Donald J. Trump might have been expected to pull back from his “savvy” and “genius” compliments of Vladimir Putin when the former U.S. president spoke at CPAC in Orlando Saturday night. Of course, he didn’t.
Meanwhile, the Russian president continued to rattle his nuclear sabre when his troops faced more resistance from Ukrainian freedom fighters than he had expected.
Trump blamed the “atrocity” on President Biden, and “not so smart” North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) nations. He seems unaware that U.S. and/or NATO troops were not invading Ukraine. “When you have a weak president who is not respected by other nations, you have a very chaotic world. The world hasn’t been this chaotic since World War II.” (Per Yahoo!News). “Weak president” and “not respected by other nations” stand out for irony here.
Meanwhile in Orlando, the Conservative Political Action Committee crowd could do nothing more than cheer and nod their heads. The narrative pushed by Fox News and outlets to its right is, so far, that Trump would be a much stronger leader in dealing with Putin, and the MAGA faithful are buying it, despite Trump’s 2018 sock puppet behavior with Putin in Helsinki.
Mainstream media have to constantly remind us that President Trump appears to have tried to hold up military aid to Ukraine in 2019, contingent on Zelinsky's cooperation on the “request” to find dirt on Hunter Biden’s time as an employee of Ukrainian gas company Burisma.*
Known knowns
That Trump is an aspiring autocrat is obvious. Consider this less-oft repeated quote from his appearance on The Clay Travis & Buck Sexton Show last Tuesday: “And [Putin’s] going to go in and be a peacekeeper. That’s the strongest peace force. We could use that on our southern border.”
Known unknowns
Asked at CPAC whether he would take up arms to defend the U.S. in a similar situation, according to Newsweek, Trump responded: “You never know about bravery. Some people think they are brave are not brave and other people think of themselves as very brave and step up. You never know until you get tested.” Which is probably best interpreted as a hard “no” from, in Sen. Tammy Duckworth’s (D-IL) brilliant nickname, “Cadet Bone Spurs.”
Trump’s GOP, Even More So
Donald J. Trump took 59% of CPAC’s 2022 straw poll of leading contenders for the Republican presidential nomination in 2024, according to a report in the U.S. edition of the The Sun tabloid. That compares with 55% for Trump in last year’s CPAC straw poll [The Gray Area, https://thehustings.news/forum/, March 1, 2021].
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis was second this year, at 21%, down from 28% in 2021. In the 2022 straw poll, the Trump administration’s secretary of state and Fox News habitue’ Mike Pompeo registered third, at 2% of the vote.
On Either Side of CPAC
In a separate summit “across town” from CPAC in Orlando, according to The Washington Post, the America First Political Action Conference gathered together “right-wing media personalities and tech entrepreneurs” to hear a speaker call for sending political adversaries to the electric chair. One right-wing commentator at the alt-right white supremacist summit helped paint CPAC’s “useless own-the-libs conservatism” as too moderate.
Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) reportedly stopped by AFPAC, and later said on social media she was not aware of the group’s white supremacism. AFPAC organizer Nicholas Fuentes had “stormed” a 2021 CPAC event in Dallas, WaPo says, shouting “America first” and “white boy summer.” (When does being not aware of such things become something that no longer gets a pass?)
Meanwhile …
Republican attendees who were required to present a vaccination card to enter at a two-day “Principles First” conference at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C., last week, including Rep. Liz Cheney (R-WY) and Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, perceive AFPAC and CPAC as having “too much in common,” WaPo reports. Cheney’s fellow Republican on the House Select Committee investigating the January 6 Capitol insurrection, Adam Kinzinger, of Illinois, who was scheduled to speak Sunday night, earlier called out politicization of Biden’s response to Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, in an interview on NPR’s All Things Considered. Kinzinger is not running for re-election this year.
--Todd Lassa
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*An earlier version of this story conflated Trump's withholding military aid to Ukraine with his first impeachment. As the Center for Public Integrity notes, the connection is murky at best: https://publicintegrity.org/national-security/timeline-how-trump-withheld-ukraine-aid/
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