Since its founding in the 1970s, the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) has been a chance to take the temperature of Republican politics. In recent years, that’s looked increasingly fevered, with the Donald Trump wing of the party taking center stage. This year, for instance, a far-right figure named Jack Posobiec called for “the end of democracy” during a panel led by former Trump White House advisor Steve Bannon. But it’s also taking a surprisingly internationalist turn for a group whose theme this year was “Where Globalism Goes to Die.”
Since its founding in the 1970s, the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) has been a chance to take the temperature of Republican politics. In recent years, that’s looked increasingly fevered, with the Donald Trump wing of the party taking center stage. This year, for instance, a far-right figure named Jack Posobiec called for “the end of democracy” during a panel led by former Trump White House advisor Steve Bannon. But it’s also taking a surprisingly internationalist turn for a group whose theme this year was “Where Globalism Goes to Die.”
A Hungarian branch of the conference was founded in 2020, where Prime Minister Viktor Orban, perhaps inevitably, always seems to be the keynote speaker. In 2023, CPAC Brasil launched as well. Between 2017 and 2019, CPAC events also launched in Australia, Mexico, Japan, and South Korea. This year’s Hungarian CPAC, to be held in April, is expected to focus heavily on elections both in the United States and across Europe.
But the American event itself is the main chance for authoritarians and nationalists everywhere to shine. Drawing thousands of attendees each year, from lobbyists to party functionaries to conservative media stars, nearly every Republican presidential candidate was once expected to make a stop at CPAC, although Trump’s ascendancy has cooled some of them on the prospect. A straw poll taken at the event is used as a barometer to try to judge who the conservative base is likely to vote for in the Republican presidential primaries (a foregone conclusion this year) and for the vice presidency (a tie this year between South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem and biotech entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy.)
The conference has become an obligatory stop for international political figures, either looking to make inroads with the American right—and prepare for the benefits of closeness to a future Trump administration—or to float a new career built on American money after they crash and burn at home. At this year’s event, held as usual in a hotel in National Harbor, Maryland, political figures from right-wing populist movements across the world worked the room and preached from the stage. They included two sitting presidents: Argentina’s Javier Milei and El Salvador’s Nayib Bukele.
In turn, as CPAC has made clear, it is also seeking to draw international influences into U.S. politics. The conference even hosted an “international summit” before the main event, attended by the global leaders and Bannon, the former Trump advisor, for some reason. CPAC added in a tweet that it looked forward to hearing “more international conservative leaders throughout the week on the best practices to beat socialism, Marxism and globalism.”
CPAC itself may have bigger problems than Marxists. Its brand has been tarnished as Matt Schlapp, the head of the American Conservative Union, which hosts the event, fends off a series of high-profile sexual misconduct lawsuits. And neither Fox News or Turning Point USA were in attendance, once large sponsors. As NBC’s Ben Goggin reported, a number of racist extremists were freely wandering the halls this year, while in the past people espousing openly white supremacist views were ejected.
But for those ambitious foreign politicians looking to join, CPAC remains an essential stop. The international politicians this year stressed U.S. right wing-friendly talking points on the dangers of socialism, mass migration, leftism of various kinds, and “wokeness,” and, to scattered rounds of applause, often described America under President Joe Biden as a dangerous, post-apocalyptic, fentanyl-soaked hellscape. The end goal for those speakers who hold international office was clear: to get close to Republican power players—and possibly the once and future president himself—in preparation for a possible second Trump administration.
But the speakers from abroad included people whose political futures are somewhat unsettled, like CPAC veteran and Brexit advocate Nigel Farage, who appeared early on to promote a nonspecific message of unity, victory, and transborder fealty to the populist movement. There, the idea seemed to be to bulk up their own profile—and to appeal to a well-funded American conservative movement.
Praising the event’s international flair, Farage told the room, “It feels like the Atlantic just got a little bit narrower.” He then embarked on a long recap of the 2023 incident in which Coutts bank closed his account. He claimed this had happened due to his political views, although an independent review in December found no evidence that was the case.
