In the Magaverse there are guys in tailored suits with a drawing of a wall “with Mexico of course”; 11-year-old commentators well-versed in the latest trends in reactionary thinking; mothers “for freedom” and against “gender indoctrination in schools”; and a group of five “Proud Texans” with sequined jackets and letters on their T-shirts lined up reading TRUMP, the guy it’s all about.
There are hats, many hats, and one slogan stands above the rest: Make America Great Again. There are also Republican politicians, activists, culture warriors, headline-grabbing congressmen like Marjorie Taylor Greene, and powerful senators like Ted Cruz. Rising stars from all the fringes of America’s thriving right-wing media ecosystem, a pillow mogul named Mike Lindell who embarks on a crusade against “election crimes,” and a guy named Steve Bannon who’s happy to be hooked on by a pro-cause ideologue.
But after years of unstoppable expansion, the Magaverse, now encapsulated in a gigantic hotel and convention center, seems to be shrinking. At least that is the impression left by the celebration of the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in National Harbor (Maryland) south of Washington after a two-year absence due to the restrictions imposed by the pandemic on the capital and its agglomerations. The highlights of the last day are speeches by Trump, who will close the event, and by another former president who is resilient to defeat, Brazilian Jair Bolsonaro, who has been living in Orlando, Florida, since the end of the year.
CPAC attendees dressed as former President George Washington and ‘King MAGA’ at the hotel where the convention was held. Al Drago (Bloomberg)
Founded in 1974 with an upbeat inaugural address by Ronald Reagan, CPAC bills itself as “the world’s largest and most influential assembly of conservatives.” It also used to be a place for the various factions of the American right to debate ideas. Trump’s appearance on stage in 2016 blew that up too and the thing was absorbed by the MAGA movement. A dozen attendees with long-standing CPAC experience speaking to EL PAÍS these days agreed that attendance was down compared to previous editions (which took place in Dallas and Miami) and that spirits were a bit down due to the party’s apparent breakup
Some absences were more noticeable than others. Republican Congressman Kevin McCarthy, speaker of the House of Representatives, was not seen in the convention center corridors, but some of the more right-wing fellow believers, such as Matt Gaetz or Lauren Boebert, led him to pass a historic embarrassment by throwing up to 15 Forced votes until he could be elected.
Subscribe to EL PAÍS to follow all the news and read without limits.
subscribe to
Former Vice President Mike Pence, who was a Trump ally until Jan. 6, 2021, when the mob asked that he be hanged for not opposing confirmation of Joe Biden’s election victory, attended the meeting also did not participate. As if that weren’t enough, there’s no sign of the party’s rising stars like Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin, to whom things came close, and most importantly not Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, whose candidacy for the presidency seems secure and is running as Trump’s biggest rival for the party’s nomination.
The DeSantis Meteor, which this week released a 256-page memoir that reads like an applicant’s reference letter, lifted off in 2018 thanks to the then-president’s support, but the two orbits have long since separated. The old protégé has become a certain DeSanctimonius (cruel nickname playing on nickname Meapilas) for Trump and his family, so foreigners are not welcome in this town.
“We’re here while others are raising money from Chinese billionaires, enemies of the United States,” Donald Trump Jr. said from the main stage on Friday afternoon, referring to a fundraiser the Florida governor was hosting and looking for an alternative plan .
A woman at CPAC this Thursday wears a hat that alludes to the notion of China as another state of the American Federation CHIP SOMODEVILLA (Getty Images via AFP)
Perhaps because it’s a country DeSantis has given up as lost this time around, in the aisles of CPAC, the former president’s supporters won by a landslide victory. Supporters as famous as Bannon, who was his White House adviser. “Trump will win the primaries. And whoever puts him in front of the Democratic Party will win, too,” the national-populist ideologue said Thursday in a conversation with the newspaper that ended in a rally surrounded by dozens of fans of his podcast War Room, which he broadcast from CPAC, as it has done about twenty other shows of this style.
