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The best way to think of CPAC now is MAGA’s United Nations.
The far-right confab held every year outside Washington, D.C., has long been a gathering for American conservatives. Launched with a keynote speech by Ronald Reagan in the aftermath of Watergate in 1974, it has morphed subtly through the Bush era and the advent of the Tea Party. But it has become a fully Trumpist event in recent years, less a forum of ideas than a celebration of one individual’s takeover of the Republican Party. CPAC is no longer a conference of the American right — indeed many avowed conservatives shun the event now. Instead, it has turned into a kind of MAGA Comintern, gathering right-leaning populists from around the world who come to pay tribute to the American leader who inspires them and whose rhetoric they imitate.
Walking the halls of the Gaylord National Resort and Conference Center, where CPAC was held this year, the number of languages spoken made it feel more like a ramble through Miami Beach than a Maryland suburb. The biggest difference was that attendees wore merchandise commemorating their participation in the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol in lieu of swimsuits. There were buttons handed out with joint pictures of Donald Trump and Viktor Orban labeled “the Age of Patriots” and there were speakers from nearly 20 countries around the world, including heads of government from Argentina, Italy, Slovakia and North Macedonia.
Even before the conference officially kicked off, there was a CPAC “international summit,” held with all the formality of a diplomatic conclave. There were long rows of flags lined up behind the tables where the participants sat in a partitioned hotel conference room and attendees had assigned seats with name tags from which they could give prepared statements when called upon to participate. All speakers at the international summit tried to tie their country’s struggles to those conservatives say they face in the United States. Liz Truss, who was very briefly British prime minister in 2022, complained about how unelected judges were ruining Great Britain. Balázs Orbán, an aide to Hungarian strongman Viktor Orban, said that the Hungarian leader’s vision was the same as Trump’s: “No migration, no gender and no war.”
Yet, the most striking convergence was the fact that increasingly hard-right parties around the world had adopted their own parallel mythologies to Jan. 6 at a conference where those who stormed the Capitol were described in an official statement as a “persecuted community.”
While the analogies were imperfect — after all, there can be only one QAnon shaman — Eduardo Bolsonaro railed against the efforts to prosecute his father, former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro who is charged with a coup attempt over an effort to overturn his 2022 presidential loss to Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, his leftist rival. Bolsonaro’s alleged coup featured an attack on the Brazilian capital on Jan. 8, 2023, where a mob stormed the Congress building. For the younger Bolsonaro, who insisted his father was being politically persecuted by his political opponents just like Trump, “Jan. 8 is a similar case that we have here with your Jan. 6.”
As he said this, a man in a Brazilian soccer jersey took a picture while holding a bag emblazoned with the slogans of Bolsonaro, Trump and Argentinian President Javier Milei (who also appeared at the conference on Saturday). The God, Country, Family and Liberty slogan that Bolsonaro had adopted and modified from the right in the 1920s was paired with Milei’s “Long Live Freedom Goddamnit” and Trump’s “Make America Great Again.”
Steve Bannon, who was one of the conveners of the international summit on Wednesday, also compared the ouster of former South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol to the efforts to prosecute Trump and Bolsonaro. Yoon shockingly declared martial law in December to combat what he claimed was obstruction by the country’s national assembly. The declaration was overturned by the assembly within hours despite efforts by special forces sent by Yoon to stop the vote. He has since been impeached and removed from office, and was recently indicted for insurrection. Around CPAC, South Korean attendees, who numbered in the dozens, argued that Yoon only declared martial law to “clean up the election fraud.” Even countries with established democracies are now experiencing skepticism about the fairness of their electoral process.
Richard “Bigo” Barnett, who infamously was pictured putting his feet up on Nancy Pelosi’s desk on Jan. 6, told me that he talked with the group that is “trying to stop the steal in South Korea” and said that he had sent “an inspirational video” to those in jail there for their role in the attempted putsch as part of international effort to “Stop The Steal.” He added that the same thing was going on in Brazil and in Europe, where “the
Nazi police will show up and arrest you just like they did in Auschwitz.” He added of his fellow Jan. 6 participants, “That’s what they did to us.”
As Trump foreign policy adviser Richard Grenell put it to me afterwards, “Almost everything we do in America tends to go [around the world]. ‘Woke’ went around the world because of us. Our Covid policy went around the world because of us. So I think we have to get comfortable with the fact that we are the global cultural power and a lot of what we do gets exported, whether we like it or not.”
There are obvious pitfalls to bringing together a conference of nationalists from around the world. Everyone might love Trump, but they don’t necessarily all love each other. There are often competing geographic claims and competing national mythologies. At a dinner on Wednesday night where Bannon hailed Bolsonaro and Nigel Farage, the leader of the Reform Party in the UK, as the future of the populist right, nationalists from Hungary and neighboring Romania were seated at different tables, which was probably wise lest their conversation turn from their agreement on fighting transgender rights to their disagreement over Transylvania, the historically ethnic Hungarian region in central Romania. Jordan Bardella, the leader of the National Rally, the French far-right party previously headed by Marine Le Pen, canceled his appearance at the conference after Bannon gave what the French nationalist called “a gesture referring to Nazi ideology” in a speech on Friday. Bannon insisted he had held his arm out in a wave and derided Bardella as “a boy” who was “unworthy of leading France.”
And not every speaker from abroad won over the crowd of MAGA acolytes. Some delivered — like Farage, a fixture on the American conservative conference circuit, who was greeted as a conquering hero as he marveled at how much the conference had changed since he was once the only foreign speaker. Milei got loud acclaim for a long libertarian speech that he read in Spanish. It went over big with the Spanish-speaking crowd who cheered his applause lines; the English speakers, waiting for the translation, cheered on delay as he condemned the power of the state.
Others met far less rapturous receptions. North Macedonian Prime Minister Hristijan Mickoski’s speech served as more of an explainer that North Macedonia was indeed a real country than populist red meat for the crowd. Truss’ remarks were met with quiet befuddlement. The crowd knew that USAID was bad but unsure why it deserved condemnation for funding “Rory Stewart’s wife” (let alone who Rory Stewart was himself).
By far the most popular foreign politician was Farage. Heather Johnson of Pittsboro, North Carolina, kvelled over the fact that she got to have a drink with the British MP at the hotel bar on Friday. Michael O’Neil of Concord, New Hampshire, said the British pol was one of his two favorites, along with Christine Anderson, a German member of the European Parliament for the far-right AfD party whom he described as “awesome.” O’Neil cherished the international nature of the conference, sharing the QAnon motto: “Where we go one, we go all.”
Yet, it wasn’t just about the boldface names appearing on stage. The audience was just as international. Brazilian flag pins seemed almost as common as American flag pins and attendees seemed almost as likely to be livestreaming into their phones in Hungarian as English.
Terry Schilling, a prominent social conservative activist who is a frequent speaker at CPAC, told me. “It’s been nice seeing CPAC expand across the globe. I was able to catch up with old friends from Hungary and even got to meet some new friends from Korea.”
He added: “I still have no idea why Liz Truss comes here though.”
English (US)