This isn’t the Trump audience relaxing and ranting about his NBC ratings or how he saw a celebrity boob in 1988. It’s more of the dystopian, grumpy Trump of his speech. at the inauguration of American Carnage in 2017, or his march to the Capitol speech before the mob attack in Jan. 6, 2021.

He spoke about his influence in reshaping the party. We had a Republican Party led by freaks, neocons, globalists, open borders zealots and fools, but we will not return to the party of Paul Ryan, Karl Rove, and Jeb Bush, he said. Let’s get rid of the warangers, let’s get rid of the globalists, let’s get rid of the communists, let’s get rid of the kind of politics that hate our country. The country, he said, is in an epic battle against evil forces as the country turns into a crime-ridden, filthy communist nightmare.

In 2016, I declared: I am your voice, Trump said. Now, I add: I am your warrior. I am your justice. And for those who have been harmed and betrayed: I am your recompense.

Yeah, so not exactly a sunny, shining city on a hill scene of things. Trumps campaign vision is more about, say, destroying the communist hill town and its pagan cultural practices. He’s happier when he talks about how the toilets don’t work anymore.

Trump won the CPAC presidential straw poll with 62 percent of the vote. DeSantis got 20 percent.

Speaking of DeSantis, the Florida governor now has enough hype and recognition that he can afford to miss CPAC, especially if it isn’t already. Polls in the single-digits mean, all others are not. Half a crowd of people is still a crowd of people to them, and they have to take advantage of the half chance.

The only other known candidate to formally launch a presidential campaign, former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley, put up a double-digit performance in the CPAC straw poll. Unfortunately for him, it was the CPAC vice presidential straw poll, where he got 10 percent. (Kari Lake, someone from Arizona who might believe she’s the current governor of Arizona, won with 20 percent.)

In her speech, Haley delivered the usual fare about how socialist Democrats don’t just want to spend our money, they want to take away our freedoms and repeated her call for mandatory brain testing of politicians over 75 years old. The response was reportedly warm.

Tepid, however, appears generous, as Haley is jeered in the hallways with chants of we love Trump! after his speech.

Nikki Haley gets a warm reception from CPAC.

Oh wait they’re yelling at Trump pic.twitter.com/6PuJ6606Ph

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Not that you need to say anything about Trump to have his mercenaries scream at you for the rest of your life, but what potshots could Haley have taken at Trump? One of his arguments for generational change is that Republicans have lost the popular vote in seven of the last eight presidential elections, a line he repeated at CPAC. This at least points to the question of Trumps electability. (Trump will probably tell you his many supporters at CPAC that those numbers are bogus and that he actually won the popular vote both times.)

Another likely presidential candidate, former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, is a little more direct. Not only have they lost the popular vote in seven of the last eight presidential elections, he said, but we have lost three elections in a row. It acknowledges that Trump lost the 2020 election.

We cannot be the left, following celebrity leaders with their own brand of identity politics, those with fragile egos who refuse to acknowledge the truth, Pompeo said.

Pompeo got one percent in the CPAC straw poll.

In his speech, Pompeo noted that previous administrations, Republican and Democrat, have mismanaged the national debt. That is profoundly unconservative, he said. It’s a point he’ll repeat on Fox News later in the weekend, implying that Trump is not a true conservative.

Everything is a little strange. Why does he, or anyone walking into Trumps lion den this weekend, think the Conservative Political Action Conference has anything to do with conservatism?

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