Former President Donald Trump will speak at his first public engagement since leaving the White House. He is scheduled to speak in Orlando, Fl., at the Conservative Political Action Conference on Sunday, February 28th, the last day of the conference. Trump has regularly spoken at the annual conference, which is usually held in Maryland, but has been moved to a Hyatt Regency in Orlando this year amid coronavirus lockdowns, about 175 miles away from his home in Mar-a-Lago.
Longtime Trump adviser, Jason Miller, told reporters that the former president’s speech will be a “show of force” that Trump reflects the best of the GOP, adding that the handful of Republicans who voted to impeach him have already found themselves being vilified by the parties in their own state. “Trump effectively is the Republican Party. The only chasm is between Beltway insiders and grassroots Republicans around the country. When you attack President Trump, you’re attacking the Republican grassroots,” he said.
Trump’s speech is expected to show that power within the GOP runs deep and broad, whether or not he runs in 2024. Others think he’ll pretend to run for leverage and attention but ultimately pass. Miller said “the fire is there” in response to whether or not he will run in 2024 and that if the election were next week, Trump would be ready to go and jump back in it.
“Of course no formal decision has been made yet, but you can tell he is very much looking at this first month or month and a half of the Biden presidency and he’s very concerned. He’s concerned about what’s happening with amnesty for 11 million illegals, stopping the construction of the border wall. You see the absolute disaster of the Biden vaccine rollout and distribution,” Miller said.
Trump also plans to talk about the ‘Washington Swamp’ and how many of his predictions about President Biden have already come true. Miller says it will be “much like 2016, we’re taking on Washington again” and added that whatever Biden was doing in his basement all those months sure wasn’t getting ready for the job.
Miller talked about keeping voters engaged in the Republican party, noting how Trump brought in a record amount of African American voters and Latino Voters on the GOP side. He said it was “bigger numbers than we’ve seen in modern Republican presidential history.”
In a recent USA Today/Suffolk University poll, 46% of Republican voters said they would leave the party if Trump decides to create his own and 80% said they would not back a candidate who voted against the former president.
Milwaukee small-business owner and Republican Brandon Keidl told the pollsters that he felt Republicans weren’t fighting enough for them and that he saw Donald Trump fighting as hard as he could every single day. “But then you have establishment Republicans who just agree with establishment Democrats and everything, and they don’t ever push back,” he added.
Since being acquitted in his second Senate impeachment trial, Trump’s support remains strong in the polls and voters expect his speech on the future of the Republican Party and conservative movement to prove to Washington D.C lawmakers that he’s here for the long haul.
