Donald Trump reprised his campaign stump speeches in his first appearance as President at the Conservative Political Action Conference Friday morning, assuring the audience of grassroots Republican leaders that he really does intend to “Make America Great Again.”
Trump talked about his plans for curbing immigration, rebuilding the military, handling foreign policy, and financing infrastructure improvements including the controversial Dakota Access and Keystone pipelines. He trumpeted several successes from his first weeks in office though, oddly, left out his nomination of Judge Neil Gorsuch to the US Supreme Court.
He is likely to elaborate on how, exactly, he plans to pursue his ambitious agenda on Tuesday, during an address to a joint session of Congress.
But while most Republicans use CPAC speeches as a rallying cry against Democrats, Trump reserved a huge portion of his speech — the entire first half hour of a fifty minute address — to attacking the media as the opposition party, a theme that has emerged from White House officials over the course of the CPAC conference.
“They are very smart, they are very cunning, they are very dishonest,” Trump said about his newfound political foils. “It doesn’t represent the people, it never will represent the people.” He went on to describe the “dishonest media” as the “enemy of the people,” though he did say that he was only targeting certain reporters who failed to give readers the whole story about his administration.
Trump launched his most stringent attacks at CNN, which he dubbed the “Clinton News Network,” taking the news organization to task for allegedly faulty polling during the election and what he seems to believe is a deliberate ongoing campaign of misinformation.
In what is sure to be the most controversial segment of his speech, Trump even attacked the First Amendment, calling on journalists to reveal the names of anonymous sources, like the ones who told the Washington Post that General Mike Flynn most definitely discussed dropping sanctions against Russia in his contacts with the Russian ambassador in December — a charge the White House had repeatedly denied.
Trump Tweeted about the Post story ahead of his CPAC speech.
He wrapped up his speech by taking the media to task again, though noting that the negative coverage he’s received “doesn’t bother me.”
For Trump, a key slot at CPAC is its own victory lap, of sorts. Although he appeared at the conference in 2011, 2012, and 2015, his appearances were more as entertainment than as a serious candidate for Republican leadership. In 2011, he was used as a protest by a conservative gay rights organization that had been banned from CPAC – a way for GOProud to provide an entertaining alternative to socially conservative CPAC speakers.
As part of his introduction, he apologized for skipping the conference last year, using the excuse that he would have been “too controversial” for the event, and committed to a yearly appearance in front of the same audience.
