President Biden has spent his first five weeks in office peeling back his predecessor's legacy, one executive action at a time. On Sunday, former President Trump will take his first opportunity to respond.
Biden moved on his first day in office to rejoin the Paris climate agreement, cut off funding for the border wall, reverse Trump’s travel ban and recommit to the World Health Organization. And the president’s rhetoric is regularly filled with swipes at Trump’s bungled handling of the coronavirus pandemic and his inability to be transparent with the public.
Trump’s first media appearances since leaving office have been focused on national headlines involving the death of Rush Limbaugh and Tiger Woods’s serious car accident. But he is expected to return fire against Biden in a speech Sunday at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC).
“Joe Biden's dangerous first month failures will feature prominently in Sunday's speech,” said Jason Miller, a senior adviser to Trump.
Immigration is expected to be among the dominant topics of the address, according to people familiar with the planning. Trump is likely to seize on the influx of migrants at the southern border, which has prompted the Biden administration to reopen a facility for teenagers in Texas that operated for a month during the previous administration.
That decision has drawn fire from all sides, with liberals decrying the use of the facilities to house young migrants and conservatives complaining that Biden's policies are drawing immigrants to the border amid the pandemic.
Trump’s appearance at CPAC comes as former Trump officials slowly ramp up their visibility and criticism of the Biden administration’s policies.
Former Vice President Pence met this week with members of the Republican Study Committee for roughly two hours to discuss the conservative agenda moving forward.
Pence, whom Trump attacked during the Jan. 6 riot at the Capitol even as the then-vice president was being whisked to safety, told lawmakers he has a strong relationship with Trump and plans to defend the administration's record. Pence is expected to record a regular podcast through the Young America’s Foundation.
Stephen Miller, a former senior adviser in the Trump White House who was a speechwriter and the architect of the former president’s immigration agenda, also met with committee members this week.
Miller, who only occasionally appeared on television during the Trump administration, has been something of a regular presence on Fox News since Biden took office.
But nobody in the Republican Party draws attention like Trump, and all eyes in the political world will be on his address on Sunday.
The Biden administration's early policy moves have largely been aimed at undoing Trump's actions and addressing what they argue were shortcomings left by the previous administration in vaccine distribution.
In addition to day one executive orders, Biden has established a task force to reunite families separated during the Trump administration and rescinded the ban on transgender troops serving in the military.
On Wednesday, Biden issued an executive order that undid a series of Trump actions, including ones that established new guidelines for federal architecture, outlined new regulatory guidance during the pandemic and ordered a review of funding for "anarchist" cities that saw protests last summer.
Despite the focus on dismantling Trump’s policies and the tendency to blame him for initial issues with the vaccine rollout, the White House has been adamant that it will not take the bait when the former president speaks."
metmike: The democrats and MSM are celebrating this, regardless of what they might state. Donald Trump is now extremely and permanently toxic to the republican party.
This is permanent damage that the MSM is maximizing daily, almost 2 months later with their lead stories and long duration coverage of the Insurrection.
They are not covering it so extremely to be fair and balanced or informative. It's their "9-11" which is a massive unifying event over something that is appalling to Americans and the other side has ZERO defense for.
9-11 of course was in an entirely different league and light years worse but you may remember that it caused many Americans to think of Muslims differently. There was a tremendous amount of unfair discrimination and distrust of Muslims for years after 9-11............because of 9-11.
I saw it personally on the soccer and chess teams that I coached. My wife saw it in Detroit, where she was working, over a decade later when nice Muslim employees of hers had their tires slit......because they were Muslim.
The vast, vast majority of Muslims are good, honest people but 9-11 did tremendous damage to their image in the minds of Americans that didn't know any Muslims. Many Americans distrusted Muslims and suspected them of being potential terrorists.
This is exactly what is taking place right now with the Insurrection. It's being used by the MSM to stereotype the republican party. Anybody that supported Donald Trump is a racist. They are the extreme dangerous radicals that this country should fear.
There are people like that of course but they are effectively convincing tens of millions of people, to believe that tens of millions of people that disagree with them on politics, are dangerous, radicals and racists.
But it goes beyond that. They are using the circumstances, very effectively to also convince moderate Republicans who thought the Insurrection and how Trump acted was abhorrent, to abandon their support for their party.
How should the republican party deal with this?
They must distance themselves from Donald Trump. That is the only way.
With 9-11, the face and person most connected with that diabolical event was Bin Laden. The most hated person in America for a decade by a very wide margin.
With the Insurrection, the person with a similar connection and association is Donald Trump. He was already the most hated person in America, which makes this association even easier to connect but now we have an actual event to associate and connect him with to unify and rally those against him, like 9-11 did.
