Trump thrills supporters at Dallas CPAC
Former President Donald Trump swept into Dallas on Sunday spinning tall tales about the 2020 election and the crowd that mobbed the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6 hoping to keep him in the White House despite his defeat.
“No evidence? There’s so much evidence,” he insisted at the Conservative Political Action Conference.
He harped on complaints that he’d been cheated of a second term because of a “rigged election” and basked in chants of “four more years” from thousands of activists who want him to make a comeback and mostly assume he’s already angling to do so.
Whipping the crowd to a frenzy,
he vowed that once Republicans take back Congress in the 2022 midterms, “We will take back that
glorious White House that sits so majestically in our nation’s capital.”
Trump’s appearance at the the Hilton Anatole was part of a reemergence since Jan. 20, when he retreated to his Mar-a-lago resort in Florida in the final hours of his presidency.
At CPAC and a pair of recent rallies, Trump has sought to elevate his profile, settle scores, and keep supporters revved and potential 2024 rivals muted.
The sound system blared Lee Greenwood’s “God Bless the USA” as he took the stage.
“Look at all those fake news people back there,” he said, peering through the lights at the bank of TV cameras.
On cue, the crowd booed, enjoying the first of many greatest hits from the Trump rally playlist. Over the next 90 minutes he railed
against “left wing cancel culture,” the “radical left Marxist maniacs” and “illegal leakers.”
He needled President Joe Biden for going senile and Big Tech as overbearing losers.
“The Biden administration is turning the border into the single biggest disaster in American history, and perhaps in world history,” Trump said with signature hyperbole, lamenting what he called an open door policy to welcome “savage MS-13 gang members,” drug smugglers and illegal migration.
Speaker after speaker over three days had by then heaped praise on the one-term president.
Stephen Miller, architect of Trump’s immigration policies, lauded his former boss for crafting a new “conservative populism.”
“He fought the open borders lunatics … He fought China. He fought the terrorists,” Miller said. “President Trump did an amazing job … defending this nation’s heritage, its culture, its values.”
“What was Donald Trump right about?” the ex-president’s son Donald Trump Jr. asked Friday. “Everything!” the CPAC crowd shouted.
The ex-president spent the day downplaying the Jan. 6 attack.
“There was such love at that rally. You had over a million people there. They were there for one reason … We had a corrupt election. We had a rigged election. We had a stolen election,” Trump said on Fox News, describing the scene as “a love fest …They were peaceful people. These were great people.”
Estimates put the crowd that day at no more than 50,000, not over a million. Of those, several
thousand lay siege to the Capitol, bashing in windows and doors, attacking police with flagpoles, bike racks, hockey sticks and pepper spray and sending lawmakers into hiding for hours.
Trump topped the CPAC straw poll for the 2024 GOP nomination, besting Florida Gov. Ron Desantis 70-21. If Trump opts not to run, Desantis would be the top pick for 68 percent of attendees.
Trump’s approval rating: 98 percent. Biden’s disapproval rating, for comparison: 97 percent.
“We have a much different party than we had five years ago,” said Trump, who snubbed CPAC in March 2016, when conservative activists were clamoring for anyone but him as the GOP nominee.
Introducing Trump in Dallas, the chair of the American Conservative Union, Matt Schlapp, called him “the biggest impact player in our movement.”
Despite efforts by social media giants to “cancel” him – prompting a class action lawsuit by Trump against Facebook, Twitter and Google that the American Conservative Union joined – “he simply won’t give in and be quiet,” Schlapp said.
“We are taking Mark ‘Zuckerbucks’ … and the other Silicon Valley billionaires to court … until we have restored the sacred right of freedom of speech for every American,” Trump told the crowd. “I was banned by sleazebags.”
Trump was in Orlando for another CPAC event in late February and began holding his own rallies last month, starting June 26 near Cleveland. He had a second rally last weekend in Sarasota, Fla. Both drew tens of thousands of supporters. CPAC drew about 3,000 attendees, plus vendors, media and others.