Updated at 5:45 p.m. with Trump’s speech over.
Donald Trump swept into Dallas on Sunday, spinning tall tales about the 2020 election and the crowd that mobbed the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6 hoping to keep him in the White House despite his defeat.
“No evidence? There’s so much evidence,” he insisted at the Conservative Political Action Conference, harping on complaints that he’d been cheated of a second term because of a “rigged election” and basking in chants of “four more years” from thousands of activists who want him to make a comeback and mostly assume he’s already angling to do so.
Whipping the crowd to a frenzy, he vowed that once Republicans take back Congress in the 2022 midterms, “We will take back that glorious White House that sits so majestically in our nation’s capital.”
Trump’s appearance at the Hilton Anatole was part of a reemergence since Jan. 20, when he retreated to his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida in the final hours of his presidency.
At CPAC and a pair of recent rallies, Trump has sought to elevate his profile, settle scores, and keep supporters revved and potential 2024 rivals muted.
“Look at all those fake news people back there,” he said, peering through the lights at the bank of TV cameras.
On cue, the crowd booed, enjoying the first of many greatest hits from the Trump rally playlist. Over the next 90 minutes he railed against “left wing cancel culture,” the “radical left Marxist maniacs” and “illegal leakers.”
He needled President Joe Biden for going senile and Big Tech as overbearing losers.
“The Biden administration is turning the border into the single biggest disaster in American history, and perhaps in world history,” Trump said with signature hyperbole, lamenting what he called Biden’s policy of welcoming “savage MS-13 gang members,” drug smugglers and illegal migration.
Speaker after speaker over three days had by then heaped praise on the one-term president.
Stephen Miller, architect of Trump’s immigration policies, lauded his former boss for crafting a new “conservative populism.”
“He fought the open borders lunatics,” Miller said a few hours before Trump’s arrival. “President Trump did an amazing job … defending this nation’s heritage, its culture, its values.”
“What was Donald Trump right about?” the ex-president’s son Donald Trump Jr. asked the CPAC crowd on Friday. “Everything!” they shouted.
The ex-president spent the day downplaying the Capitol riot, prompting Speaker Nancy Pelosi to reproach him for “trying to whitewash January 6th” with “inciteful lies.”
“There was such love at that rally. You had over a million people there. They were there for one reason. ... We had a corrupt election. We had a rigged election. We had a stolen election,” Trump said on Fox News, describing the scene as “a lovefest. … They were peaceful people. These were great people.”
Estimates put the crowd that day at no more than 50,000, not over a million. Of those, several thousand lay siege to the Capitol, bashing in windows and doors, attacking police with flagpoles, bike racks, hockey sticks and pepper spray and sending lawmakers into hiding for hours.
Trump topped the CPAC straw poll for the 2024 GOP nomination, besting Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis 70-21. If Trump opts not to run, DeSantis would be the top pick for 68% of attendees.
Trump’s approval rating: 98%. Biden’s disapproval rating, for comparison: 97%.
“We have a much different party than we had five years ago,” said Trump, who snubbed CPAC in March 2016, when conservative activists were clamoring for anyone but him as the GOP nominee.
Introducing Trump, the chair of the American Conservative Union, Matt Schlapp, called him “the biggest impact player in our movement.” Despite efforts by social media giants to “cancel” him – prompting a class action lawsuit by Trump against Facebook, Twitter and Google that the American Conservative Union joined – “he simply won’t give in and be quiet,” Schlapp said.
“We are taking Mark Zuckerbucks ... and the other Silicon Valley billionaires to court ... until we have restored the sacred right of freedom of speech for every American,” Trump told the crowd. “I was banned by sleazebags.”
Trump was in Orlando, Fla., for another CPAC event in late February, and held his first post-presidential rally June 26 near Cleveland, followed last weekend by another in Sarasota, Fla. Both drew tens of thousands of supporters. Roughly 3,000 people attended CPAC, plus vendors, media and others.
On June 30, Trump joined Gov. Greg Abbott in the Rio Grande Valley to tout the border wall whose construction Biden halted.
