President Trump’s stem-winding speech before conservative supporters Saturday provided a rhetorical road map for the next 20 months as the president makes his re-election pitch to voters.
To be sure, Trump’s remarks before the Conservative Political Action Conference, which ran more than two hours, had all the markings of a classic Trump speech, with knocks on “crooked” Hillary Clinton, prompting chants of “lock her up,” gripes about what Trump said was inaccurate coverage of the crowd size at his inauguration more than two years ago, and denunciations of special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia probe.
But the president also rolled out some new material during his remarks that is likely to become a staple of his speeches and rallies as he seeks to shore up his base and secure a second term in office.
“We believe in the American dream, not in the socialist nightmare,” Trump told the crowd at CPAC. “And we believe in the words of our national motto: In God We Trust.”
Trump and other top administration officials have seized upon the positions of the new crop of Democratic lawmakers in Congress and 2020 opponents as they begin to hit the campaign trail, with abortion, immigration, and socialism emerging as key themes likely to carry through the campaign.
Democrats, the president asserted Saturday, “have totally abandoned the American mainstream.”
“But that’s going to be good for us in 2020,” he said. “They’re embracing open borders, socialism, and extreme late-term abortion.”
The president also hit Democrats on those issues during a rally last month in El Paso, Texas, where he vowed America would never become a socialist country.
“We’re born free,” he said at the time. “We will live free and we will die free.”
On Saturday, Trump again accused his political opponents of “embracing socialism” through their support of “Medicare for all,” citing a bill from Rep. Pramila Jayapal, D-Wash., that would extend Medicare to the whole population and which has more than 100 Democratic co-sponsors.
“They want to replace individual rights with total government domination,” the president said.
In addition to knocking Democrats for their positions on immigration and abortion, which Trump seized upon after a late-term abortion bill was signed in New York this year, Trump and his surrogates have used the “Green New Deal” as political fodder as they prepare to hit the campaign trail.
The president sarcastically advocated that the proposal, the brainchild of Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., and progressive Democrats, be “part of the dialogue” of the 2020 election and joked that it has “tremendous promise and tremendous potential.”
“No planes. No energy. When the wind stops blowing, that’s the end of your electric,” Trump joked at CPAC. “’Darling, darling, is the wind blowing today? I’d like to watch television, darling.’”
Helping Trump amplify his condemnation of Democrats and demonstrate the daylight between the president and Democratic presidential contenders is Vice President Mike Pence, who on Friday warned of socialism’s consequences and knocked elected officials who have “papered over the failed policies of socialism with bumper sticker slogans and slick social media campaigns.”
“Under the guise of ‘Medicare for all’ and a ‘Green New Deal,’ Democrats are embracing the same tired economic theories that have impoverished nations and stifled the liberties of millions over the past century,” Pence said during his own remarks at CPAC. “That system is socialism.”
While Trump’s CPAC speech received rousing applause from supporters in the audience, the president is also spotlighting achievements designed to woo a faction of the Republican Party critical of him.
Trump suggested opponents would hate him less if he were someone else with the same policies.
“Let’s face it, whether you like me or not, if my name is Smith instead of Trump, and if you told him I put in over 100 federal judges — it’ll soon be 145 judges and two Supreme Court judges, and 17 appellate division judges; that we’ve got the best economy maybe in our history; that we’ve got the best employment numbers in our history; that we’ve cut more regulations in two years than any president has ever done, whether it’s for eight or beyond; that we’ve taken care of our military … Think of that,” he said. “Think of what we did.”
