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Trump Dominates Key Conservative Event   

Two competing, prominent events have put on display a cleaving of American conservatives ahead of next year’s presidential election.

Former President Donald Trump closed out the annual Conservative Political Action Conference near Washington, which for years has been a must-attend event for the right wing of the Republican Party. But many party loyalists, including big campaign contributors, instead attended a rival gathering in Florida.

“In 2016, I declared: I am your voice. Today, I add: I am your warrior. I am your justice. And for those who have been wronged and betrayed: I am your retribution,” Trump told the CPAC attendees shortly after he captured the conference’s Saturday evening straw poll (unofficial balloting among event registrants) for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination.

In the survey, Trump trounced runner-up Ron DeSantis, the governor of the southern U.S. state of Florida, 62% to 20%. It was the fifth consecutive time Trump has won the CPAC straw poll.

Trump, whose speech lasted an hour and 42 minutes, revisited familiar grievances aired at his campaign rallies and repeated the false claim he won the 2020 presidential election. He made no mention of any other declared or expected Republican presidential candidates, instead heaping criticism on the Democrat who defeated him in the 2020 presidential election.

“Joe Biden is leading us into oblivion,” Trump said, adding, “We’re going to have World War III if something doesn’t happen fast.”

“I am the only candidate who can make this promise,” he said. “I will prevent World War III.”

Trump also vowed, if elected again, that he would settle Russia’s war on Ukraine before he arrived back in the Oval Office.

Haley speaks at both events

The former president’s only significant, declared primary challenger so far, his former ambassador to the United Nations, Nikki Haley, was on the CPAC stage the previous day. Haley also spoke at the rival event, the four-day gathering of the Club for Growth, a group focused on an anti-tax agenda.

“I know there’s a Republican candidate out there you did not invite to this conference,” she told those at the Palm Beach, Florida, event. “I appreciate being one you did invite.”

Trump was not invited to the Club for Growth retreat, held at a luxury hotel just 5 kilometers north up Ocean Boulevard from his Mar-a-Lago resort.

Florida Governor DeSantis was among the top speakers with dozens of major Republican Party donors attending. Among those in Palm Beach for the conference were several potential presidential candidates: former Vice President Mike Pence; Tim Scott, a U.S. senator from South Carolina; and Chris Sununu, the governor of the Northeastern U.S. state of New Hampshire.

On Tuesday, Trump criticized the conservative, economy-focused group, writing in a Truth Social post the “Club for NO Growth is an insignificant group of Globalists” that would only attract the stragglers in next year’s Republican primary.

Another potential presidential prospect from the Republican Party who spoke at CPAC was Trump’s former secretary of state, Mike Pompeo.

Attendees described the reception to remarks at CPAC by Pompeo and Haley as tepid. Haley was confronted by chants for Trump as she departed the ballroom.

Pompeo took a subtle dig at Trump during his speech, indirectly blaming his former boss for Republican losses in the 2022 midterm elections, combined with the 2020 presidential loss, creating what he called a “crisis in conservatism.”

“We need a party, a conservative party, that we can be proud to call home again, rooted in our founding ideas, led by people of real character, of competence and commitment to the mission that brought you all here today,” he said.

‘A vehicle for Trump’ 

In public remarks so far, prominent Republicans, including those expected to challenge Trump for the party’s presidential nomination, have refrained from directly criticizing the former president, a reflection of the power he wields over the party rank and file.

Conservatives were mostly united around Trump when he unsuccessfully ran for reelection in 2020. Some recent polls show the former president retaining about 50% support among Republicans ahead of next year’s election.

CPAC has turned into the “Donald Trump Family Variety Hour,” said CNN’s conservative commentator Sarah Elizabeth Cupp. “It’s become a vehicle for Trump and Trumpism” and no longer “a stop on way to becoming president.”

Prominent neo-conservative writer Bill Kristol, who served in the administrations of two Republican presidents, was not impressed by either the CPAC or Club for Growth events.

“Competition is a good thing. It leads to better products and choices except when it’s a race to the bottom,” Kristol told VOA. “And it looks like Trump versus DeSantis is more of a race to the bottom than a healthy contest which will improve the choice.”
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Marianne Williamson Launches Longshot 2024 Challenge to Biden

Self-help author Marianne Williamson, whose 2020 White House campaign featured calls for spiritual healing, launched another bid for the presidency on Saturday, becoming the first Democrat to formally challenge President Joe Biden for the 2024 nomination.

“We are upset about this country, we’re worried about this country,” Williamson told a crowd of more than 600 at a kickoff in the nation’s capital. “It is our job to create a vision of justice and love that is so powerful that it will override the forces of hatred and injustice and fear.”

The 70-year-old onetime spiritual adviser to Oprah Winfrey should provide only token primary opposition — a testament to how strongly national Democrats are united behind Biden. Still, she tweaked the president, a longtime Amtrak rider, by holding her opening rally at the ornately marble-columned presidential suite at Union Station, Washington’s railway hub.

Biden gave his own speech from Union Station just before last November’s elections, when he led Democrats to a surprisingly strong showing, urging voters to reject political extremism and saying “democracy itself” was at stake.

Williamson, whose red, blue and black campaign signs feature the dual slogans “A New Beginning” and “Disrupt the System,” said she’ll be campaigning in early-voting states on the 2024 election calendar.

That includes New Hampshire, which has threatened to defy a Biden-backed plan by the Democratic National Committee to have South Carolina lead off the nominating contests. Democrats and Republicans in New Hampshire have warned that if Biden skips the state’s unsanctioned primary and a rival wins it, that outcome could prove embarrassing for the sitting president — even if that challenger has no real shot of becoming the nominee.

Striking a defiant tone Saturday, Williamson denounced “those who feel they are the adults in the room” and aren’t taking her candidacy seriously, proclaiming, “Let me in there.”

“I have run for president before. I am not naive about these forces which have no intention of allowing anyone into this conversation who does not align with their predetermined agenda,” she said. “I understand that, in their mind, only people who previously have been entrenched in the car that brought us into this ditch can possibly be considered qualified to bring us out of it.”

Luke Stowell, 20, a musician and student at American University in Washington who sat in the front row for Williamson’s announcement, said “she has a really nice message that incorporates all of the prejudices and the social structures that inhibit, I think, a lot of people on a daily basis.”

Seated next to him, 24-year-old American University law student Ivan Claudio noted that, should he win a second term, Biden would be in his late 80s by the time he leaves office, which Claudio said “is a cause for concern.”

Biden, the oldest president in U.S. history, would be 86 at the end of a second term. Most people in the United States — and even most Democrats — say they don’t want him to run again, according to a poll from The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research.

The president is expected to announce in the coming weeks that he’s running again.

A Texas native who now lives in Beverly Hills, California, Williamson is the author of more than a dozen books and ran an unsuccessful independent congressional campaign in California in 2014. In 2020, she was best known for wanting to create a Department of Peace and arguing the federal government should pay large financial reparations to Black Americans as atonement for centuries of slavery and discrimination.

Arguably her most memorable moment of that campaign came during a primary debate when she called for a “moral uprising,” but she dropped out of the race shortly before the leadoff Iowa caucuses began.
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