President Trump will soon be halfway to matching Ronald Reagan’s record four speeches as a sitting president to the Conservative Political Action Conference, a major gathering of conservative activists outside Washington, D.C., this week.
“And we’ll see you again next year and the year after that, and I’ll be doing this with CPAC whenever I can, and I’ll make sure that we’re here a lot,” Trump vowed to attendees last year. This month, the president tweeted, “the opportunity to reconnect with friends and supporters is something I look forward to every year.”
For Trump, it is something of a homecoming. His 2011 speech to CPAC was widely seen as setting in motion the chain of events that within four years had him go from real estate magnate and reality television star to serious presidential candidate.
“I had very little notes, and even less preparation,” he recalled. “So, when you have practically no notes and no preparation, and then you leave and everybody was thrilled, I said, ‘I think I like this business.’”
This year, Trump is set to address the American Conservative Union’s CPAC while projecting a $1 trillion deficit under his watch, not former President Barack Obama’s. He has floated a gasoline tax increase to help offset the costs of an infrastructure plan that could also see a price tag in excess of $1 trillion, although the federal spending commitment is only around $200 billion. He is also offering a path to citizenship — “amnesty,” in his supporters’ parlance — to some 1.8 million immigrants who were brought to the U.S. illegally as children.
And Trump is party to a bipartisan spending deal that would bust through spending caps to the tune of $300 billion over the next two years, with Democrats and Republicans alike getting more taxpayer dollars for their budget priorities. Those caps were among conservatives’ few spending wins under eight years of Obama.
Few of these initiatives are popular among the movement conservatives who dominate CPAC. “There is no need to raise the federal gas tax,” Americans for Tax Reform president Grover Norquist said in a statement, though he blamed the Democrats, who have by some accounts exaggerated the White House’s support for an increase, and predicted “President Trump will not be fooled into following” their playbook.
The spending deal is even more demoralizing on the Right. “The swamp won, and the American taxpayer lost,” Rep. Mark Meadows, R-N.C., chairman of the conservative House Freedom Caucus and a frequent Trump ally, told CBS’ “Face the Nation” this month.
“As a member of Congress representing the 5th District of South Carolina, I probably would have found enough shortcomings in this to vote against it,” Mick Mulvaney, a former Freedom Caucus lawmaker who now serves as Trump’s budget director, said in congressional testimony. “But I’m the director of the Office of Management and Budget, and my job is to fund the president’s priorities, which is exactly what we did.”
“We had an impressive list of conservative accomplishments to run on this year and really turn out the base for the midterms,” said one Republican insider who requested anonymity to speak candidly. “Tax cuts, the individual mandate, judges, Neil Gorsuch. The last few weeks have chipped away at that a little bit.”
Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., an early Tea Party success story and occasional Trump golfing partner, was even more blunt. “When the Democrats are in power, Republicans appear to be the conservative party,” he argued on the Senate floor. “But when Republicans are in power, it seems there is no conservative party. The hypocrisy hangs in the air and chokes anyone with a sense of decency or intellectual honesty.”
When former President George W. Bush was preparing to speak at CPAC in 2008, he asked for the deletion of references to the conservative movement in a draft of the speech, according to his then-speechwriter Matt Latimer. “Look, I know this probably sounds arrogant to say, but I redefined the Republican Party,” Bush was quoted as saying.
A lot of conservatives think Trump has redefined it too, and not to their liking. They fear he is moving it away from the limited-government, “fusionist” understanding of conservatism, properly understood as an attempt to balance libertarian and traditionalist strains on the Right, against populism, nationalism, a rejection of free trade, and an alliance with European Right figures such as Nigel Farage, who is also set to speak at CPAC.
“I see an elected leader who is trying to put in place the platform on which he was elected,” Farage said in his CPAC speech last year. “Just as Brexit has become more popular by the day, President Trump will become more popular by the day.”
