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    What does Liz Truss’s book tell us about her American ambitions?

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    In her new book, the former British prime minister Liz Truss directs scathing attacks and mockery at Joe Biden, president of her country’s closest ally. Biden was guilty of “utter hypocrisy and ignorance”, Truss writes, when the US leader said he “disagree[d] with the policy” of “cutting taxes on the super wealthy” in the mini-budget Truss introduced in September 2022, shortly after taking power.“I was shocked and astounded that Biden would breach protocol by commenting on UK domestic policy,” Truss adds. “We had been the United States’ staunchest allies through thick and thin.”Such harsh words between British and American leaders, in or out of office, would normally seem unusual. But Truss has scores to settle. By the time Biden spoke, in an ice-cream parlor in Portland, Oregon, Truss’s mini-budget had already caused panic over British pension funds, threatened to crash the UK economy and been withdrawn – a humiliating reversal for any prime minister, let alone one little more than a month into the job. Six days later, Truss was forced to resign.A year and a half later, offering the public her version of what went so terribly wrong, Truss still manages to thunder: “What the Biden administration, and the [European Union], and their international allies didn’t want was a country demonstrating that things can be done differently, undercutting them in the process.”Perhaps. Either way, Biden is still president while Truss is now a mere backbench MP for a constituency in rural Norfolk. But the release of her book, Ten Years to Save the West, alongside her founding of Popular Conservatism, a new pressure group, says a lot about where she sees her future.Far from taking her allowance and pursuing traditional, relatively sedate pursuits – lobbying, say, or trying to achieve peace in the Middle East – Truss wants to remain relevant on the global populist right, particularly in the US.Truss’s book is published in the US and UK on Tuesday. The American jacket carries praise from two hard-right senators, Ted Cruz of Texas and Mike Lee of Utah, both vocal enemies of Biden. It also carries a different subtitle from the British edition. In the UK, Truss is said to offer “Lessons from the Only Conservative in the Room”. In the US, she is “Leading the Revolution Against Globalism, Socialism, and the Liberal Establishment”.It’s a lot to pack in between the school run – Truss has two daughters – and her duties as a Norfolk MP. But it all points to a clear ambition to carve out a presence in rightwing US media, long on plain display.In February, Truss attended the CPAC conference in Maryland, giving an address to an audience of what Politico called “bewildered conservatives” before appearing with Steve Bannon, Donald Trump’s former campaign chair and White House adviser, a leading far-right voice who pitched Truss into controversy with remarks about the jailed far-right figure Tommy Robinson.View image in fullscreenTruss will soon be back, visiting Washington to promote her book at the Heritage Foundation, the thinktank behind Project 2025, a vast and controversial plan for a second Trump administration.Truss’s relationship with Heritage is well established. She spoke there in 2015, as trade secretary and over the objections of the British ambassador, and accepted an award named after Margaret Thatcher there last year. Kevin Roberts, president of Heritage, also blurbs the US edition of Truss’s book.The foundation is a couple of miles from the White House, but Truss is hardly likely to seek contact with Biden or his administration. That may be just as well. Elsewhere in her book, she describes meeting the president at the White House in September 2021, when she was foreign secretary under Boris Johnson.“Our Oval Office meeting lasted around an hour and a half,” Truss writes, adding that this was not a sign of favor.“The truth was it owed more to Biden’s penchant for telling extended anecdotes in response to any issue that came up. ‘Ah, that reminds me …’ he would say, as his officials looked at each other with knowing smiles. Ten minutes later, the story would end and he would move on to something else.”Biden’s age, 81, and mental capacity to be president are the source of constant media speculation and political attack – and strong White House pushback. But Truss has more to say. At the Cop 26 climate conference in Glasgow, later in 2021, she “bumped into Joe Biden again. He remembered our meeting at the White House, telling me he’d never forget ‘those blue eyes’, even though we’d both been wearing Covid masks.”It is not clear if the reader should think Biden or Truss was under the impression mouth coverings also obscure the eyes.Truss is still not done. She includes the president with the former House speaker Nancy Pelosi among US politicians deemed “unhelpful” over Northern Ireland issues, their interventions “generally on one side of the argument, doubtless egged on by the Irish embassy in Washington”.She also describes how in September 2022, as prime minister, she attended the UN general assembly in New York. There, she says, “Biden regaled me with tales of the Democrat campaign trail, including an incident in which he had fallen over. He said, ‘I can see them thinking, ‘You can’t get up, grandpa’, but I got up.’“I formed the view that he was running again in 2024,” Truss writes, before risking a self-own by writing about a faux pas at the same event, when she called out “Hi, Dr Biden!” to “a blonde lady” who turned out to be Brigitte Macron, the wife of the president of France.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“I hope she didn’t hear!” Truss writes.The vignette about Biden at the UN is not the only one in Ten Years to Save the West in which Truss uses “Democrat” to refer to the Democratic party. It is a telling choice. Republicans have long used the incorrect term as a term of political abuse. Nor is it the only instance in which Truss – or her US editors – must adapt or explain her language.When writing about UK politics, as in most of the book, Truss must often offer translations or explanations for US readers. For one small but telling example, in referring to her distaste for National Insurance – a payroll tax that supports state pensions and unemployment and incapacity benefits – she calls it “a social security entitlement”. On the US right, “entitlement” is almost as dirty a word as “Democrat”.At least until the eve of publication day, Truss had shied from saying Donald Trump’s name but said she wanted a Republican in the White House in 2025. She says so in her book but abandons any pretense of subtlety when it comes to praising Trump, now the presumptive GOP nominee despite facing 88 criminal charges and multimillion-dollar penalties for tax fraud and defamation, the latter arising from a rape allegation a judge called “substantially true”.Calling herself “an early fan of the TV show The Apprentice” who “enjoyed the Donald’s catchphrases and sassy business advice”, Truss says that when Trump entered politics in 2015, colleagues in parliament and “elderly ladies” in Swaffham, a town in her constituency, were united in “seem[ing] genuinely animated by the disruptive Republican candidate”. She makes a common link between support for Trump and support for Brexit – which she campaigned against before becoming its hardline champion on her way to leading her country.View image in fullscreenWhen Trump was president, Truss writes, she “chased” Boris Johnson “down a fire escape” in New York, to demand inclusion in a meeting between the British and American leaders. According to Truss, who was then trade secretary, that meeting saw Trump urge her and his own trade representative, Bob Lighthizer, to get on with talks for a UK-US trade deal – only for Johnson to try to make Trump focus on restoring the Iran nuclear agreement, a tactic that did not work.Truss never got her trade deal. In part, she blames “many in Number 10” Downing Street who “seemed to want to hold Trump at arm’s length for political reasons”.“The UK media provided universally negative coverage of Trump, and leftists in the Conservative party were keen to insult him at every opportunity,” Truss writes. “My view was that he was the leader of the free world and an important ally.”That view stands in stark comparison to her abuse of Biden, who beat Trump conclusively in an election Trump still refuses to concede. Furthermore, when it comes to the deadly fruits of that refusal – the attack on Congress Trump incited – Truss keeps her observations to a single paragraph.On 6 January 2021, Truss writes, she was “on a phone call with Bob Lighthizer”, “working on” removing a US tariff on Scottish whisky. From the Executive Office building, next to the White House, Lighthizer “remarked … in passing that the street was full of people with huge American flags walking towards Congress. Little did I realise how seismic that event would turn out to be.”Truss eventually saw the whisky tariff removed – in summer 2021, after “talks with the new Democrat administration”.“But with Joe Biden as president,” Truss writes, “it was made quite clear that a trade deal with the United Kingdom was no longer a priority. We had missed the boat.” More

