Former President Donald Trump will speak at the Conservative Political Action Conference, or CPAC, in Florida next week, about the future of the Republican Party and the conservative movement, a source familiar with the plan told Reuters on Saturday.
The CPAC meeting will be held in Orlando, Florida, February 25-28, with Trump speaking on the last day, Reuters reported.
“He will talk about the future of the Republican party and the conservative movement,” said the source. “We are also waiting for the 45th president to take over the president [Joe] Biden’s disastrous amnesty and border policies. ”
Trump lost the presidency to Biden, who defeated him 306-232 at the electoral college and more than 7 million votes in the popular vote. The former president refused to accept the result, but now lives at his resort in Mar-a-Lago, Florida.
Last week, he survived a second impeachment, for inciting the deadly US Capitol insurrection on January 6, as part of his attempt to reverse his defeat.
Seven Republican senators voted for the conviction, 10 less than necessary, but indicative of a party split between Trump supporters and an establishment looking to move on.
Ten House Republicans voted for impeachment and Trump expressed anger in his own way. On Tuesday, he set fire to Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell, the most elected Republican.
The loss of the White House to Biden and control of the Senate, which Democrats won in two victories in the second round of Georgia elections last month, along with the rise of far-right figures who vocally support Trump, made Republican leaders nervous. . they plan how to win back Congress in 2022.
Trump and McConnell broke up in the weeks after the November election, with Trump angry that the Kentucky Republican recognized Biden as the winner in mid-December. They haven’t spoken since, a former White House official said this week.
The gap widened when McConnell declared, after the Senate’s acquittal, that Trump was “practically and morally responsible” for attacking the Capitol and open to criminal prosecution. In return, Trump called McConnell “a severe, taciturn and serious political hack” and said that if Republicans stay with him “they won’t win again”.
Research shows that while thousands have left the party since the attack on the Capitol, a clear majority of them support Trump and would vote for him if he participated in the primaries for the 2024 presidential nomination.
It was also reported this week that former White House strategist Steve Bannon thought Trump was suffering from early dementia during his term.
Several key Republicans who are considered possible candidates for the 2024 presidential nomination are also expected to speak at CPAC, including former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and Kristi Noem, the governor of South Dakota.
Two notable figures who are not on the CPAC speaker list are former United Nations ambassador Nikki Haley and former vice president Mike Pence.
Another anonymous source told Reuters that Trump rejected Haley’s request to meet with him recently after she criticized him in an Politico article.
Pence’s life was threatened by the Capitol crowd when he refused to agree with Trump’s attempts to overturn the election.
Conservatives and CPAC participants were slow to accept Trump when he first ran for office, prompting him to withdraw from the event during the 2016 primaries. But he came to dominate the event, offering red meat to a party base apparently entirely in their slavery.
“Do you remember that I started running and people would say, ‘Are you sure he’s conservative?’”, He asked the audience in 2018. “I think we now prove that I’m a conservative, right?”