George W. Bush waited years after leaving office before weighing in publicly on any political fights. Barack Obama played an active role in the 2018 midterms, two years after leaving office, and last year helped his vice president defeat Trump.
Trump embarked on what some have dubbed a “revenge tour” much sooner.
His Ohio rally was on the turf of one of 10 Republicans who voted to impeach him for inciting the Jan. 6 riot; Trump called him “a grandstanding RINO [Republican in name only].”
In Sarasota he denounced a fresh tax-evasion indictment in Manhattan against the Trump Organization and its longtime chief financial officer, calling it “prosecutorial misconduct” to target “good, hardworking people for not paying taxes on a company car … or a company apartment … or education for your grandchildren.”
In Dallas, the grievances came fast and furious.
He complained that his friend and lawyer Rudy Giuliani has lost his law license, at least temporarily, for pushing baseless claims about election fraud.
He complained that his attorney general, Bill Barr, refused to echo his baseless claims of election fraud or assign the Justice Department to engage in a fishing expedition for evidence.
He complained that more than two years after Barr tapped Connecticut’s U.S. Attorney John Durham to probe the origins of the FBI’s Trump-Russia investigation, that inquiry has yielded no fruit.
He lacerated chief impeachment manager Rep. Adam Schiff, asserting that “what Shifty Schiff was saying was pure [expletive].”
He accused Democrats of threatening U.S. energy supremacy.
“We don’t need windmills in Texas,” he said, perhaps unaware that wind accounts for nearly 20% of Texas’ electricity, or that no other state produces more wind power.
He boasted that he’d “aced” a cognitive test in early 2018 administered by Amarillo Rep. Ronny Jackson, then the White House physician. “How do you think Joe would do on a cognitive test?” he said.
And he downplayed the violence of Jan. 6, when thousands of frenzied supporters stormed the U.S. Capitol at his urging, hoping to prevent Congress from certifying the election.
“People that are patriots or conservatives or Republicans, they stay in jail for extended periods of time,” he complained, shortly before he thundered that “we want law order. We demand law and order.”
Some of the “patriots” were calling for the deaths of Vice President Mike Pence and Pelosi. An officer lost an eye. More than 500 rioters face criminal charges, and federal authorities are hunting for hundreds more.
Hours before taking the stage at CPAC, Trump complained on Fox that “vicious killers” in the antifa and Black Lives Matter movements have been treated far more generously than his own “peaceful” supporters who stormed the Capitol.
“There were no guns whatsoever… and yet they have people still in jail,” Trump said. “It’s not right. And they’re military people, and they’re police officers, and they’re construction workers. And they’re … tremendous people.”
And he said, “Who shot Ashli Babbitt? ... Who is the person that shot [this] innocent, wonderful, incredible woman, a military woman, right in the head? And there’s no repercussions.”
Video shows Babbitt was no bystander. She and other rioters tried to breech a barricaded door to the Speakers Lobby, a restricted area next to the House chamber. An officer shot her as she tried to climb through a broken section of the door.
Trump insinuated that the officer, not yet publicly identified, was “head of security for a certain high official, a Democrat . … It’s going to come out.”
CPAC attendees are among the most fired-up Republican activists, and it’s been an essential stop for presidential hopefuls since Ronald Reagan’s headline appearance at the first such gathering in 1974. Given Trump’s apparent aspirations, though, only two potential contenders showed up in Dallas: South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem and Florida Sen. Rick Scott.
For Trump, there were few empty seats in a huge ballroom that was half-empty for most of the three-day conference.
Red MAGA hats were abundant.
As Trump critic Joe Walsh, a former GOP congressman, put it ahead of the Sarasota rally, “Trump’s supporters already know he’s a tax cheat, a liar, a rule-breaker and a crook. They don’t care.”
Trump said two weeks ago that he’s decided whether he’ll mount a comeback bid in 2024 but hasn’t said whether it’s a yes or no. He told Fox News’ Maria Bartiromo that “I can’t reveal it yet” because of campaign finance rules, though “we’re going to do very well. People are going to be very happy.”
“Stop lying about Trump!” one man in a MAGA hat yelled at reporters as he filed out.