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      Immigration, Ukraine distrust and January 6 games: Republican agenda on display at CPAC

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      A digital pinball game defending the January 6 insurrection. A panel discussion called Putting Our Heads in the Gas Stove. An eager crowd watching agent provocateur Steve Bannon interview former British prime minister Liz Truss for a tiny online audience.Every year the Conservative Political Action Conference, or CPAC, conjures a theatre of the absurd beside the Potomac River. This week something else slowly came into focus: three pillars of a Republican agenda that the party believes will provide a winning formula in the 2024 elections.First, speaker after speaker highlighted the crisis at the southern border, variously describing it as “a war zone” where “thugs, Islamic extremists and Chinese spies” are staging an “invasion”. Second, this year’s CPAC theme was “Where globalism goes to die”, a rare foregrounding of foreign policy that embraced “America first” isolationism and advocated no more funding for Ukraine.Finally, there was the contention that only Donald Trump can save American democracy. Speakers cast the Republican frontrunner as both as the underdog David, bravely battling political persecution, and a mighty Goliath tirelessly fighting for the forgotten and left behind. This was in striking contrast to Joe Biden, portrayed as both criminal mastermind and senile old man.“I’m just going to say it – Joe Biden and Kamala Harris suck,” said Kristi Noem, the governor of South Dakota, seen as a potential Trump running mate. “And we shouldn’t look to Congress for the answers – the gridlock on Capitol Hill is not going to break in time to save America. We need a president who will. And I have always believed – and supported the fact – that our next president needs to be President Trump.”This week marked the 50th anniversary of CPAC’s inaugural gathering, when Ronald Reagan, then the governor of California, urged conservatives to remain united. In 2015 the conference heard from establishment Republicans such as Jeb Bush. But since then it has marched rightward, each year proving more extreme than the one before. It has effectively become The Trump Show.It has also lost relevance. Under CPAC impresario Matt Schlapp, who faced multiple sexual assault allegations, many sessions took place in a half-empty ballroom. “Media Row”, which includes various live talk radio broadcasts, and “CPAC Central”, a marketplace for vendors, was diminished compared with past years, exposing empty and forlorn floor space. Instead of Fox News, a plethora of fringe podcasters and streamers held sway.But CPAC does provide a window to the soul of a Republican party in thrall to Trump. No issue is more central to his candidacy than immigration and resuming construction of a border wall. It was a constant talking point on the CPAC main stage.Elise Stefanik, another contender for Trump’s vice-presidential pick, said: “We had the most secure border in our nation’s history when President Trump left office … In Joe Biden’s America, every district is a border district. Every state is a border state. The southern border is being invaded.”In a session titled Trump’s Wall vs Biden’s Gaps, Thomas Homan, former acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement under Trump, said: “The reason I wake up pissed off every day is because this administration – Joe Biden is the first president in the history of this nation who came in office and unsecured a border on purpose.”Describing Trump as the “greatest president in my lifetime”, Homan confidently predicted that the former president would destroy drug cartels in Mexico if re-elected. “President Trump will declare them a terrorist organisation. He will send a Hellfire rocket down there and he’ll take the cartels out.”There was little acknowledgment over four days of the positive contribution immigrants have made to American society. Instead there were nods to white nationalism, the “great replacement” theory and Trump’s recent assertion that illegal immigrations “poison” the bloodstream of the nation.Senator JD Vance, a devout Trump loyalist, told the gathering: “The reason why we have a border crisis is by design. Biden is invading the country with people who he knows are going to vote disproportionally for Democrats. California has five more congressional representatives than it should.“Do you know why? They count illegal aliens for purposes of assigning apportionment in Congress. So when these guys flood the country with millions of people who shouldn’t be here they destroy the voting power of citizens in our own republic. This is by design and this is maybe the last very good chance we have to stop it.”An examination of this topic in 2020 by the Pew Research Center found that if unauthorised immigrants were excluded from the apportionment count, California, Florida and Texas would each end up with one less congressional seat than they would have been awarded based on population change alone.Vance and others were quick to draw a contrast between the border crisis and Washington’s obsession with the war in Ukraine. They questioned why taxpayer dollars should fund a conflict 6,000 miles away instead of tackling problems at home. Many were quick to add disclaimers distancing themselves from Russian president Vladimir Putin – not always convincingly.Senator Tommy Tuberville of Alabama said: “We’re the one that forced this war because we kept forcing Nato on Ukraine and showing Russia, hey, we’re going to build military bases on your borders. And Putin said, no, no, you’re not going to do that.