San Diego Union-Tribune (Sunday)
CPAC SPEAKERS FOCUS ON TRUMP
Lawmakers note former president’s role in promoting candidates
A pair of influential House Republicans used a conservative political gathering Saturday to lavish praise on former President Donald Trump and, in ways subtle and direct, marginalize their GOP colleagues who have distanced themselves from Trump in the aftermath of the Capitol riot last month.
House Minority Leader Kevin Mccarthy, who faulted the former president for his role in the attack and at one point considered asking him to resign, credited Trump at the annual Conservative Political Action Conference with helping Republicans with their surprise gains in the House last year.
“You know why we won that?” Mccarthy asked of the 14 seats the GOP claimed in 2020. “President Trump worked on all these races.” He also recalled how Trump, even when in quarantine after his coronavirus diagnosis, would do “rallies over the phone for each district.”
The top House Republican sat onstage alongside Rep. Jim Banks of Indiana, an emerging conservative leader who answered a question aimed at minimizing the party’s internal fractures by drawing attention to them.
Banks highlighted Mccarthy’s popularity before pointedly noting that “the least popular” congressional Republicans “are the ones who want to erase Donald Trump and Donald Trump supporters from our party.”
If that happens, he continued, “we won’t win back the majority in 2022 — we definitely won’t win back the White House in 2024.”
Neither lawmaker mentioned Rep. Liz Cheney, the third-ranking House Republican. But their unprompted rhetorical embrace of the former president illustrated how little appetite there is among Cheney’s colleagues for cutting ties with Trump, as she has urged.
In fact, Mccarthy’s joint appearance with Banks was something of a brushback pitch at Cheney, who earlier in the week restated her hope that Republicans would move on from Trump just moments after Mccarthy had said the former president should attend this conference.
The Indiana Republican, who heads the conservative Republican Study Group, has sought to take a more prominent role in the caucus following Cheney’s break with Trump. On Saturday, Mccarthy hailed Banks as “an amazing individual” shortly before he assailed the anti-trump Republicans in their ranks.
In the weeks since he criticized Trump over the deadly Jan. 6 attack, Mccarthy has scrambled to patch up his relationship with the former president, visiting him at his home in Florida and welcoming him to play a continued role in the party.
After much of the first day of the conference was devoted to slamming Big Tech companies and “cancel culture,” the House GOP leader and a bevy of his colleagues used the Saturday session to sketch out their opposition to the $1.9 trillion COVID relief bill House Democrats passed on a party-line vote overnight.
They sought to link the rising conservative anger toward social media giants with the aid measure.
“She put a tunnel in Silicon Valley that has nothing to do with COVID into the bill,” Mccarthy said of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, alluding to funds in the proposal to extend a subway in San Jose.
Trump will make his first postwhite House speech at the conference today.