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ORLANDO, Florida – Former President Donald J. Trump was planning to use his first public appearance since leaving to whip President Biden and insist there are no divisions within the Republican Party – so even that he plots revenge on the legislators who broke with him.
In a speech prepared for his Sunday afternoon speech at the annual Conservative Political Action Conference, Mr. Trump planned to claim GOP leadership and isolate his critics in Congress.
“The Republican Party is united,” Mr. Trump was to say, according to excerpts shared by his post-presidential advisers. “The only divide is between a handful of Washington DC establishment political hacks and everyone across the country.”
While much of the party’s base remains devoted to the 74-year-old former president, some Republicans view him less favorably because of his refusal to accept defeat and his role in inciting the 6 January at the Capitol.
A handful of GOP lawmakers were among the loudest voices urging the party to move from Mr. Trump, the most prominent Representative Liz Cheney of Wyoming, to the third House Republican.
In response, Mr. Trump’s eldest son Donald Trump Jr. repeatedly attacked Ms. Cheney in his remarks on Friday, and the former president was scheduled to target her himself on Sunday.
Many of his advisers, however, urged him to use his time on stage in Orlando to deliver a forward-looking speech.
To that end, they also released a snippet in which Mr. Trump will confront his successor in a manner almost identical to what he said about Mr. Biden when he himself was president.
“Joe Biden has had the most disastrous first month of any president in modern history,” he should say, according to prepared remarks. Unaware that schools remained closed during his own presidency, Mr. Trump also planned to call on Mr. Biden to open schools “now. No more deadlines of special interest! “
He will also call Mr. Biden’s more liberal immigration policies “immoral” and “a betrayal of our nation’s core values,” according to the snippets.
However, to what extent Mr. Trump chooses to follow a teleprompter script is still an open question. And maybe more than ever now that he has scampered from the White House to his Palm Beach resort, stripped of his social media accounts.
His speech was written by two of the former president’s speech writers in the White House, Ross Worthington and Vince Haley, with input from other advisers.
The former president’s aides were looking for an opportunity for him to reappear and wondered whether to organize a rally-type event or take advantage of the forum of CPAC, which has moved to Mr. Trump’s new home state there. suburb of Washington because Florida has more lenient coronavirus restrictions.
Mr. Trump and his aides worked with him on the speech for several days in his newly constructed office above the ballroom at Mar-a-Lago, his private club near the Atlantic Ocean. Without his Twitter thread, Mr. Trump used specific moments in the news cycle – the death of talk show host Rush Limbaugh and the Tiger Woods car crash – to inject himself into the news cycle. current events.
Outside of prepared statements, however, he has said much less since January 20 about the future of the GOP and its own lingering ambitions.
Mr Trump’s advisers have said he does not plan to discuss a litany of his own accomplishments and instead will try to regain some of the way he presented himself as a candidate in 2016. Mr. Trump has made it clear to allies and advisers that, for now, at least, he wants to run for president again in 2024, which he should tease in the speech.
Yet even with a built-in supporting audience, not everyone in the party thinks Trumpism is the way to go.
“CPAC is not the whole of the Republican Party,” said Senator Bill Cassidy of Louisiana, one of seven Republican senators who voted to convict Mr. Trump on the House impeachment charges on Sunday.
Speaking on CNN’s “State of the Union,” Cassidy said Republicans need to pay attention to voters who have changed over the past four years. “If we talk to less secure voters, who have gone from President Trump to President Biden, we win. If we don’t, we lose, ”Mr. Cassidy said.
Jonathan Martin reported from Orlando, Florida and Maggie Haberman from New York.
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