“I haven’t voted for any money to go to Ukraine because I know they can’t win. You hate that they’ve had 300,000 or 400,000 people killed, so – Russians also. You hate that we supported this. We’re pushing them out in front of the guns or out in front of the bus, I guess you’d speak. It’s an atrocity but they can’t win.”Tuberville added: “Donald Trump will stop it when he first gets in … He knows there’s no winning for Ukraine. He can work a deal with Putin.”View image in fullscreenThere was little support here for Congress to pass a national security bill that would provide military funding for Ukraine. In a speech headlined Burning Down the House, Matt Gaetz, a congressman from Florida, said: “What’s really left unsaid in this Ukraine aid debate is that Europe’s fecklessness is a direct result of them becoming national security welfare queens largely at your expense … America is not the world’s police force and we are not the world’s piggy bank. It is not sustainable.”In a jarring contrast from Reagan’s vision of American leadership, politicians from Britain, El Salvador, Spain and other parts of the world came to CPAC to rail against the sinister forces of “globalism”.Nigel Farage, a former leader of the Brexit party in Britain, observed that CPAC has become an international movement. “We all want the same things. We want international cooperation. We want trade. We want peace. We want common sense. We want it within the framework of the nation-state, not within the framework of the European Union or the United Nations – or the increasingly appalling World Health Organisation.”The audience erupted in cheers and applause.CPAC offered a preview of other Republican talking points for the campaign. There were plenty of references to inflation and the demonstrably false claim that Trump bequeathed a booming economy that Biden ruined. A session called No Woke Warriors nodded to culture wars and, despite recent evidence about its limited electoral potency, numerous speakers assailed transgender rights.The other common thread was a Trump worship that elevated him to the status of political martyr. Farage said the former president had been unfairly targeted by the justice system and commented: “I believe that Donald Trump is the bravest man I have ever met in my life.” Mark Robinson, lieutenant governor of North Carolina, opined: “We need warriors like President Trump, who is literally spending his golden years fighting for the survival of this nation.”And Noem put it this way: “President Trump broke politics in 2016 – he just did – and that’s a good thing. He’s real. He’s not perfect – none of us are – but he cares about you. He doesn’t think he’s better than you. Luckily, we are not going back to the old days of the Romneys and Cheneys. The Republican party is much bigger than that now. We are filled with blue collar workers, many cultures, perspectives and viewpoints.”Contrast will be key in the presidential election campaign. Biden, 81, was subjected to cheap shots and derogatory insults. At a discussion billed as Cat Fight? Michelle vs Kamala, rightwing commentator Kurt Schlichter commented: “I don’t think Joe Biden has any plans other than eating mush while watching Murder She Wrote. Two scoops. It will be tough to pry that desiccated old husk of a human being out of the White House.”Down in CPAC Central, attendees were clear about the priorities for the coming campaign. Barbara Hale, a retired property agent from Austin, Texas, who was wearing a “Trump was right” badge, said: “The most important thing is our border. If Trump would have been our president instead of Biden, the wall would have been finished.“We wouldn’t have this catastrophe that we have right now. I don’t know how anybody can vote Democrat today if you’re an American. I’m serious about that. If you love America, how can you vote to destroy America?”America has sent enough funding to Ukraine, Hale added: “Like Trump has said he was going to do it as soon as he becomes president, he’s going to go talk to Europe and say, OK, we’ve paid our share to Ukraine to help them. We want Ukraine to be free. They need to pony up some money and they need to get more serious about helping Ukraine, not just the United States of America.”Phil Cuza, 63, a saxophone player and retired police officer from New York, criticised corrupt politicians and district attorneys for “picking and choosing” who to prosecute. He added: “The southern border is extremely important because they’re undermining the whole country. It’s like having a house and you’re trying to dig underneath the house. Eventually the house will collapse if you don’t address that.”Rachel Sheley, 54, a cybersecurity practitioner from northern Kentucky, said: “We need to stop funding wars in other countries. I like Trump’s initiative to loan money to these countries if they need it but they need to be held accountable to pay the money back.“Our taxpayer money is going to these other places, some of which none of us ever travel to or get to. We don’t even know what’s going on in Ukraine. There’s no video or evidence of anything. I think it’s just a money-laundering scheme for the Democrats and the [George] Soros people.”Asked what she thought of Putin, Sheley replied bluntly: “I don’t care.”The marketplace featured everything from vibration plates to Trump glass art, from “Make America great again” shirts, hats and hammocks to a bus with a huge picture of the former president. There also a January 6-themed virtual pinball machine with the game modes “Political Prisoners”, “Have Faith”, “Babbitt Murder”, “It’s a Setup”, “Peaceful Protest”, “Fake News” and “Stop the Steal”, along with a photo of the “QAnon shaman” who stormed the Capitol and a screen showing footage from that day.It was the brainchild of software developer Jon Linowes, 65, an election denier from New Hampshire who believes a baseless conspiracy theory that Trump’s foes planned the insurrection a year in advance as a pretext for keeping him off the ballot. He said: “If Trump was in office now, Ukraine would never have happened. October 7 [in Israel] would never have happened. The border would be shut down.“All of these crises or situations that the Biden administration created were totally artificial and unnecessary and pathetic. We need someone like Trump with the strength and the fortitude to fix it if he can. If anyone can, he can. So that’s what I would expect. And I would expect him to pardon the J6 prisoners.” More

