OXON HILL, Md. – After raising its status by connecting with Donald Trump in recent years, the fortunes of the Conservative Political Action Conference seem to have collapsed with the former president attempting a coup today, with fewer sponsors, fewer participants and, according to appearances. from hoping for a White House, less relevance.
Attendance at the four-day meeting at the Gaylord National Resort & Convention Center appeared to be lower than in the past, especially two years earlier when it was held in Orlando, Florida, to avoid the COVID-19 restrictions in the Washington suburbs. Sponsorships are down, and the exhibit hall has plenty of unsold space after Wednesday’s opening — a dramatic contrast from previous CPACS.
“It’s amazing,” said Al Cardenas, former chairman of the American Conservative Union, the nonprofit organization that runs CPAC. “Corporate America has decided not to touch it.”
Possible GOP presidential candidates such as former Vice President Mike Pence, former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, South Carolina Senator Tim Scott and Florida Governor Ron DeSantis decided not to touch, either.
In 2015, during the last presidential election without a Republican in the White House, CPAC attracted dozens of candidates: Christie, Ben Carson, Carly Fiorina, Ted Cruz, Jeb Bush, Bobby Jindal, Scott Walker, Marco Rubio, Rick Perry, Rick Santorum, Rand Paul and Trump.
Eight years later, despite 14 well-known Republicans running or considering a run for president, only three attended the event: Trump, former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and former UN Ambassador Nikki Haley.
Many of the major candidates, including Haley and Pompeo, attended a meeting of the anti-tax Caucus for Growth in Florida this weekend. DeSantis appeared at a Republican dinner in Texas. Pence has scheduled visits to Michigan, South Carolina and Florida.
In the past, other groups wouldn’t even consider scheduling an event in front of CPAC. That is no longer the case. “Nobody stopped to say, ‘Oh, we can’t do it because it’s the same time as CPAC,'” said one of the candidate’s top advisers on condition of anonymity.
Also contributing to the decline was the lawsuit by current ACU chair Matt Schlapp, who faced sexual allegations against a male staffer for Herschel Walker’s Senate campaign last year. Schlapp denied the allegations, but many prominent Republicans said candidates and officials should be wary of appearing on stage with him.
“Schlapp’s legal problems are a cloud in the conference,” one of them said anonymously. “It is difficult to calculate, but there is no question that it is affected by the number of speakers and participants.”
ACU did not respond to HuffPost’s inquiries for this story.
This year’s production continues the group’s movement away from its conservative roots. The keynote speaker at CPAC’s inaugural event in 1974 was Ronald Reagan, but the biggest names in 2023 were election losers who claimed their votes were stolen from them, including failed Arizona gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake, former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro and, in the main speech. slot on Friday evening, Trump himself.
On Thursday, the biggest draw for the Trump-focused audience was pillow seller Mike Lindell, who has been a major sponsor of the right-wing media in recent years even as he aggressively pushed the lie that the 2020 election was stolen from Trump using compromised votes. machine. They are also a sponsor of this year’s event and will appear on stage shortly before Trump on Saturday.
Cardenas said CPAC’s embrace of foreign authoritarians like Bolsonaro and Hungary’s Viktor Orbán — CPAC has held conferences in Brazil and Hungary — is also troubling.
“The prime minister of Hungary is not only someone you don’t want to imitate, but also someone close to Vladimir Putin,” he said, referring to the Russian leader.
Indeed, speaker after speaker there criticized the United States’ current policy of sending weapons to Ukraine to repel Putin’s year-old invasion. Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, among the most strident voices against help for Ukraine, is the featured speaker there.
“CPAC is now really the center of the pro-Putin movement in American politics. It’s not an exaggeration to say that it can cost Ukraine the war. … So for Putin now it’s not an abstract thing. I think it’s extraordinarily dangerous,” said Stuart Stevens, a Republican consultant who worked on the campaign of former President George W. Bush and 2012 nominee Mitt Romney.
“There’s a tendency to laugh at CPAC because it’s a strange event. But I will say this year, watch out,” added Stevens. “You go from Ronald Reagan – ‘Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall’ – for Marjorie Taylor Greene.