Less Intellectual and More Salacious: Commercialized, Trumpified, CPAC Is Adrift

[demmiblue]

With American conservatism currently a one-man show, no wonder the right’s most important conference is not drawing the way it did in the Obama years.

Source: Vanity Fair

For years, comparing CPAC to the Super Bowl might have been underselling it. The annual Conservative Political Action Conference, which had accelerated to its apex during the Reagan era, had such a hold on the Republican universe that activist groups would clamor for precious vendor space in the expo hall; the wealthy would finesse their way into the glitzy Ronald Reagan dinner (or beg to get into the Breitbart frat rager); and major politicians would bus in students and activists to vote for them in the conference’s famous straw poll. And for a mainstream-media community that rarely has an opportunity to engage with the conservative world, CPAC was the greatest carny show on earth. The CPAC party piece became its own reportorial genre, and for days, one could see reporters running up and down the Gaylord convention center’s carpeted halls to get a quote from whoever was wearing the craziest getup.

This year, however, there was something conspicuously different, and Trumpified, about the lineup. As of Tuesday, the lineup boasted 59 big-name speakers, with the normal crew of think-tank wonks filling out the rest of the agenda— a puzzling drop from the 166-plus speakers the conference advertised last year. Some bold-faced names stood out among them: Donald Trump, obviously, who owes his political career in part to American Conservative Union chairman Matt Schlapp, who runs CPAC. (Schlapp’s wife, Mercedes (Mercy to her friends), now works in a newly created position in Trump’s administration.) There was James Damore, the anti-diversity crusader who was fired from Google, and Pamela Geller, the anti-Islam activist who likes to warn about “creeping Sharia”; Trump skeptic Ben Shapiro and failed Libertarian presidential candidate Gary Johnson. But whereas CPAC had, in the past, been a Tea Party-inflected coalition of activists, most of the lineup is now explicitly pro-Trump: Sean Hannity, Ted Cruz, Laura Ingraham, leading panels such as “How Trump Is Taking Down Lawless Government Agencies,” “Trumponomics vs. Obamanomics,” and “#TrumpedUp: Unmasking the Deep State.“

Some members of the old guard were appalled by the late addition of Marion Maréchal-Le Pen, the niece of French Nationalist Party leader Marine Le Pen and a prominent anti-immigrant extremist. “She’s an anti-trade, anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim, anti-Semitic, [and] anti-free market nationalist,” an A.C.U. insider told me, explaining their anger. But in the new Trumpublican party, all manner of ideological outsiders are suddenly mainstream. “Marion is a classical liberal, a conservative,” Schlapp wrote on Twitter, defending the decision against a host of outraged Reaganite conservatives. The Trump G.O.P., after all, is a big tent party, so long as you’re aligned with the new management. While a former CPAC employee fumed that the same people who had griped about inviting Trump in past years—“He’s not a conservative. He’s not even a Republican. Why are we having him come and speak?”—were now “kissing his ass,” others struggled to understand how anyone couldn’t love Trump. “I can’t understand why any conservative would be against him,” said former A.C.U. board member Cleta Mitchell. “If their ideas are just to be hostile to the president, I would be hostile to those ideas at CPAC also! I don’t even know what those ideas are, that they don’t think he’s promoting. I really can’t think of anything in the conservative constellation that he’s not good on. I can’t.”
president reagan at cpac

Still, there seems to be a sense that this year’s CPAC is more toxic than in years past. While the vast majority of lawmakers have voted in lockstep with the president, many continue to express reservations in private about his politics and temperament. Last year, 20 congressmen and senators showed up at CPAC; this year, there are five, including Freedom Caucus Chair Mark Meadows and House Intelligence Committee chairman Devin Nunes. The abstaining members “don’t want to be around Trump supporters,” Rick Wilson, a prominent never-Trumper, explained, “because [with] Trump supporters, their first question is: Why didn’t you vote exactly this way? Why didn’t you praise the president? . . . And it is a strange kind of feeling for these folks. Most of them are hostages to Trump.”

Read more: https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2018/02/commercialized-trumpified-cpac-is-adrift