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      ‘My ultimate and absolute revenge’: Trump gives chilling CPAC speech on presidential agenda

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      Donald Trump styled himself as a “proud political dissident” and promised “judgment day” for political opponents in an address that offered a chilling vision of a democracy in imminent peril.In classic carnival barker form, the frontrunner for the Republican presidential nomination accused Joe Biden of weaponising the government against him with “Stalinist show trials”. He pledged to crack down on border security and deliver the biggest deportation in US history if he wins the 5 November election.“For hard-working Americans, November 5th will be our new liberation day,” Trump told a packed ballroom at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) at National Harbor in Maryland. “But for the liars and cheaters and fraudsters and censors and imposters who have commandeered our government, it will be their judgment day!”He added: “Your victory will be our ultimate vindication, your liberty will be our ultimate reward and the unprecedented success of the United States of America will be my ultimate and absolute revenge.”The overwhelmingly white crowd, many wearing Make America Great Again regalia, rose to their feet and roared their approval.The former US president was speaking hours before an expected victory over Republican rival Nikki Haley in the South Carolina primary, making him all but certain to be the party nominee.Meanwhile, organizers held a straw poll at the convention for Trump’s running mate: South Dakota governor Kristi Noem tied with tech entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy at 15%, followed by former Hawaii congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard, current New York congresswoman Elise Stefanik and South Carolina senator Tim Scott. In last place was Nikki Haley at 2%. About 1,500 people voted.Trump’s visit marked his 14th appearance at CPAC, breaking the record previously held by former president Ronald Reagan, according to his campaign. He appeared unbound and at times unhinged. The 77-year-old was bilious and bleak but also energetic and at times even humorous, less commander-in-chief than stand-up comedian. He told self-deprecating jokes about his wife Melania’s reviews of his speeches (“I ask our first lady, I say. So, baby, how good was that? She goes you were OK”).His puerile parody of the speaking style, finger pointing and gait of 81-year-old Biden earned roars of laughter. And in a nod to his days as host of the reality TV show the Apprentice, Trump delighted the audience by shouting: “Crooked Joe Biden, you are fired! Get out of here. You’re destroying our country. You’re fired. Get the hell out of here!”But, like demagogues of the past, the comedy and showmanship smuggled in a sinister undertow. Trump’s ability to play the crowd, turning its emotions from euphoria to fury as easily as flicking a switch, carry echoes that are hard to ignore.The tone was set before he appeared on stage. A series of popular hits – Abba’s Dancing Queen, Johnny Cash’s Ring of Fire, Sinéad O’Connor’s Nothing Compares 2 U, Elvis Presley’s Suspicious Minds – was followed by the tinny sound of Justice for All, a rendition of the Star-Spangled Banner sung by defendants jailed over their alleged roles in the January 6, 2021, insurrection. The CPAC audience rose solemnly for the dirge that was recorded over a prison phone line.As usual, Trump entered to Lee Greenwood’s God Bless the USA, hugged an American flag and painted an impossibly grim picture of an America overrun by bloodshed, chaos and violent crime. “If Crooked Joe Biden and his thugs win in 2024, the worst is yet to come,” he said. “A country that will go and sink to levels that are unimaginable.“These are the stakes of this election. Our country is being destroyed, and the only thing standing between you and it’s obliteration is me.”View image in fullscreenFacing 91 criminal charges in four cases, Trump projected himself as both martyr and potential saviour of the nation. “A vote for Trump is your ticket back to freedom, it’s your passport out of tyranny and it’s your only escape from Joe Biden and his gang’s fast track to hell,” he continued.“And in many ways, we’re living in hell right now because the fact is, Joe Biden is a threat to democracy – really is a threat to democracy.”Speaking days after the death of the Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny, Trump hinted at a self-comparison by adding: “I stand before you today not only as your past and hopefully future president but as a proud political dissident. I am a dissident.”The crowd whooped and applauded. Trump noted that he had been indicted more often than the gangster Al Capone on charges that he described as “bullshit”. The audience again leaped to their feet, some shaking their fists and chanting: “We love Trump! We love Trump!”Trump argued without evidence: “The Stalinist show trials being carried out at Joe Biden’s orders set fire not only to our system of government but to hundreds of years of western legal tradition.“They’ve replaced law, precedent and due process with a rabid mob of radical left Democrat partisans masquerading as judges and juries and prosecutors.”Trump also spent time on his signature issue: he said his “first and most urgent action” as president would be the “sealing of the border, stopping the invasion … send Joe Biden’s illegal aliens back home”.The ex-president, who has spent years demonising immigrants, said: “They’re coming from Asia, they’re coming from the Middle East, coming from all over the world, coming from Africa, and we’re not going to stand for it … They’re destroying our country.”He promised to carry out the biggest deportation in American history. “It’s not a nice thing to say and I hate to say it and those clowns in the media will say: ‘Oh, he’s so mean.’ No, they’re killing our people. They’re killing our country. We have no choice.”He added: “We have languages coming into our country … they have languages that nobody in this country has ever heard of. It’s a horrible thing.”But Trump broke from the teleprompter into a series of bizarre riffs. One was a convoluted story about flying into Iraq in darkness: “I sat with the pilots … the best-looking human beings I’ve ever seen. Not my thing … But they are handsome. Central casting. Better looking than Tom Cruise. And taller.”Once again he had the faithful eating out of the palm of his hand – a scene that may set off alarm bells for defenders of democracy. “By the way, isn’t this better than reading off a fricking teleprompter?” he asked. The crowd cheered.“Nobody can ramble like this,” he said, adding: “They’ll say: ‘He rambled, he’s cognitively impaired.’ Well, it’s really the opposite. It’s total genius – you know that.” The crowd cheered some more. More

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      Trump calls himself a ‘proud political dissident’ during CPAC speech – as it happened