Farage is speaking again this year. French nationalist politician Marion Marechal-Le Pen is also on the agenda.
Trump’s relationship with the conservative movement has long been tenuous, with many of the latter’s leading lights labeling themselves “Never Trump” during the 2016 campaign. But relations thawed after Trump became president, leaning heavily on the Heritage Foundation and the Federalist Society in filling vacancies in both the executive and judicial branches.
CPAC, like the National Rifle Association and some corners of the organized Religious Right, were conservative movement early adopters on Trump. In the event’s last straw poll before he won the Republican nomination, Trump received just 15 percent of the vote. He pulled out of CPAC late in 2016.
By 2017, however, Trump had rebounded to an 86 percent approval rating in the CPAC straw poll. A solid 55 percent “strongly” approved. These numbers track with the latest Gallup polling showing Trump with an 86 percent approval rating among Republicans nationally. “This has been a president-led movement since Reagan, really,” said a conservative organizer.
It’s worth asking how radical a departure Trump has been in some respects from the other two sitting presidents who have spoken to CPAC, Reagan and Bush 43, both of whom are more admired within the conservative movement than he is.
Bush proposed a bigger amnesty for illegal immigrants than Trump; Reagan signed one into law. Like Trump so far, both Reagan and Bush cut taxes and had more success increasing defense spending than cutting non-defense expenditures. Under Reagan, the federal budget hit $1 trillion for the first time. It eclipsed the $2 trillion and then $3 trillion marks under Bush on the way to Trump’s $4.4 trillion budget proposal.
In fact, Bush presided over the biggest increase in non-defense discretionary spending in 30 years. His deficit-funded Medicare prescription-drug benefit was the largest new entitlement since Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society. Bush signed the Wall Street bailout that gave rise to many a Tea Party primary challenge, reminiscent of the backlash against his father’s tax increase. He inherited a $127 billion surplus and left office with a $1.4 trillion deficit.
Reagan whipped stagflation, the economic crisis of his time, and helped win the Cold War. But he never balanced the budget, and the national debt nearly doubled on his watch. He also failed to curb entitlement spending and tried to expand Medicare, although his catastrophic care program was catastrophically unpopular and repealed soon afterward.
For his part, Trump has advanced the conservative immigration restrictionists who were largely shut out of the Bush and Reagan administrations. His immigration framework may have failed in the Senate, but it is closer to what a lot of conservatives, especially in the House, have been advocating for decades than anything proposed by the previous Republican president.
In last year’s CPAC speech, Trump cited socialist Sen. Bernie Sanders, the runner-up for the 2016 Democratic presidential nomination, on trade. “Our country is being absolutely devastated with bad trade deals,” Trump said. “So, he was right about that, but we’ve got a lot of Bernie support.” But he could have quoted the runners-up for the 1996, 2008, and 2012 Republican presidential races: Pat Buchanan, Mike Huckabee, and Rick Santorum were all to some extent protectionist and all conservative enough for a CPAC crowd.
Although Trump recently tweeted it was time to invest in infrastructure after “so stupidly spending $7 trillion in the Middle East” — he told CPAC-goers last year that the region would have been better off if “our presidents would have gone to the beach for 15 years” instead — he hasn’t really wound down any major conflict in which the U.S. is militarily engaged. Instead, he approved more troops for Afghanistan and strikes in Syria, nibbling around the edges of the GOP foreign-policy consensus at best.
None of this satisfies Trump’s many conservative critics, for whom the president’s defects are more fundamental than policy. To them, the Stormy Daniels headlines make a mockery of social conservatism, as the supposed coziness with Russia does with national security conservatism. Some of these conservatives had hoped that the Tea Party signaled the end to Republican hypocrisy on fiscal conservatism. They now see no end in sight.
Many at CPAC are nevertheless likely to see Trump as a kindred spirit and welcome him back to the fold as a conquering hero. “All of these years, we’ve been together,” he told attendees last year. “And now, you finally have a president. Finally.”
