Trump previews 2024 Biden attacks in rambling 90-minute CPAC speech veering from menace to slapstick

Former president Donald Trump previewed his attacks against President Joe Biden in the 2024 election when he spoke at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) on Saturday afternoon in a meandering speech that toggled between mocking his opponent and telling rambling anecdotes.

Mr Trump made the address at the Gaylord National Resort & Convention Center on the day of the South Carolina primary, where he is expected to overwhelmingly defeat the state’s former governor Nikki Haley.

The twice-impeached, four-times indicted former president served as the main attraction for the 50th annual gathering of conservatives where he made his political debut in 2011. The conference’s executives – married couple Matt and Mercedes Schlapp – have effectively turned into a celebration of Mr Trump above all else.

Mr Trump showed up almost an hour late to the conference and delivered a 90-minute speech wherein he veered between offering his plans for political retribution and a crackdown on immigrants on one hand and mocking Mr Biden and the media on the other.

At one stage the Republican compared immigrants to Hannibal Lecter in a xenophobic tangent about what he called migrant crime, saying they were coming from “insane asylum[s]” and “being deposited into our country”. He also invited controversy by suggesting his Georgia mugshot had made him more popular among Black people.

Seemingly aware of the fact the press would criticise his penchant for long-winded stories – including darting between his interactions with the Mexican government, to his visiting Iraq – he looked to swat them down. “They’ll say, ‘he rambled,’ nobody can ramble like this,” he said. “They’ll say ‘he rambled. He’s cognitively impaired.’ Not it’s really the opposite. It’s total genius.

“You know that it is these fakers up there, ‘he rambled on endlessly, telling these horrible and very boring stories’ – no, they’re very informative stories, they’re very important stories actually. And no, there is no cognitive problem – if there was I’d know about it.”

All the while, he mocked Mr Biden for his age and his seeming inability to get around safely, even joking that Mr Biden, who is only a few years older than Mr Trump, walks into walls, speaks only briefly, and cannot even read off a telemprompter.

CPAC spent a considerable amount of the four-day conference defending the January 6 riot and efforts to overturn the election – featuring some of the people who had been convicted for their actions and their loved ones both onstage and in booths – and indeed, Mr Trump opened his address by playing “Justice for All,” a song that features Mr Trump reciting the Pledge of Allegiance while inmates in a DC prison sing the “Star-Spangled Banner.”

Mr Trump alluded to their treatment in his address.

“You heard the J6 hostages, didn't you?” he told a packed ballroom. “And I will tell you there's never been in the history of our country a group of people treated the way they've been treated. There has never been anything like it.” In a country that had slavery for several hundred years and saw much of the indigenous population wiped out this was a tall claim.

In addition, Mr Trump sought to compare his plight to political prisoners.

“I stand before you today not only as your past and hopefully future president,” he said. “But as a proud political dissident, I am a dissident.” His claim echoed comments earlier this week when he compared himself to Alexei Navalny, the Russian dissident and opponent of Vladimir Putin who died in a Siberian prison camp.

Mr Trump regularly complained about the multiple indictments and legal troubles he faces, most recently, a ruling in New York that he, his two adult sons and their chief associates would have to pay $364m – plus interest – to the state for committing fraud.

Throughout the week the conference seemed to singularly focus on migrants coming into the United States via the US-Mexico border in a sign of how Mr Trump’s rhetoric, once called racist and xenophobic, has become standard fare not only in the Republican Party but also parts of the Democratic Party as well.

“We have countries that honestly, nobody has ever heard of,” he said at one point. Similarly, he decried the influx of migrants and blamed them for bringing disease.

“People were coming in deathly sick with highly contagious diseases,” he said. “I said, ‘I don’t want our people catching these diseases that nobody’s even heard about.”

As a result, Mr Trump called for drastic efforts to deport migrants from the United States.

“It will be the largest deportation in the history of our country,” he said. “And it’s not a nice thing to say. And those clowns in the media will say ‘oh, he’s so mean.’ No, no. They’re killing our people. They’re killing our country.”

Striking a similar tone to the one he made last year before his first indictment in New York, Mr Trump regularly invoked a desire to seek retribution.

“For hard-working Americans, November 5 will be our new liberation day,” he told a crowd to rupturous applause. “But for the liars and cheaters and fraudsters and censors and imposters who have comandeered our government, it will be their judgment day. When we win, the curtain closes on their corrupt reign and the sun rises on a bright new future for America, that’s what we have to have.”

Most polling shows Mr Trump leading Mr Biden in swing states. Still, other than immigration, Mr Trump refrained mostly from talking about any domestic policy. On Friday, he came out in support of in vitro fertilisation after Alabama’s supreme court ruled that frozen embryos could be considered children under state law. In the same respect, he also did not mention how he nominated the Supreme Court Justices who facilitated the overturning of Roe v Wade in 2022.

In the same respect, Mr Trump refused to mention one specific case that did not go his way: the trial that found him liable for sexually abusing writer E Jean Carroll and the subsequent trial for defaming her, which rewarded her $83.3m