In his game, Bannon addressed theories, consistently dismissed in court, that the 2020 presidential election was a robbery. “Biden is an illegitimate president. The Chinese Communist Party, the KGB in Moscow and the ayatollahs in Iran know this and therefore treat him disrespectfully. There is an urgent need to fix the electoral system that is destroying this country. How difficult is it to count ballots? Europeans can count them in a single day. Are you telling me that the Europeans are better than us?” he exclaimed to cheers from his impromptu audience.
Vox’s presence
What happens in the aisles of the CPAC conflicts with the speeches of the speakers in the auditorium in the interest of those present. Vox MP Herman Tertsch walked through these corridors on Thursday, who is repeating this year’s conference to what he said “to improve solid relations [de su formación] with the Republican Party” and “to try to make them aware of the threat being forged in Latin America by regimes led by narco-communism”. Also other far-right European parties such as the Brothers of Italy, Law and Justice, Poland or the French Front National regularly take part in the call.
A few floors down, in the exhibitor area, more entertainment awaits. There you can have your picture taken against a backdrop of Trump’s Oval Office or have fun guessing which figure on the American left said which sentence, taken out of context. “In Congress, we approve the legislation, and then we read it to ourselves.” Nancy Pelosi? Correct!
The conference program consists of short interventions between 10 and 25 minutes (except for the one that the Sarao closes: an hour of Trump’s speech). These interventions are reminiscent of a TED Talk or take the form of conversations between two, three, or four people with titles such as Biden, Crime Family, True Stories of January 6th The Persecuted Speak, or There Are No Chinese Balloons Over Tennessee.
“We are here to say no to open borders, to chaos, to disempowering police, to attacks on America’s energy independence, to capitulation to climate alarmists, to waste, to turning our schools into indoctrination centers, far left, to their madness and Lawlessness, banning, censorship of dissent, and being dismissed as a fan if you dare question any of it,” proclaimed TV star Kimberly Guilfoyle, a former Trump adviser, when it was his turn. “Did I miss something?” he asked an audience who had paid for tickets starting at $295 ($50 for students) and didn’t even come close to filling the huge audience until the headliners arrived.
It must be acknowledged that Guilfoyle’s review of the issues of the interventions was fairly thorough, ridiculing the social justice aspirations of what conservatives scornfully call waking culture, defining traditional media as a threat to democracy, and much more talk about the supposed Chinese origin of the coronavirus, a melon the FBI reopened this week when dusting off the Wuhan lab theory. Next to Biden, the most frequently mentioned enemies were Dr. Anthony Fauci and Attorney General Merrick Garland.
The first word was given Thursday by CPAC’s seven-year president, Mat Schlapp, whose opinion has been dampened by allegations of sexual abuse by a campaign aide for Georgia Republican Senate nominee Herschell Walker.
Speakers included Brexiteer Nigel Farage, Tom Homan, Trump’s border czar, and JD Vance, Ohio Senator and author of the best-selling book A Hillbilly Elegy, as well as participation in the White House by two newly minted Republican candidates, Nikki Haley and Vivek Ramaswamy (a Third, businessman Perry Johnson was a member of CPAC and later started his Presidential Order).
Ramaswamy drew on his personal history as an anti-wake billionaire to try to sound like a compelling pick for 2024, to no avail. National unity, he argued, can only be achieved “by embracing extremism, radicalism, and the ideals that founded this nation 250 years ago: merit, freedom of expression, open debate, and self-government above the aristocracy.”
For her part, Haley, a former South Carolina governor and former UN ambassador to the United Nations, demonstrated arrests by appearing on hostile territory and reminding attendees that Republicans lost the popular vote in the last seven out of eight presidential elections. “If you’re tired of losing, put your trust in a new generation of leaders,” he warned. Haley, who received a few boos, reiterated his suggestion that politicians over the age of 75 should be required to have intellectual competency tests.
The King of the Magaverse, who his fans are waiting for this Saturday at the National Harbor Convention Center, is already 76 years old.
Follow all international information on Facebook and Twitteror in our weekly newsletter.
Subscribe to continue reading
Read without limits