TRUMP’S LOYALISTS RAIL AGAINST ‘FAILED’ GOP ESTABLISHMENT

Start of conservative conference affirms him as party leader

One month after Donald Trump left office, thousands of his conservative allies and other far-right leaders on Friday began trying to center the Republican Party around the grievances of his presidency, pushing false claims about the American voting system, denouncing what they called liberal cancel culture and mocking mask-wearing.

Gathering at the first major conference of pro-Trump conservatives since his defeat, the politicians and activists sought to affirm their adherence to a conservatism as defined by Trump, and the need to break with many of the policies and ideas that had animated the American right for decades.

Some speakers at the event, the annual gathering of the Conservative Political Action Conference, went as far as to declare the traditional Republican Party all but dead. Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, who is seen as a possible candidate for president in 2024, vowed that conservatives would never return to “the failed Republican establishment of yesteryear.” Others firmly asserted Trump’s standing as the party’s leader and waved off the talk among some Republicans about moving on from the former president.

“Let me tell you right now,” said Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas, “Donald J. Trump ain’t goin’ anywhere.”

The line earned the loudest applause of the conference’s events Friday morning, the start of a three-day affair that will culminate with a speech by Trump on Sunday afternoon.

To the extent the speakers addressed policy at all, it was to stake out hard-line positions on China, immigration and, to a degree, the laissez-faire economic policies that had allowed tech giants like Amazon, Facebook and Google to amass so much power.

But the conference’s opening-day agenda was anchored chiefly in grave warnings about an impending breakdown of American society at the hands of “woke mobs” and “Marxist leftists”; complaints about censorship of conservatives; a false insistence that the 2020 presidential election had been “rigged”; and a suspicion of anyone who did not share their resolve to fight back and stand with Trump.

As the conference got under way, Democrats in Washington neared a House vote on a coronavirus relief package worth nearly $2 trillion that has blanket Republican opposition. Yet even as the House minority leader, Kevin McCarthy, sporting a “No Pelosi Payoffs” button, railed against the measure in the Capitol on Friday, there was scant mention of it or anything else related to President Joe Biden’s agenda.

The Republican speakers, instead, won applause by focusing on the themes that animated the party during Trump’s presidency — the us-versus-them politics, the preoccupation with personality over policy — all while scarcely even mentioning Biden’s name.

It was not until Donald Trump Jr. and his girlfriend, Kimberly Guilfoyle, took the stage near the end of Friday’s sessions that anyone offered an extended critique of Biden’s first month in office. Yet the former president’s eldest son spent nearly as much time ridiculing Rep. Liz Cheney of Wyoming, the third-ranking House Republican and a Trump critic, as he did confronting the current president.

After days of Republicans proclaiming there would be no civil war in the party, the attacks represented a stark reminder that Trump and his closest associates are determined to purge their critics.