“They picked on the wrong bloke, didn’t they?” Farage declared. This he tied, somehow, with the long moral arc of the universe: “In the end, although it might take time, good always triumphs over evil.”
Farage, too, noted that when he first attended CPAC a decade ago, he was “the only foreign-born speaker” on the platform. “Look at it today,” he added. “Quite extraordinary.” He noted that he’d met delegates and elected officials at the event from Hungary, Poland, Romania, Australia, Canada, Colombia, Mexico, France, and Germany. He closed by declaring a need for “strong leaders,” adding, “We need Trump back in the White House.”
Trumpism underpinned the other international speakers and the conference at large, but it didn’t always come with direct endorsements of the ex-president himself. Brief-serving U.K. Prime Minister Liz Truss—who, as Politico noted, spoke to a half-empty room, although that’s not unusual at CPAC—did not explicitly endorse Trump but echoed many of his talking points, telling the crowd that Biden was “asleep at the wheel in the White House” and told Farage in a separate conversation that Biden needed to be “kicked out.” (Contrast that with Orban’s CPAC speech last year, where he claimed that Trump would have prevented the war in Ukraine, had he been in office, and beseeched Trump to “come back and bring us peace.”)
Given that Trump is deeply unpopular in the United Kingdom, these remarks—and Truss’s appearance at CPAC in general—don’t seem designed to revive her political career at home. In fact, it could seriously sabotage it. Her remarks at CPAC prompted a call for censure from the opposition Labour Party. Its chair asked Prime Minister Rishi Sunak to remove the whip for Truss, which would essentially expel her from the Conservative Party, and she was surrounded by journalists asking if she would apologize upon her return to the UK. It doesn’t help that the Tories are mired in a wider series of Islamophobia and homophobia scandals, with another member of Parliament recently suspended.
Truss may be aiming for a new career in the states. Truss blamed the “deep state” for sabotaging her brief time as prime minister and used other language that would appeal to America’s far right, stressing many times that conservatives needed to regain power to “save the West.” (She has also been flogging a forthcoming book, Ten Years to Save the West, which she urged people in the audience to pre-order.) Besides making the rounds at CPAC, she’s made appearances at the Heritage Foundation, another powerful group in U.S. conservative politics.
When Bukele, El Salvador’s president, spoke, he focused heavily on ideas of hidden forces working to undermine the United States. It was, like Truss, a speech that reflected a sort of global anti-globalism, a clear nod to international conspiracy theories about the deep state, hidden hands, and worldwide cabals.
“The next president of the United States must not only win an election, he must have the vision, the will, and the courage to do whatever it takes, and above all, he must be able to identify the underlying forces that will conspire against him,” Bukele told the crowd. “These dark forces are already taking over your country. You may not see it yet, but it’s already happening.” He then claimed that “unscrupulous terrorists” in El Salvador had “performed satanic rituals,” positing this as something the United States needed to avoid. He pointed at “Baltimore, Portland, and New York” as places where “crime and drugs have become the daily norm.”
Bukele’s half-trolling public image is built around wild claims and a Trumpist insistence that he is a national savior. In contrast, Milei, Argentina’s president, seemed determined to play against his self-created “wildman with a chainsaw” persona. When he took the stage, he focused on a lengthy and dryly delivered series of disconnected ideas, including how “socialist intervention destroys the economy.”
That matches Milei’s own swing toward a more moderate approach in office than he preached on the campaign trail. But he also promulgated conspiracy theories about the “murderous” abortion agenda and the “Marxist agenda” of a belief in climate change. And he, too, was ultimately there under a broad umbrella of Trumpism: He and Trump exchanged “an ecstatic hug” backstage, according to the Associated Press.
All of this, of course, is a bet on Trump’s second term. The politicians and former politicians who traveled from abroad to CPAC are guessing that his reelection is nigh, and that it’s time—no matter how incendiary the language or strong the censure at home—to strengthen a relationship with what they reckon is the past and future face of power in the United States.
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