In 2016, Donald Trump canceled his planned speech at the Conservative Political Action Conference amid rumblings of an audience walkout. Several speakers used their time slots that year to bash Trump, and the crowd vigorously booed each mention of his name.
A year later, a newly inaugurated President Trump and his staffers, advisers, cabinet members, and allies dominated the event.
“By tomorrow, this will be TPAC,” joked White House counselor Kellyanne Conway as she sang her boss’ praises to thousands of attendees.
So how does 2017’s TPAC compare to the decades of CPACs that preceded it?
~ In 2015, the last non-election year, the conference hosted nearly 20 members of Congress as speakers. This year, just a small handful made the pilgrimage.
~ The right-wing publication Breitbart, once so on the fringe that they held a rival conference outside of CPAC in 2013 and 2014 called “The Uninvited,” is now a lead sponsor of the official show, and several of its writers and editors spoke on panels and from the main stage.
~ Aside from Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX), Trump’s vanquished Republican rivals are nowhere to be seen.
~ You couldn’t hear so much of an echo of the thunderous denunciations of Trump and Trumpism common on the stage in years past.
~ Panels held at previous CPACs focused on Republican outreach to African Americans and Latinos were nowhere to be seen.
~ The small-government, free-market, libertarianism that has dominated the conference—which for years crowned either Ron Paul or Rand Paul winners of the CPAC straw poll—was also glaringly absent.
Many long-time conference attendees, including Brooklyn Tea Party Vice President Cartrell Gore, expressed unease about these changes.
“I don’t see the Ron or Rand influence this year,” he lamented. “But it’s alive and well in me.”
Gore, a Naval Reserve member who left the Republican Party many years ago when it became “too liberal for [his] taste,” became visibly uncomfortable when asked if he is a Trump supporter. “I can’t say that. I want to wait and see what happens. I’m not over-optimistic.”
Even some members of CPAC’s leadership broadcast some discomfort about the conference's embrace of Trump. Conference organizer Dan Schneider told the crowd on Thursday: “We are so thankful to be celebrating a president ... who is not named Hillary Clinton.”