Donald Trump took the stage at CPAC on Saturday afternoon and made it perfectly clear what his campaign was going to be about.
“I am your warrior, I am your justice, and for those who have been wronged and betrayed, I am your retribution,” Trump said. “I will totally obliterate the deep state.”
He framed the contest in 2024 as an existential fight for the future of the country.
“We have no choice. If we don’t do this, our country will be lost forever,” Trump told a crowd of diehard supporters at the conference in National Harbor, Md. “People are tired of RINOs [Republican in name only] and globalists. They want to see America First.”
Trump referred to this campaign as his “final battle.” “They know it; I know it; you know it; everybody knows it. This is it. Either they win, or we win and if they win, we no longer have a country.”
The former president repeated his claims about the 2020 election being stolen and continued his war on the Republican establishment in Washington. “We are never going back to the party of Paul Ryan, Karl Rove, and Jeb Bush,” Trump said.
Immediately before the former president’s speech, CPAC organizers announced the results of the annual straw poll. Trump won the poll for the 2024 presidential election with 62% of the vote. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis took second place with 20%, and in third place was Perry Johnson, a businessman who ran for Michigan governor, with 5% of the vote.
Former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley came in with 3% of the vote and entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy came in at 1%.
In the vice presidential straw poll, Kari Lake, the Republican Arizona gubernatorial nominee in 2022, took first place with 20% of the vote. DeSantis came in second with 14% of the vote.
This is Donald Trump’s Republican Party. Ryan, Rove, and any of the Bushes don’t want to be in Trump’s GOP, which suits the former president and most of his supporters just fine. The political problem Trump will have to overcome is that those establishment Republicans represent a big chunk of the party. It’s going to be very hard for Trump to get 270 electoral votes without them.
Certainly, Trump can win some Democratic votes — more than any other Republican in recent memory except Ronald Reagan. But as in 2020, Trump Democrats would be concentrated in red states — states Trump is already expected to win. Blue-state Democrats are a different story.
The fact is, Trump’s rejection of establishment Republicans isn’t hurting him one bit in the GOP primary polls. He’s beating Ron DeSantis by 18 points. But in a general election, those lost Republican votes will matter. If Trump doesn’t want a repeat of 2020, he’s going to have to find a way to make some kind of peace with the establishment.
Trump has yet to show he has any desire to do so.
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