Donald Trump, having found his political side, wasted no time wading into the swamps of intra-conservative combat at the Conservative Political Action Conference on Thursday.
The billionaire businessman kicked off his speech by announcing that he would decide on a presidential run by June. But by the end, he had scores of Ron Paul fans on their feet booing, and CPAC’s bloggers row in stitches.
“We need a competitive person, we need a highly competent person,” Trump told the audience assembled in the ballroom of Washington DC’s Marriott Wardman Park hotel, “or we’re going to have very, very serious trouble very quickly.”
“Ron Paul!” came a cry from the ballroom crowd, followed by thunderous applause from CPAC’s ubiquitous Paul contingent.
Trump continued with his speech, but he clearly heard the outburst. “By the way,” he quipped a few minutes later, “Ron Paul cannot get elected, I’m sorry.”
The place erupted. Paul fans in the crowd broke out in boos, but most of the crowd seemed to be applauding heartily. Bloggers looking on laughed and taunted. “That was awesome,” one exclaimed.
“I like Ron Paul, I think he’s a good guy, but honestly he has just zero chance of getting elected,” Trump added for good measure.
For CPAC attendees, the Ron Paul comments will likely color any discussion of Trump’s speech going foward. The eccentric Texas congressman is a lightning rod in the conservative movement. Some see Paul as a well meaning if quirky libertarian, with more views consistent with conservatism than in conflict with it. Others are more apt to see a libertine than a libertarian, and one with a shaky record on issues of national defense and traditional values.
So at CPAC, where the various strands of conservative thought mingle, debate, and, on occasion, butt heads, Paul has become something of a symbol of the movement’s divisions on strictly libertarian policies.
Trump wasted no time in aggravating one side of that debate, and endearing himself to the other. While Trump didn’t give away any opposition to libertarianism per se, he clearly doesn’t feel it’s a winning platform.
So what does that mean for his positions on key conservative policy priorities? Trump said he is pro-life, anti-gun control, and opposed to raising taxes. He also claimed he would “fight to end Obamacare and replace it with something that makes sense for people in business and not bankrupt the country.”
Trump essentially took the boilerplate conservative position on every specific issue he raised. “If I run, and if I win, this country will be respected again,” he said, again echoing themes of American exceptionalism invoked by a number of CPAC’s Thursday speakers.
On the whole, the speech that essentially introduced Trump to the conservative movement will be remembered for little beyond his jabs at Paul. Perhaps that’s welcome for a conference intended to bring various segments of the conservative movement together – to hash out these differences in advance of a trying election season.
If attendees hoped to get an idea of what sort of Republican Trump would be, his comments on Paul are as good an indicator of his beliefs as any.
Here’s a video of the exchange, courtesy of Cubachi:
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