Dallas Donald Trump enjoys the attention. The former US President stood on the stage in Dallas, Texas for two hours on Saturday and was celebrated by his supporters.
“I will never stop fighting for you,” he says right at the beginning of his speech at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC). This is an influential right-wing organization in the United States that regularly invites prominent conservatives with radical views to its conferences and to which Trump owes much of his political success.
Here he is still celebrated and can unpack the old stories and the wild attacks against the Democrats undisturbed. “America is on the brink and our movement is the only one that can save the country,” Trump said. “We will banish the radical left to the afterlife.”
In doing so, the former President reiterated the motto of the conference, which has been providing a platform for speakers with aggressive, combative messages since Thursday in Texas: a fight over the future direction of the United States is conjured up.
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How much support Trump has outside of CPAC supporters is a subject of heated debate in the Republican Party. “Trump’s influence is steadily dwindling,” said his former national security advisor John Bolton in an interview with the Handelsblatt. “It’s not zero, but it’s steadily getting weaker.”
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Bolton himself has become a vocal critic of the former president after his brief tenure in the Trump administration, citing polls of Republican voters conducted by his Political Action Committee (PAC). The organization uses donations to advance Bolton’s political views and interests.
According to Bolton, the ongoing investigation into the storming of the Capitol would particularly damage Trump’s image. “With every day that new revelations about Trump come to light, his support is eroding. More and more people understand how destructive and erratic he is.”
Bolton’s polls show that Trump is still the most popular candidate for the 2024 presidential election. However, he would “only get 33 percent of the votes,” Bolton points out. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis is right behind him in second place.
In Texas, Trump knows that the right-wing conservative audience is behind him.
(Photo: dpa)
However, he leaves open whether Trump actually wants to run for the White House again in two years. “We might have to do it again,” Trump said during his performance on Saturday, enjoying the cheers of the crowd. But he doesn’t want to commit himself.
According to observers, this also has strategic reasons. For example, Trump has millions of dollars in donations through his own PAC, which he can use to finance his own appearances and to support the nominations of other Republicans. As soon as he officially announces his candidacy, however, he would lose the right to dispose of the donations.
Trump therefore prefers to focus on fueling his supporters and getting allies in position. It is important to “win the congressional elections in November very clearly,” emphasizes Trump.
Majorities in both chambers are thin. In the Senate, Democrats and Republicans each have 50 seats; the Democrats only have a majority with the vote of Vice President Kamala Harris. The Democrats are up nine seats in the House of Representatives.
During his appearance, Trump also praised gun rights activist and Congressman from Colorado, Lauren Boebert, who took the stage just before him and further fueled tensions within the party. Should Republicans regain majorities in both houses, she called for new, more radical leadership in the two chambers “to hold the Biden regime accountable.” She was “disappointed too often” by the party’s old guard.
Before her political career, Boebert ran a restaurant called “Shooters Grill” where the waiters clearly wore weapons on their hips. In her speech, she threatened the social networks Twitter and Facebook that they would “pay the price for silencing you Americans” as soon as the Republicans regained the majority. Trump has been banned from the major platforms since the storming of the Capitol on January 6, 2021, which tends to enrage him and many of his supporters.
Hungary’s President made his grand entrance on Thursday.
(Photo: Reuters)
Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban spoke at the CPAC on Thursday, days after he once again sparked outrage by saying Hungary does not want “racial mixing”. In Dallas, on the other hand, the autocrat was celebrated.
“How we fight” was the title of his speech. “We have to take back the institutions in Washington and Brussels, we have to be friends and allies of each other,” Orban said. And: “We need a strong America with a strong leader.”
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The divisions within the Republican party have recently become increasingly evident. For example, Trump and his then Vice President Mike Pence appeared at campaign events in Arizona on the same day at the end of July to support various candidates in the race for the governorship. Trump’s favorite, Keri Lake, ultimately prevailed in the primaries.
But whether she will get the majority of the votes of the general public with her radical views “remains to be seen,” says Bolton. He assumes that she has to move much further into the middle in order to get enough votes. “Trump will not like this.”
The struggle for direction, also within the party, is in full swing. The Republicans actually want to win back the majority in the House of Representatives and the Senate with a “red wave”. They also rely on the votes of Latino voters.
She is supposed to win the votes of Latino voters for the Republicans.
(Photo: Reuters)
Yesli Vega is supposed to help catch votes. The Republican, whose parents fled El Salvador, is running for a seat in the House of Representatives and has positioned herself in Dallas as the conservative counterpoint to Democratic MP Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. The high prices in the supermarket and at the gas station “are the fault of the Democrats, who have failed in their leadership and with their politics,” said Vega, who worked as a police officer for many years. “But we don’t want to stand by and watch any longer as you destroy the America we love.”
But not everyone pulls together. DeSantis was not among the CPAC speakers. Nikki Haley, the former US Ambassador to the United Nations, and Mike Pence also stayed away from the event.
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