At this year’s CPAC, the room for criticizing the president was vanishingly small.
OXON HILL, Md.—If you’re a conservative with something critical to say about President Donald Trump, watch your back.
That was the implication Saturday afternoon at the Conservative Political Action Conference, where a panelist who rebuked the president, as well as the event’s organizers, had to be escorted out of the building by a three-man protective detail.
Mona Charen, a well-known conservative author and a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, was among four women discussing issues of feminism and sexual abuse on the final day of the annual right-wing gathering. Asked by the moderator to name something that gets their “blood boiling” as it relates to those subjects, Charen replied, “I am disappointed in people on our side for being hypocrites about sexual harassers and abusers of women, who are in our party, who are sitting in the White House, who brag about their extramarital affairs, who brag about mistreating women—and because he happens to have an ‘R’ next to his name we look the other way.”
And she didn’t stop there. With the audience silent and seemingly paralyzed by her assault on Trump—whose Friday-morning speech highlighted three days of uninterrupted adulation—Charen added: “This is a party that endorsed Roy Moore for the Senate in the state of Alabama even though he was a credibly accused child molester. You cannot claim that you stand for women and put up with that.” Her final line was interrupted with jeers and boos from the audience, mixed with scattered applause, with one woman near the front repeatedly yelling: “Not true! Not true!”
The moderator scrambled to move the panel forward, mentioning the “explosion” of incidents in which “accusation has been equal to conviction.” Many in the crowd continued shouting, several of them about the need to defend men from baseless allegations and separate good guys from bad guys.
“Speaking of bad guys,” Charen interjected, her tone louder and more aggressive than before, “there was quite an interesting person who was on this stage the other day. Her name is Marion Le Pen. Now, why was she here? Why was she here? She’s a young, no-longer-in-office politician from France. I think the only reason she was here is because she’s named Le Pen.” A man screamed from the audience: “Why are you here?” Charen continued: “And the Le Pen name is a disgrace. Her grandfather is a racist and a Nazi. She claims that she stands for him. And the fact that CPAC invited her is a disgrace.”
By the time Charen had finished, boos and taunts drowned out the applause. “You’re a disgrace!” another man shouted.
Waiting for Charen afterward in a hallway inside the Gaylord National Resort, I was surprised to see her surrounded by three security officers. She was surprised, too. Charen told me the detail had suddenly appeared backstage, “seemingly nervous,” having been assigned to protect her on the way out. As we talked, and the detail marched Charen briskly toward the front doors, a few people tried to approach her but nobody got close. “They were acting as if I were in real danger,” she texted me afterward, “which I didn’t feel at all.”
Matt Schlapp, chairman of the American Conservative Union and the chief organizer of CPAC, said he didn’t see Charen’s panel and wasn’t sure who requested the security guards. Schlapp sought to cast the incident as evidence of the diverse viewpoints represented at the conference. “That’s a little bit of what CPAC’s all about,” he said. “We don’t have a monolithic message. We put a lot of people on stage.”
This is a well-worn line for Schlapp, who has courted controversy at the past two conferences by inviting—and in certain cases, uninviting—fringe characters outside of the conservative mainstream. This year’s contentious roster included Le Pen, a member of France’s far-right National Front party and the niece of its current leader; former Milwaukee County Sheriff David Clarke, who has encouraged violence against the media and in whose jails multiple inmates died; and Frank Gaffney, the conspiracy-minded national security hawk who has long been estranged from the conservative movement over his extreme anti-Islam rhetoric.
Schlapp defended his guests and complained that critics are focusing on the “2 percent” of disruption at the conference instead of the “98 percent” of speeches, panels and workshops that went off without a hitch. Even if that ratio is warped, his point is fair: With scores of events spread across three days, this year’s CPAC was on the whole a quiet, nonconfrontational affair. Schlapp also argued that the old internecine disputes over Trump are settled. “This idea that the Republican Party is somehow split, or the conservative movement is somehow split about Trump, it’s just not an accurate portrayal,” he said. Indeed, more than 9 of 10 attendees at this year’s CPAC approve of the president’s job performance, according to straw poll results.
That monolith is what made Charen’s remarks so unpopular—and what compelled some worried soul to assign her a security detail. It’s a dizzying bit of irony: There are indeed still plenty of prominent conservatives who object to Trump, yet they are unwelcome at an event they once dominated, replaced by fringe characters whose presence is justified by the pursuit of ideological diversity.
“There are a huge number of conservatives who feel as I do. And I just felt it was important that people at this conference hear from us, too,” Charen told me before leaving the hotel. “The conservative movement is broader than CPAC. And it still contains a tremendous number of people with principles and high standards.” She paused, then added, “There are still good people at CPAC. Very good people. But it’s important to draw a line.”
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Trump’s takeover of conservatism is complete and total https://t.co/vUa0GVUwhx via @POLITICOMag pic.twitter.com/qgmqA8UcDn
— POLITICO (@politico) February 26, 2018
CPAC hasn’t been conservative for some time. Mostly, it was comprised of liberal Republicans. Now it is a haven for the alt-right Trump supporters. Neither Trump nor most of his supporters are conservative.
Trump and his thugs might be acknowledged as conservative leaders by some, but for me, they will never be true conservatives And they sure as heck do not represent me.
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