Even if you know that Jan. 6th is being exaggerated and somehow, believe that Donald Trump did not cause it, you must agree in the above.
Trying to fight that, would be like trying to make progress in a motor boat that goes 5 mph, going upstream in a river with a current going 8 mph.
You can't defy the laws of physics and go against the current with something much less powerful than the current.
In the above analogy, there is no motorboat going 10+ mph and the streams current is not going to stop, just like the Dems and MSM are NEVER going to stop using the Insurrection and the Republicans will NEVER have a powerful reason to excuse it and attempts to defend the main reason for it, Donald Trump's behavior for 2 months, will ALWAYS backfire because he DID cause it.
Never fight the truth if you are already way behind.
It's always worth fighting lies and injustice USING the truth.
However, when you are already way behind, it's ALWAYS best to concede the truths from the other side.......and pick new battles based on well defined truths that are winnable.
I know that we have some big Trump supporters here who don't like reading this but without question, Donald Trump is your party's kryptonite. There will never be a point in time that he can help the republican party other than stepping aside and letting the damage that took place the last 4 months slowly fade away, so that the country can move forward.....just like with Superman.
It would be dumb for Superman to sprinkle powdered kryptonite on his cereal every morning because its toxic to him.
Superman must get the kryptonite as far away as possible.
Unfortunately, the only way this can work is if Donald Trump decides to withdraw from political life. If he keeps up his battle with Mitch McConnell for instance and suggests that he will run again in 2024, it would be like Superman also putting kryptonite sauce on his chicken too.
He has enough devout supporters left for him to be motivated to fuel his self serving motivation and feed his ego and continue to be the main actor in the republican party.
This would splinter/split the republican party and give the other side unlimited ammunition to win many battles, based on PR that involve him.
He is the MSM and democrats dream.
Last November, for most Americans, the ballot for president looked like this:
1. Donald Trump
2. Not Donald Trump
After losing, then disgracing himself and the office for 2 months worse than any president in history and destroying his own legacy, the new choice will be:
1. Anybody that supports Donald Trump
2. Anybody that does not support Donald Trump
metmike: This sort of delusional thinking below, that ignores all the objective facts......... will destroy the republican party.
Trump has the power to do that the next 2 years. There is no path ahead that features Donald Trump successfully leading the way for a recovering republican party.
I am hesitant to say NEVER or NOT POSSIBLE about alot of things but this is one of those things that is very crystal clear from an objective standpoint and not based on my opinion.
Donald Trump Jr. asserted that his father, former President Donald Trump, is still the future of the GOP ahead of his speech at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) this weekend.
“If you’re reading the room and you’re intelligent, you realize that Donald Trump is still the future of the Republican Party,” Trump Jr. said on Fox News. “Those people who are being displaced by illegals, those people who are being swept aside by the Democrat Party, who has just flagrantly ignored them for decades, Donald Trump is all over that,” he added.
Trump Jr. is scheduled to speak at CPAC on Friday, while the former president will give a speech on Sunday.
The former commander-in-chief has not yet indicated whether he would run for president in 2024. Trump was impeached and later acquitted by the Senate earlier this month, triggering a schism between Republicans who either voted to impeach or convict and those who did not.
Since the Jan. 6 Capitol breach, a number of corporations severed ties with Republicans. The younger Trump argued that it may ultimately be a positive development because it shows the GOP represents working-class Americans, rather than Democrats—who have for decades attempted to cast themselves as the party representing the working class and unions.
“The Republican Party isn’t going to be bound to those corporate interests anymore,” he argued in the Fox interview. “So I love that they are making that link and breaking it, because we need more of that and we need candidates and people who will go to bat, who will go to war and fight for the American working class and make sure we put them first.
Trump added that it’s unprecedented in history for it to be considered “controversial” for “leaders of a nation to put their people first.” He added: “Why is it now, and how do the Democrats get away with making America last as opposed to first?”
A number of opinion polls in recent weeks suggest that Trump is still viewed highly by Republican voters, with one survey showing that up to 70 percent of Republicans would consider joining a Trump-backed political party.
metmike: If you are a Trump supporter, in what world do you think that it would be possible for a Trump backed political party, that would split the republicans, possibly defeat the democrats when a Trump backed republican party with ALL the republicans lost............then, were disgraced by Trump after the loss?
It would be like KC, losing the Super Bowl to TB, thinking they could win a rematch if they split their top players up on 2 different teams and use their top quarterback, despite him having a career ending injury.......but playing anyways.