ORLANDO, Florida – Former President Donald J. Trump planned to use his first public appearance since leaving office to flog President Biden and insist that there are no divisions within the Republican Party – even while he plans revenge on lawmakers who broke with his.
In a speech prepared for his Sunday afternoon speech at the Annual Conservative Political Action Conference, Trump planned to claim the leadership of the Republican Party and isolate his critics in Congress.
“The Republican Party is united,” Trump was expected to say, according to excerpts shared by his post-presidential advisers. “The only divide is between a handful of political hacks from the Washington DC establishment and everyone across the country.”
While much of the party’s bases remain devoted to the 74-year-old former president, he is viewed less favorably by some Republicans because of his refusal to accept defeat and his role in inciting the Capitol riots on January 6.
A handful of Republican lawmakers are among the loudest voices urging the party to move on with Trump, Wyoming’s most prominent representative Liz Cheney, the House’s third Republican.
In response, Trump’s eldest son, Donald Trump Jr., attacked Cheney repeatedly in his comments on Friday, and the former president was expected to target her in person on Sunday.
Many of his aides, however, urged him to use his time on stage in Orlando to deliver a forward-looking speech.
To that end, they also released an excerpt in which Trump will face his successor in a manner almost identical to what he said about Biden when he himself was president.
“Joe Biden had the most disastrous first month of any president in modern history,” Trump is expected to say, according to prepared comments. Ignoring that schools remained closed during his own presidency, Trump also planned to ask Biden to open schools “right now. No more delays of special interest! “
He will also call Biden’s more liberal immigration policies “immoral” and a “betrayal of our nation’s core values., According to the excerpts.
How close Mr. Trump chooses to follow a teleprompter script, however, is always an open question. And perhaps never more than now that he has moved from the White House to his Palm Beach resort, without his social media accounts.
His speech was written by two of the ex-president of the White House speechwriters, Ross Worthington and Vince Haley, with contributions from other advisers.
The ex-president’s advisers were looking for an opportunity for him to reappear and debated whether to hold a rally-type event of his own or take advantage of the CPAC forum, which was moved to Trump’s new home state from a Washington suburb because Florida has restrictions more tolerant to coronavirus.
Mr. Trump and his aides worked with him on the speech for several days in his newly built office above the ballroom of Mar-a-Lago, his private club near the Atlantic Ocean. Without his Twitter feed, Trump has been using specific moments in the news cycle – the death of talk show host Rush Limbaugh and the Tiger Woods car accident – to insert himself into the news cycle.
Apart from the prepared statements, however, he has said far less since January 20 about the Republican Party’s future and its own persistent ambitions.
Trump’s advisers said he does not plan to discuss a litany of his own achievements and will instead try to recapture a little of how he sounded as a candidate in 2016. Trump has made it clear to allies and advisers that, for now at least, he wants to run for president again in 2024, something he is expected to do in his speech.
However, even with an integrated support audience, not everyone in the party believes that Trumpism is the way to go.
“The CPAC is not the whole of the Republican Party,” Sen. Bill Cassidy of Louisiana, one of seven Republican senators who voted to condemn Trump on charges of impeachment in the House, said on Sunday.
Speaking on CNN’s “State of the Union”, Cassidy said Republicans should pay attention to voters who have changed in the past four years. “If we talk to the less secure voters, who went from President Trump to President Biden, we win. If we don’t, we will lose, ”said Cassidy.
Jonathan Martin reported from Orlando, Florida, and Maggie Haberman from New York.