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      “A vote for Trump is your ticket back to freedom, it’s your passport out of tyranny and it’s your only escape from Joe Biden and his gang’s fast track to hell,” Donald Trump said.“And in many ways, we’re living in hell right now because the fact is, Joe Biden is a threat to democracy, really is a threat to democracy,” Trump continued.“I stand before you today not only as your past and hopefully future president, but as a proud political dissident. I am a dissident,” he said.Donald Trump has concluded his approximately 90-minute speech at CPAC in National Harbor, Maryland. Here are the key takeaways:
      If Joe Biden wins, “the worst is yet to come”, Trump warned the audience in his opening remarks. He went call Biden the “crookedest, most incompetent president in the history of our country”.
      Trump also mocked Biden and his mental capabilities and called the current president “a threat to democracy”. He went on to call himself a “proud political dissident”, adding: “A vote for Trump is your ticket back to freedom.”
      On his legal troubles, Trump compared himself to American gangster Al Capone, saying: “I’ve been indicted more than Alphonse Capone.” He also accused the Biden administration and Democrats of “weaponizing” the justice department and FBI.
      Trump, who previously compared his criminal indictments to the persecution of Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny, who suddenly died last week, described his court cases as “Stalinist show trials”. He then accused the Biden administration of replacing “law, precedent, and due process with a rabid mob of radical left Democrat partisans masquerading as judges and juries and prosecutors”.
      On foreign policy, Trump said that if he had been president, Hamas’s attack on Israel and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine would have never happened. He then descended into a lengthy ramble on how he attempted to strong-arm Mexico over his border security measures – while veering into stories of his flight to Iraq, pilots who were “better looking than Tom Cruise” and his attempt to award himself the congressional Medal of Honor.
      On border security, Trump vowed that his first order of business as president would be “sealing the border, stopping the invasion” and sending “Joe Biden’s illegal aliens back home”. He then said there are languages in the US that nobody has ever heard of, calling it a “horrible thing”.
      On law enforcement and crime, Trump vowed that he could solve crime rates “in one day, in one hour, in one minute” if he was president. He then said: “We have the greatest law enforcement people in the world but they’re not allowed to do their job.”
      Trump closed his speech by calling on voters to vote for him in South Carolina, where the state’s Republican primary is being held today. “We’re going to win the election. We’re going to win it big and we’re going to win it bigger than ever before,” he said.
      That’s it from me, Maya Yang, as we wrap up the blog for today. Thank you for following along.“Our country is run by people that are destroying it. We’re not going to let it happen. We’re going to have a great military … our country is going to function properly,” Donald Trump said in his closing remarks.“I’m going to leave you with this one final message. We’re going to win the election. We’re going to win it big and we’re going to win it bigger than ever before … We are going to make America great again,” he said.Expressing his support for law enforcement, Donald Trump said: “We have the greatest law enforcement people in the world but they’re not allowed to do their job.”“Chicago could be solved in one day. New York could be solved in half a day … New York police, I grew up with them. They’re the greatest people … You have great people and they can do their job if they’re allowed to do their job but they don’t want to lose their pension, they don’t want to lose everything.“I could solve that problem in one day, in one hour, in one minute,” he added.Donald Trump went on to recall how he asked his staff if he could give himself the congressional Medal of Honor following his flight into Iraq.“I see my staff … and I said, ‘Let me ask you a question. Is the president of the United States allowed to give himself the congressional Medal of Honor because I did a very brave thing? I was so brave. Am I allowed to do it? And they said, ‘Sir, it would not be a good thing to do.’”He went on to say: “Now here’s the problem with that story. The fake news media will lead tomorrow, ‘Donald Trump wanted to give himself the congressional [Medal of Honor].”Donald Trump has descended into a story of his experience flying into Iraq when he was president.Describing the pilots, Trump said: “I sat with the pilots … the best-looking human beings I’ve ever seen. Not my thing … but they are handsome. Central casting. Better looking than Tom Cruise and taller.”Describing his border plans, Donald Trump said, “It will be the largest deportation in the history of our country and we have no choice.”“It’s not a nice thing to say and I hate to say it and those clowns in the media will say, ‘Oh he’s so mean,’” Trump said.He went on to attack languages, saying, “We have languages coming into our country…they have languages that nobody in this country has ever heard of. It’s a horrible thing.”Donald Trump vowed that his “first and most urgent action” as president will be the “sealing of the border, stopping the invasion … send Joe Biden’s illegal aliens back home”.“We’re going to have to do them fast because no country can sustain what’s happening in our country,” he said, adding: “It’s a new category of crime and I wanted to call it ‘Biden migrant crime’ but it’s too long so we just call it ‘migrant crime’.”Donald Trump described his legal woes and court appearances as “Stalinist show trials”.“The Stalinist show trials being carried out at Joe Biden’s orders set fire not only to our system of government but to hundreds of years of western legal tradition,” he said.“They’ve replaced law, precedent, and due process with a rabid mob of radical left Democrat partisans masquerading as judges and juries and prosecutors,” he added.“For years, you watched the entire Washington cesspool … feeding on the wealth and hopes and dreams of hardworking Americans,” Donald Trump told the crowd.“November 5 will be our new liberation day, but for the liars and cheaters and fraudsters and censors and impostors who have commandeered our government, it will be their judgment day,” he added.“Your victory will be our ultimate vindication, your liberty will be our ultimate reward and the unprecedented success of the United States of America will be my ultimate and absolute revenge,” he continued.Donald Trump pivoted to foreign policy by saying that numerous ongoing conflicts would have been avoided had he been president.“The attack on Israel would have never happened. Iran was broke. They were broke. Ukraine would have never happened,” he said.He went on to tell a cheering crowd: “Crooked Joe Biden, you are fired. Get out of here. Get that you’re just destroying our country. You’re fired. Get the hell out of here.”“We can break out of this Biden nightmare,” Donald Trump said.He went on to attack migrants, saying: “They’re coming from Asia, they’re coming from the Middle East, coming from all over the world, coming from Africa, and we’re not going to stand for it … They’re destroying our country.”Donald Trump also went on to compare himself to American gangster Al Capone, saying: “Remember, I’ve been indicted more than Alphonse Capone.”“It’s very dangerous. What’s going on? They’ve weaponized government. They’ve weaponized the DOJ, the FBI. We’ve never had anything like this in this country,” he continued.“They are indeed a threat to democracy and I’m here to unleash this captive nation from Joe Biden and his gang of very bad people, very sick people, smart people, intelligent people, but they are hellbent on the destruction of American freedom,” Trump added. More

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      CPAC: Noem and Stefanik lead charge of the wannabe Trump VPs

