Former President Donald Trump speaks ahead of the Conservative Political Action Conference in Orlando on Sunday. Fla. Joe Raedle / Getty Images hide the caption
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Joe Raedle / Getty Images
Former President Donald Trump speaks in Orlando, Florida, ahead of the Conservative Political Action Conference on Sunday.
Joe Raedle / Getty Images
Former President Donald Trump delivered his first speech since leaving office in January on Sunday, beating his replacement for “having the most disastrous first month of a president in modern history”.
In his keynote address to the Conservative Political Action Conference, Trump attacked President Biden on many fronts – from immigration to national security to Biden’s pandemic response.
“The Biden administration is already proving that it is anti-jobs, anti-families, anti-borders, anti-energy, anti-women, anti-science,” Trump said at the conference. “In just a short month, we went from America to America first,” he said, nodding to his self-described “America first” platform.
Trump encountered a familiar list of bragging rights and insults, and spent a significant portion of his immigration remarks accusing his successor of “eliminating ours” [southern] Border “and” trigger a massive flood of illegal immigration “.
He also blamed Biden for school closings that began during his own tenure due to the pandemic, saying that Biden “gave in to the teachers’ unions”.
Biden said his goal is to open the majority of schools to face-to-face learning within the first 100 days of his administration.
“You are cheating the next generation of Americans about the future they deserve, and they deserve that future,” Trump said. “They’ll grow up and they’ll have a scar.”
Trump specifically criticized Republicans who voted to indict him after the Capitol uprising, and stressed that the party’s base was with him. He promised not to create a third party, adding that he would work to elect Republicans.
Trump repeated falsehoods about winning the 2020 election and teased a possible run in 2024: “Who knows? I might even decide to beat them [Democrats] for the third time. “Trump lost the electoral college and the referendum in 2020.
The former president easily outperformed the conference’s annual straw poll. Fifty-five percent of CPAC attendees said they wanted Trump to be a Republican candidate in 2024.
Florida Governor Ron DeSantis came in second with 21% (CPAC was held in DeSantis’ home state). With Trump not voting, DeSantis was the first choice, followed by Kristi Noem, Governor of South Dakota. Both gave speeches that weekend and were warmly welcomed.
