The Daily Fuckup

Donald Trump was no longer in the White House by the time conservatives gathered for CPAC in late February 2021, but that did not mean he had stopped shaping the Republican Party. If anything, his looming appearance at the annual gathering made the opposite point: even after defeat, impeachment, and the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, Trump remained the central figure around which much of the party still revolved. That was the most telling political fact of the moment. Republicans were not merely debating whether to move on from him; many still seemed unsure whether they could do anything else. The result was an uncomfortable contradiction at the heart of the party’s post-Trump posture. It wanted the benefits of Trump’s popularity, but it had not shown much appetite for the discipline required to separate itself from his lies, his grievances, and his demand for total loyalty.

CPAC should have been an occasion for a genuine reckoning. A party that had just lost the White House, lost control of the Senate, and watched a mob violently breach Congress might reasonably have used the weekend to ask hard questions about its direction, its message, and its relationship to democracy itself. Instead, the gathering was shaping up as another exercise in deference to the man whose false claims about the election had helped fuel the chaos. Trump’s expected presence made him the main event, and his account of events remained the baseline from which others were expected to speak. That left little room for honesty. It is one thing for Republicans to acknowledge that Trump still has a devoted following. It is another for them to behave as though the party cannot function without repeating his stolen-election lie or catering to the most agitated parts of his base. That is not a minor communications problem. It is a strategic and institutional failure, because a party that cannot speak plainly about its own loss also struggles to speak plainly about public trust, democratic norms, or the basic responsibilities of governing.

The attraction of Trump is easy to understand, even if the cost is hard to ignore. He still draws attention. He can still animate the Republican base. He remains a powerful fundraising and turnout force for politicians who believe they need his supporters to win primaries or general elections. Party figures know this, and many have acted accordingly, making room for him even after the most damaging episode of his presidency. But every benefit has come with a price. The more Republicans signal that they cannot operate without his spectacle, his resentment, and his constant insistence on fealty, the harder it becomes for anyone else to sound credible, responsible, or forward-looking. That message has consequences beyond Washington. To suburban voters, independents, and some conservatives who were already uneasy with the direction of the party, the Trump-centered posture suggests that Republicans have not learned the lessons of 2020. Instead of broadening their appeal, they appear to be doubling down on the habits that helped drive support away. A party trying to rebuild usually tries to look larger than one man’s resentments. In the weeks before CPAC, Republicans were still acting as though shrinking themselves around Trump was proof of strength.

That left the party stuck in a trap with no clean exit. If Republicans embraced Trump too openly, they risked hardening the stolen-election myth into a permanent part of their political identity and further normalizing the idea that loyalty to one man matters more than loyalty to democratic outcomes. If they tried to distance themselves, they risked provoking backlash from the most energized part of their coalition and from Trump himself, who remained capable of punishing disloyalty from afar. That tension was visible in the careful, often contradictory posture of many GOP figures. They seemed eager to benefit from Trump’s popularity without fully owning the damage his politics had caused. Mainstream conservatives could look weak for showing up and weak for staying silent. Anti-Trump Republicans could point to the conference as evidence that the party still had not begun a serious accounting of Jan. 6. Democrats, meanwhile, could reasonably argue that the GOP’s refusal to break decisively with Trump was not just an internal party matter but a continuing threat to the country’s political health. In the end, the deeper failure was not that Trump still mattered. It was that so many Republicans were still behaving as though they could not build a future unless they first bowed to the past.

That dynamic is why CPAC mattered beyond the usual theater of a conservative gathering. It was a live demonstration of how much power Trump retained, even without office, and how much he had warped the party’s incentives. The Republican leadership faced a choice between telling the truth about what had happened and protecting the emotional loyalty of the base he had assembled. So far, the party’s behavior suggested that the second impulse still dominated. That is an unstable foundation for any political movement, especially one that hopes to recover national power. A party can survive controversy, internal disagreement, and even defeat. What it cannot easily survive is the decision to organize itself around a falsehood and then pretend that falsehood is political strategy. Trump’s continued hold over the GOP showed how difficult it had become for Republicans to distinguish between what was popular in the moment and what was sustainable over time. It also showed how quickly a party can become captive to a leader who demands constant affirmation but offers little room for renewal. As CPAC approached, that was the real story: not simply that Trump was still relevant, but that the party still seemed unwilling to imagine itself without him.