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      On Saturday, the Conservative Political Action Conference, or CPAC, will end with a straw poll. But given Donald Trump’s lock on the Republican nomination, attendees will not be asked who they want for president. They will be asked to choose between 17 possible vice-presidential picks.On Friday, four such names were on the speakers’ roster.“There are two kinds of people in this country right now,” the South Dakota governor, Kristi Noem, told an audience in general uninterested in non-binary choices.“There are people who love America, and there are those who hate America.”As an applause line, it worked well enough. Noem hit out at “agendas of socialism and control”, boasted of taxes cut and railroads built, and decried conditions at the southern border, claiming other countries were using it “to infiltrate us, and destroy us”.But she earned perhaps her loudest response with more simple red meat: “I’m just going to say it: Joe Biden and Kamala Harris suck.”Perhaps tellingly for her straw poll chances, Noem’s statement that “I’ve always supported the fact that our next president needs to be President Trump” also earned cheers. Bland at face value, the line was a dig at other possible vice-presidential picks such as Tim Scott, the South Carolina senator who challenged Trump then fawningly expressed his love.“I was one of the first people to endorse Donald Trump to be president,” Noem said. “Last year, when everyone was asking me if I was going to consider running, I said no. Why would you run for president when you know you can’t win?”That was a question for another VP contender, Vivek Ramaswamy. Having made a brief splash in the primary – clashing with Nikki Haley, a former South Carolina governor and Trump’s last remaining rival – the biotech entrepreneur landed the speaker slot at Friday night’s Ronald Reagan dinner.Before that came two more contenders from outside the primary, Elise Stefanik of New York, the House Republican conference chair, and JD Vance of Ohio, the US Marine Corps reporter turned venture capitalist turned Hillbilly Elegy author and populist firebrand senator.The author Michael Wolff once reported that Trump preferred women to wear “high boots, short skirts and shoulder-length hair”. Stefanik, a Harvard graduate, once a moderate, strode out as if in mid-Maga metamorphosis, long hair feathered and highlighted.Her speech was full of Trump-esque lines. The media were the “loyal stenographers of the left”; she hectored the Ivy League college presidents she grilled in a hearing on campus antisemitism, earning Trump’s approval; the “Biden crime family” was to blame for “Bidenflation”.View image in fullscreenNo mention, obviously, that the chief source of unverified allegations about the “Biden crime family” was this week charged with lying to investigators and said, by prosecutors, to have ties to Russian intelligence.Stefanik attempted a Trumpian move: changing the historical record. Finessing her experience of the January 6 Capitol attack, she said she “stood up for the election and constitutional integrity” – which could only be true under Trump’s definiton of those terms. With 146 other Republicans, Stefanik objected to key results.It was a stark departure from her statement at the time, when Stefanik lamented a “truly a tragic day for America”, condemned “dangerous violence and destruction”, and called for Trump supporters who attacked Congress to be “prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law”.That statement disappeared from Stefanik’s website. But such scrubbing may be unnecessary. Trump has little interest in truth. Perhaps Stefanik’s zealous speech, if a little flat compared with the sharp rabble-rousing of the Florida congressman Matt Gaetz shortly before, will prove persuasive. She was enthusiastically received.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionVance came next, making light of appearing for an interview, by the Newsmax host Rob Schmitt, rather than a speech of his own.Relentlessly, the senator communicated anger, mostly at elites and politicians of both parties he said were dedicated to their own profit at the people’s expense.“It’s a disgrace that every person here should be pissed off about,” he thundered.Vance was angry about the need to stop funding Ukraine in its war with Russia, angry about the need to boost US manufacturing, angry about the lack of border and immigration reform.Presenting himself as a proud “conservative knuckle-dragger” but also a foreign policy voice – a sort of global isolationist, just back from the Munich security conference – Vance was unrepentant over Senate Republicans’ decision to sink a bipartisan border deal and accused Democrats of using undocumented migrants for electoral ends. He said Google should be broken up, to combat leftwing bias, but also uttered a couple of lines he might hope Trump does not search up.Singing Trump’s praises as a Washington outsider, Vance appeared to suggest he thought Trump was older than Biden, the Methuselah of the executive mansion, saying: “He was born I believe in 1940.” That would make Trump 83 or 84, not a supposedly sprightly 77.Vance also said Americans were “too strong or too woken up” to be fooled by Biden again. Woken, not woke. But given Vance’s play-in video, in which Schmitt bemoaned the spread of “woke” ideas on the left, it seemed a half-bum note.Finally, late on, came Ramaswamy. He posed his own binaries: “Either you believe in American exceptionalism or you believe in American apologism … Either you believe in free speech or you believe in censorship.” Then he reeled off positions – end affirmative action, frack and drill, crack down on illegal immigration – now in service of Trump.It sounded more like a pitch for a cabinet job, say health secretary, than for vice-president. Maybe not commerce, overseeing the patent office. Hymning the founders, Ramaswamy said Thomas Jefferson “invented the polygraph test”. The third president used a polygraph, a machine for copying letters. He did not invent a test to see if a person is lying.On Saturday, Kari Lake, an election-denying Senate candidate from Arizona, will speak before Trump, Ramaswamy after. Then the CPAC attendees, dedicated conservatives pausing in their perusal of Maga hammocks and Woke Tears water, for sale at the CPAC market, will say who they want for VP. More

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      Robert F Kennedy Jr announced as speaker at hard-right CPAC event

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      Robert F Kennedy Jr, the attorney, conspiracy theorist and political gadfly set to next week transform his run for the Democratic presidential nomination into an independent campaign, was announced on Friday as a speaker at an event staged by the hard-right Conservative Political Action Conference, or CPAC.“Robert F Kennedy Jr has a unique voice in advocating for the defunding of the weaponised bureaucracy and ensuring the constitutional right of medical freedom,” said the CPAC chair, Matt Schlapp.Kennedy, 69, will speak at the CPAC Investor Summit to Save America, in Las Vegas, Nevada, between 18 and 21 October. Vivek Ramaswamy, the biotech investor who has performed unexpectedly strongly in the Republican primary, will also speak.Kennedy comes from a storied US political family – the son of former US attorney general Robert F Kennedy and nephew of President John F Kennedy. He built a public profile as an attorney and environmental campaigner but has now emerged as a prominent anti-vaccine campaigner, particularly during the Covid-19 pandemic.A claim that Chinese people and Ashkenazi Jews have greater immunity from Covid caused huge controversy. So did a comparison of government public health mandates to laws in Nazi Germany, invoking the name of Anne Frank. Last month, Kennedy repeated a conspiracy theory about the 9/11 attacks on New York.Kennedy has polled relatively strongly against Joe Biden, the incumbent Democratic president. Standing next to no chance of winning the nomination, however, Kennedy’s announcement of an independent run was trailed last week. The announcement is set for Philadelphia on Monday.Polling shows the potential for a third-party candidate to pull votes from both Joe Biden and Donald Trump, the president’s expected challenger in what would be a contest between aging and unpopular candidates.This week, a Reuters-Ipsos poll showed Kennedy “could draw the support of about one in seven US voters”.Some observers think Biden likely to sustain worse damage from a strong third-party candidate, perhaps handing the White House back to Trump: a twice-impeached ex-president who faces 91 criminal charges, 17 over election subversion culminating in the January 6 attack on Congress, as well as assorted civil trials.Nonetheless, Kennedy’s links to rightwingers including the mega-donor Timothy Mellon and Steve Bannon, a close Trump ally, have been widely reported and his more extreme stances could see also pull support from Republicans.Bannon was among other figures listed to appear at the CPAC Las Vegas event. So were Ric Grenell, a former Trump aide; Kari Lake, a failed gubernatorial candidate now running for US Senate in Arizona; the Utah Republican senator Mike Lee; and Ken Paxton, the impeached and acquitted Texas attorney general.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionSchlapp, the CPAC chair, is a former White House political director under George W Bush now the subject of claims of sexual misconduct, which he denies.Schlapp said: “Kennedy joining such an important event is a reflection of the splintering of the leftwing coalition that has gone full woke Marxist to the point that traditional liberals don’t feel welcome anymore.”Not everyone thinks a Kennedy candidacy will only damage Biden. This week, a “Kennedy campaign insider” told Mediate: “This is going to fuck Trump. Bobby’s values are much more in line with patriots. He’s against Big Pharma. He’s pro-Bitcoin. Decentralise so the government can’t control it.”That prompted Rick Wilson, a former Republican operative and co-founder of the anti-Trump Lincoln Project, to say: “Blame Bannon. His monster got out of the cage.” More

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      Rightwingers praise free speech at CPAC Hungary – then eject Guardian journalist

