8: The Dear Leader Returns
The Lincoln Project
The Lincoln Project
4.6 • 9.1K Ratings
🗓️ 2 March 2021
⏱️ 34 minutes
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Summary
The 2021 Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) and all its weirdness has thankfully concluded. The conference's theme on paper was "America Uncanceled" however the overwhelming theme in the air was, and continues to be, that the Republican Party is firmly the party of Donald Trump. Host and Lincoln Project Co-Founder Reed Galen is joined by fellow Co-Founder Rick Wilson and Lincoln Project Senior Advisor Stuart Stevens to recap the events of CPAC 2021, with special attention to Donald Trump's closing speech.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome back to the Lincoln Project. I'm your host, Reed Gaily. Today we want to talk about the 2021 |
| 0:14.5 | Conservative Political Action Conference that just wrapped up on Sunday evening with Donald Trump's |
| 0:20.2 | speech, his first since leaving office last month. And it was everything we expected it would be, |
| 0:25.3 | and the conference was everything we would expect from a Republican party now completely dominated |
| 0:30.5 | by Donald Trump. And to join me today, I have two political experts and friends. First, |
| 0:36.4 | Mike fellow co-founder, Rick Wilson. Rick, thanks for being back on. Absolutely, Reed. |
| 0:41.7 | And of course, Lincoln Project Senior Advisor Stuart Stevens. Stuart, thanks for coming. |
| 0:46.3 | Hey, Reed, great to be here, man. So obviously the highlight of CPAC was Trump and all of the |
| 0:51.9 | attendant hero worship or idle worship around him. Literal idle worship. There was literally a |
| 0:57.6 | golden Trump calf on wheels that was rolled through the high-at-space. But when you roll through |
| 1:02.8 | the golden idol, it reminds you that the religiosity piece of this is really just performative like |
| 1:08.2 | everything else. But I want to go back through some things. So still, I want to start with you, |
| 1:13.2 | I watched Trump's 90-minute speech late Sunday night. I didn't sleep well after that, not surprisingly. |
| 1:20.2 | But given the coverage you've seen or any of the things that you saw, what was your take away |
| 1:24.9 | sort of top line from what happened over the course of the last four days or so? |
| 1:29.0 | I think this idea that there's a civil war in the party is crazy. As you said, this is Trump's |
| 1:35.8 | party. If there is a civil war, the Confederacy won. I thought one of the sadder little subplots to |
| 1:42.4 | see Pac was Nikki Haley, who now is back to praising Donald Trump after attempting to take even just |
| 1:50.1 | half a step away and maybe suggest that the guy who was impeached twice tried to overthrow the |
| 1:54.8 | government, under his watch 500,000 Americans died, the greatest unemployment since the Depression, |
| 2:00.8 | maybe wasn't such a great president. But now she's back in line. And Nikki Haley, to me, is |
| 2:06.6 | particularly sad. She would fall into the category that some of us thought she had a great future, |
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