The 7 Most Bewildering Moments From Trump’s CPAC Speech
President Donald Trump has had a fiasco of a week. His former lawyer called him “a racist,” “a con man,” and “a cheat” in explosive testimony before Congress. Trump walked away empty-handed from a bizarre summit with Kim Jong Un. And then it got weirder. He went to CPAC.
Trump took the stage for more than two hours at the Conservative Political Action Conference, an annual gathering of conservative politicians, celebrities, and pundits in Washington, D.C. He never once mentioned Cohen during his marathon remarks—and he only brought up the failed denuclearization talks in Hanoi as he approached the two-hour mark of a speech that made last fall’s campaign rallies seem highly scripted.
Instead, he returned to his list of greatest hits: the Russia “witch hunt,” the worst trade deal ever, criminal immigrants, Crooked Hillary, socialist Democrats, and even the crowd size at his inauguration. Compared with his freewheeling rally speeches or his rambling remarks last month in the White House Rose Garden, the president’s CPAC speech was a wild ride.
These were his people, and he said he by 39 minutes. His time at the podium may have even been the longest presidential oration in American history, to the political writer David Rothkopf, eclipsing William Henry Harrison’s 8,445-word in 1841—the outdoor speech in cold weather that famously gave Harrison pneumonia and caused his death within a month.