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      US Republicans and their European allies tore up news headlines and ejected a Guardian journalist from a conference of radical rightwing activists, on the same day that they highlighted the importance of free speech.Speaking at the second annual meeting in Budapest of the US Conservative Political Action Coalition (CPAC), Kari Lake, a failed Republican gubernatorial candidate, said that “truth-tellers and peacemakers” were being destroyed by “fake news”.“It’s always opposite day in the media: if they’re telling what you’re doing is bad, it’s probably good,” said Lake before tearing up a sheaf of printed articles about the conference aimed at cementing radical rightwing ties across the Atlantic.Despite being a former TV news anchor, Lake made hostility towards the press a central theme in her unsuccessful 2022 election campaign, which included an advert in which she smashed TVs and pledged to “take a sledgehammer to the mainstream media’s lies and propaganda”.Addressing CPAC, she said her childhood ambition was to be a journalist, but that during the Covid pandemic she had realized that “some of the news wasn’t true”.Lake was one of the most high-profile Republicans in the midterm elections to embrace Donald Trump’s lie about voter fraud. She lost her bid to become the governor of Arizona but refused to concede and continued making false claims of electoral wrongdoing.The CPAC audience also watched a recorded message from Donald Trump in which the former president said conservatives were “fighting against barbarians” and listed freedom of speech as one of the cardinal virtues of the far right.“We believe in tradition, the rule of law, freedom of speech and a God-given dignity of every human life. These are ideas that bind together our movement,” Trump said.Not long afterwards, a Guardian journalist was ejected from the conference, during an interview with Rick Santorum.The former Republican senator was praising Hungary’s parental leave policies, when one of the conference organisers grabbed him by the arm and pulled him away mid-sentence.A security guard then led the reporter to the exit.Meanwhile, speakers including the Newsweek comment editor, Josh Hammer, were preparing for a panel on “Free Speech”.CPAC later described the reporter’s registration for the conference as a “system error”.The International Press Institute (IPI) denounced the Guardian’s ejection from the event as a “shameless move” and an “attack on media freedom”.Enmity towards the media has been a constant theme at CPAC’s Hungarian iteration. Last year the organizers refused entry to journalists from all US media outlets, including Vice, Vox, Rolling Stone, the New Yorker and the Associated Press.This year, most independent journalists were refused accreditation for the event, held in a country where the IPI has said media freedom “remains suffocated”. During the Covid outbreak, Viktor Orbán’s government passed a law imposing prison sentences of up to five years for spreading disinformation. More

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      Hungary’s far-right PM calls for Trump’s return: ‘Come back, Mr President’

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      The Hungarian leader Viktor Orbán has called for Donald Trump’s return to office, claiming their shared brand of hard-right populism is on the rise around the world, in a speech to US Republicans and their European allies in Budapest.Orbán was addressing the second annual meeting of the US Conservative Political Action Coalition (CPAC) in the Hungarian capital, aimed at cementing radical rightwing ties across the Atlantic. He said that conservatives have “occupied big European sanctuaries”, which he listed as Budapest, Warsaw, Rome and Jerusalem. He added that Vienna “is also not hopeless” .He noted that Washington and Brussels were still in the grip of liberalism, which he described as a “virus that will atomize and disintegrate our nations”.The Orbán government has made tentative approaches to open contacts with Ron DeSantis, with the Hungarian president, Katalin Novák, flying to meet the Florida governor in Tallahassee in March, but at Thursday’s CPAC conference it was overwhelmingly Trumpist, and Orbán threw his full-throated support behind the former US president.He said: “I’m sure if President Trump would be the president, there would be no war in Ukraine and Europe. Come back, Mr President. Make America great again and bring us peace.”The prime minister, who last year won his fourth consecutive term in office, portrayed Hungary’s self-described “illiberal Christian democracy” – widely criticised for its constraints on media and academic freedom, and for its anti-LGBTQ+ legislation – as a model for the world.“Hungary is an incubator where the conservative policies of the future are being tested,” Orbán said.The conference site, a modernist building called the Bálna, or whale, was festooned with messages echoing that theme. A gateway on the main path to the entrance declared it a “no-woke zone”. Inside, a huge map of Hungary was emblazoned with the words: “No country for woke men.”Some guests arrived in T-shirts that displayed Orbán and Trump together as “peacemakers” and “saviors of the world”. The event’s 2023 motto was “United we stand”.On its first day, the CPAC conference watched a 25-second video greeting from Tucker Carlson, a keen admirer of Orbán, which was clearly recorded before he was fired by Fox News last week.“I wish I was there in Budapest. If I ever get fired, have some time, and can leave, I’ll be there with you,” Carlson promised.Most independent journalists were refused accreditation for the event, in a country where the International Press Institute has said media freedom “remains suffocated”. During the Covid outbreak, Orbán’s government passed a law imposing prison sentences of up to five years for spreading disinformation. Hungarian journalists say the law was being used to deny them access to information, and on occasion to threaten them.The CPAC chair, Matt Schlapp, said Hungary was a model for dealing with journalists. He said that he told the event’s Hungarian organisers his team “would determine who a journalist is”, adding that was “quite revolutionary for the Americans, because in America a journalist tells them who is a journalist and we treat them like a journalist”.Schlapp said that in Hungary journalists had to follow certain rules about writing the truth and presenting “both sides” of a story.Orbán could point to a widening of the radical right coalition this year, with the presence of the Georgian prime minister, Irakli Garibashvili, who praised his Hungarian counterpart as “far-sighted” and stressed his party Georgian Dream’s commitment to prioritising “family values” over “LGBTQ propaganda”. More

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      Anti-trans rhetoric took center stage at CPAC amid hostile Republican efforts

