Trump Takes A Victory Lap

     CPAC the conservative political action committee, which used to be the premier Republican meeting place, became a Trump-only zone for 2023. Most Republican governors skipped coming, and in previous years there would have been multiple candidates running for president, but this time there was only Trump and Trump loyalists. Nikki Haley showed up and spoke, but was greeted in the hall by chants of, "Trump, Trump, Trump!" Mike Pompeo also spoke, but to a tepid response, and Trump's only serious competition for the 2024 Republican nomination Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis was nowhere to be seen.

     In my previous blog post The MAGA Republican Party I pointed out that Trump had completely taken over the Republican Party by using the primary system to remove Republicans that opposed his agenda, and that the House of Representatives this year is the first MAGA Republican-controlled House of Representatives. On Saturday March 4th 2023 at CPAC Donald Trump took a victory lap and declared his total control over the Republican Party, “We had a Republican Party that was ruled by freaks, neocons, globalists, open border zealots, and fools, but we are never going back to the party of Paul Ryan, Karl Rove, and Jeb Bush,” Trump said. “People are tired of RINOs and globalists. They want to see America First.” RINO stands for Republicans In Name Only, and represents the very last vestiges of non-Trump Republicans.

     Trump has used the last three primary seasons to remove people opposed to him, replacing them with his hand picked MAGA Republicans. Just because he's not in office right now does not mean that he's stopped playing the game, you can watch the last remaining RINOs be replaced during the next primary season as Trump finishes building his MAGA Republican Party. The message has been clear for the last 7 years or so, either get with the program or get primaried by one of Trump's MAGA Republicans.

     I cannot think of another U.S. politician in my lifetime that has been more personally involved with transforming a political party than Donald Trump, his goal is to have a nationalistic MAGA Republican Party that as he says, "puts America first." If he can win the White House, gain control of the Senate and keep the House of Representatives, in a little under 2 years we may be living in Trump's vision of America. And never forget that in only 4 years in office he appointed three justices to the Supreme Court, all conservatives, and they overturned Roe v Wade just like he said they would while he was not even in office! Appointments to the Supreme Court are for life so by placing three middle-aged conservatives on the Supreme Court, Trump skewed the court conservative for decades to come. 

     Disclaimer: I am not a Republican or a conservative, and I usually vote third party, but I do think that Trump is both smart and funny, and I know that the mainstream media lies when they say that Trump lies. I once looked at a list of top 20 lies by President Trump published by CNN during his administration. This was a complete waste of my time because every single one of them was just a Democrat talking point, what CNN wrote was a lie, and what Donald Trump said was true. You have to be politically naive not to see this, everything Trump says is true, or at least reasonably true according to lawyers that he's consulted. Trump doesn't need to lie, he can just tell the truth and because the truth that he tells is so powerful, the people that oppose him have to use the big lie and say that he lies. Fact check any fact checker yourself, you'll see that all fact checkers are just repeating partisan Democrat talking points, and pretending that they are true.

     And remember that Donald Trump made the entire old school Republican Party his enemy as well as the Liberal Democrats, so he has had detractors on all sides since he announced his run for presidency in 2015. Donald Trump has pulled off what all assumed was impossible, a grassroots, conservative, patriotic, populist movement based around the cult of his hilarious personality, and in less than 10 years he's transformed the Republican Party into his version of a Conservative Party called MAGA Republicans. He has so successfully taken over the grassroots Conservative movement that no one else even showed up at CPAC in 2023.