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      Anti-trans rhetoric took center stage at CPAC amid hostile Republican effortsRepublicans are pursuing a barrage of new restrictions related to healthcare and human rights for transgender peopleThere was a joke about the suspected Chinese spy balloon’s preferred pronouns; claims that Democrats believe there are “millions” of genders and a menacing call for “transgenderism” to be “eradicated”.From the main stage of the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), far-right activists, members of Congress and the former president of the United States waged an aggressive assault on transgender rights last week, raising the issue in speeches and unrelated panel discussions, often under the guise of protecting children.Headlining the conference on Saturday, Donald Trump drew some of the wildest applause of his more than 90-minute address when he pledged to stop the “chemical castration and sexual mutilization [sic]”​ of children if re-elected in 2024 while endorsing a national ban on transgender medical treatment for young people.A day earlier, Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, one of Trump’s staunchest allies, rallied attendees with a speech devoted to the issue, unveiling her plan to reintroduce a bill that would criminalize doctors for providing gender-affirming care to a minor.Left unsaid was that leading medical organizations, including the American Medical Association and the American Academy of Pediatrics, consider gender-affirming care to be medically necessary and potentially lifesaving for children and adults diagnosed with gender dysphoria.Much of the anti-trans discourse was aimed at liberals, who, according to the Republican senator John Kennedy of Louisiana, believe children “should be able to change their gender at recess” and “hyperventilate on their yoga mats if you use the wrong pronoun”. The remarks elicited peals of laughter from the audience.Advocates say the vitriolic rhetoric on display at CPAC is reflective of the increasingly hostile movement among conservatives that seeks to regulate the lives of transgender Americans and marginalize vulnerable young people.“People like Marjorie Taylor Greene will not be satisfied until every LGBTQ person is forced into the shadows,” said Geoff Wetrosky, campaign director for the Human Rights Campaign, an LGBTQ advocacy group. He added: “There’s really no legislative purpose other than discrimination in these bills.”In state legislatures across the country, Republican lawmakers are pursuing a barrage of new restrictions related to transgender youth’s medical care, sports participation and bathroom use.So far this year, anti-trans legislation has been proposed in 39 states, including 112 measures that focus on medical care restriction and 82 that pertain to education-related issues, according to the website Track Trans Legislation.Last week, the Republican governor of Tennessee signed into law a bill prohibiting gender-affirming care for minors as well as one imposing new limits on drag performances, which have become a target for Republicans. Mississippi also enacted a ban on treatment for transgender youth while Republican state lawmakers in Kentucky advanced a similar measure, following a charged debate over a separate proposal allowing teachers to refuse to use students’ preferred pronouns.Until recently, most legislation banning transgender healthcare was aimed at minors, but Republicans are increasingly pushing proposals that would limit treatment for adults.Health experts and LGBTQ advocates say many of these anti-trans bills being pushed in state legislatures are not rooted in science – or reality.Gender-affirming care is defined by the World Health Organization as “social, psychological, behavioral or medical (including hormonal treatment or surgery) interventions designed to support and affirm an individual’s gender identity”.While treatment for transgender youths seeking care is highly individualized, experts say most begin with “social transitioning”, or presenting publicly in their preferred gender. Adolescents may consider puberty-blockers to temporarily pause sexual development, often before hormone therapy or sex reassignment surgery, which is not typically offered until age 18 or later. Research suggests regret is rare.Toxic rhetoric and political actions can have profound consequences for LGBTQ Americans, especially transgender youth for whom suicide rates are high.More than 70% of LGBTQ young people, including 86% of trans and/or nonbinary youth, say the political debate around trans issues has negatively affected their mental health, a 2022 survey by The Trevor Project found.Harassment, intimidation and violence against LGBTQ Americans is rising, fueled, experts say, by a rise in online hate speech and an intensifying political debate. Hundreds of transgender people have been killed over the past decade, often in targeted shootings, with Black trans women at especially high risk.“By spreading this propaganda, they’re creating more stigma and discrimination and violence against LGBTQ people,” Wetrosky said. “There are real repercussions and real world violence as a result of this rhetoric.”Angelo Carusone, president and chief executive of Media Matters for America, which monitors rightwing media, said far-right influencers have helped stoke the present hysteria over trans rights. Some of the attacks pull from the online “fever swamps”, he said, merging discussions of gender identity with conspiracy theories about pedophilia and age-old tropes falsely accusing LGBTQ people of “grooming” children.Increasingly, Republican politicians and party leaders see the issue of trans rights as a way to rile their base. It’s a strategy that seeks to capitalize on the conservative “parental rights” movement, which emerged in opposition to pandemic-era school polices requiring remote-learning and mask-wearing but quickly shifted to target classroom instruction related to race, sexual orientation and gender identity as well as transgender students’ bathroom use and sports participation.“When that anti-education wave … started to talk about trans issues, the numbers were already there and their audience responded to it in a really visceral way,” Carusone said.While the backlash may have helped Republicans claw back power in Virginia – a state thought to be increasingly out of reach for the party – their disappointing showing in the 2022 midterms suggests it has limited appeal.But it was a central theme at CPAC, where panelists repeatedly mocked and misgendered transgender people, including Rachel Levine, who serves as the assistant secretary for health and is the highest-ranking transgender official in the US government.On a panel dedicated to the issue, a former college athlete who competed against a transgender swimmer warned that there was an effort under way on the left to “fully eradicate women”.A male panelist joked about “transitioning” into his female co-panelist, Chaya Raichik, who runs “Libs of TikTok”, an anti-LGBTQ social media account. Another lamented that students in China are taught calculus while American students learn that there are “72 genders”.But the speech that LGBTQ advocates found the most chilling came from Michael Knowles, a rightwing political commentator for the Daily Wire, who declared that “for the good of society … transgenderism must be eradicated from public life entirely”. A range of voices, including public officials, experts and observers of rightwing rhetoric, condemned the remarks as inflammatory and dangerous, with some calling them “genocidal”. (Knowles insisted on Twitter that he was not referring to trans people, but “transgenderism” which he has described as a “false” ideology.)Yet the intense focus on transgender rights at CPAC this year – nearly every speaker raised it – suggests it is likely to be an animating issue in the coming presidential election.Governor Ron DeSantis of Florida, seen as Trump’s strongest potential rival for the Republican nomination, was not at CPAC this year but has aggressively targeted trans rights in his state.He signed into law Florida’s so-called “Don’t Say Gay” bill as well as another measure that bans trans women and girls from competing in some school sports in the state. He has also sought to limit gender-affirming care for transgender youths and recently faced sharp criticism for requesting information about students who sought or received such care at public universities in Florida.Meanwhile Republican presidential candidate Nikki Haley, as well as possible 2024 contenders including the former vice-president Mike Pence, former secretary of state Mike Pompeo and the South Dakota governor, Kristi Noem, have all emphasized their opposition to trans rights.Wetrosky, of the Human Rights Campaign, said he anticipates the emerging Republican presidential field will continue to embrace the anti-trans rhetoric and policies on offer at CPAC. And though it may boost them in their quest to win the party’s nomination, he predicted it would backfire in a general election.“The vast majority of Americans support LGBTQ equality,” Wetrosky said, “and the people who are speaking at this conference are on the wrong side of history.”TopicsCPACLGBTQ+ rightsUS politicsfeaturesReuse this content More