NATIONAL HARBOR, Maryland — As the Beatles’ lyric goes: “Everybody had a hard year. Everybody had a good time. Everybody had a wet dream. Everybody saw the sunshine.”
The 2025 Conservative Political Action Conference held this week just outside of Washington, D.C., was exactly like that, if you’re someone who orgasms whenever they have nightmares filled with sounds of fascist shrieking.
Between Wednesday and Saturday, the American Conservative Union held its annual CPAC at the Gaylord National Resort and Convention Center in National Harbor, a marquee gathering of conservative diehards and voters, Republican activists and operatives, and high-ranking GOP elected officials and appointees. Since 2017, the annual summit has grown thoroughly MAGAfied and run as a multi-day, boozy adulation-fest of Donald Trump and his nativist personality cult.
But CPAC 2025 is the first one held since Trump retook power in the 2024 presidential election — as a twice-impeached, repeatedly indicted, convicted felon, who won on a policy platform that was somehow more openly authoritarian than in his previous campaigns. It’sthe first CPAC since the failed assassination attempts on the 45th and now 47th president of the United States. It is the first one since Trump scored not just a swing-state victory against Vice President Kamala Harris, but beat her in the popular vote, sending the Democratic Party back into the bitter cold as a humiliated opposition.
When Trump hit the stage, there was willful triumph, and there were also hints of several of the bleakest horrors likely to come.
“Somethin’s wrong,” the president told the CPAC audience — including the pardoned Jan. 6 Capitol attack defendants who hung out near the press area, cheering on Trump — on Saturday.
The president was talking about the rate of babies being diagnosed with autism. He assured the attendees that his Health and Human Services secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., would get to the bottom of it. “Bobby’s gonna find it,” Trump said. (Some of RFK Jr.’s policy views — on autism, vaccines, and other health issues — have long been so extreme and dangerous that Trump’s own former Food and Drug Administration commissioner Scott Gottlieb has publicly warned that if RFK Jr. gets his way, it will get Americans killed.)
The rest of Trump’s speech was largely garden-variety rambling and boasting. But to offer you a taste: Trump knocked the “stuttering” and “mentally screwed-up” media personalities on MSNBC, which he trollishly labeled a “threat to democracy,” a term that is accurately leveled at him, including by hosts and journalists on the liberal cable news network. “I should go against her in the ratings,” he said of MSNBC star Rachel Maddow. Trump later pivoted to mocking his vanquished predecessor, former President Joe Biden, as a “sleepy, crooked guy,” saying that “every single thing he touched turned to shit.” That naughtier line led to a cascade of whistles, cheers, claps, and some “WE LOVE YOU” shouts from the gathering.
The president added that Biden was such a historically lousy president that former President Jimmy Carter died a “happy man” — apparently suggesting that Carter could pass away knowing that Biden was worse than he was. (Carter said last summer he was hoping to survive long enough “to vote for Kamala Harris,” and got his wish.)
Trump received perhaps his greatest standing ovation and round of applause of the day when he bragged about pardoning all of those “political prisoners” — meaning, the violent rioters and others he inspired to attack the U.S. Capitol in Washington four years ago, when Trump spent months trying to steal an election he had lost.
Love it or loathe it, the MAGA movement — and Kennedy’s MAHA movement — won. Boy, did they really, really win. Right now, the country is theirs. At this year’s CPAC, they had a lot to brag about, many footballs to spike, and Gulf Of Mexico-sized oceans of liberal tears in which to gleefully doggy-paddle.
And yet, the 2025 CPAC possessed a palpable undercurrent of the old saying: “There are only two tragedies in life — one is not getting what one wants, and the other is getting it.”
It wasn’t just this “biased” Rolling Stone reporter — who has been going to these increasingly godless, blood-spitting summits since “Steve Stockman’s Awesome Hot Tub Party” was a horrifying thing that was permitted to occur — feeling this way. Numerous Republican perennial attendees, right-wing media figures, longtime conservative operatives, and even some of the CPAC 2025 speakers conceded to Rolling Stone on Friday and Saturday that the conference just wasn’t as much fun as it used to be. The booze still flowed this week, but the nightlife wasn’t as vast or as memorably decadent as it once was, particularly in the glory days when their Great Satan (President Barack Obama) was in office.
But life goes on. MAGA celebs and donors still threw on their suits and tuxedos for the annual Ronald Reagan Dinner, and attendees and Trump allies still flooded the Gaylord National lobby bar after-hours, to carouse and network against the background noise of a portable stereo cranking out “Like a Virgin,” “Party in the U.S.A.,” and — mother of Christ — Trump’s theme song since the 2020 campaign, “Y.M.C.A.”
Yes, several MAGA fans were observed spontaneously doing their own versions of Trump’s hand-jerk shimmy-dance to the famous Village People anthem, mid-bar. This is how we live now.
But something to keep in mind about CPAC is that more than anything else, it is an annual mass-assembly of the hysterical stereotype of the upper-middle-class, Fox News and Newsmax TV-binging elderly aunt and uncle, with hundreds of these aunts and uncles all gathered in the same ballroom. In between the main-stage Q&A’s and star speakers — senior Trump aide Stephen Miller was on to rail against “illegal aliens” again! Our nation’s prime minister, Elon Musk, is playing with a chainsaw prop! Trump’s “Border Czar” Tom Homan is here to talk about his immigration crackdown, and doesn’t care if he offends anyone!( President Trump finally showed up! Former Fox News personality Megyn Kelly is up there unloading on Blake Lively for some reason! — the CPAC organizers play an awful lot of filler on the Gaylord hotel ballroom’s big screens.
These videos typically feature footage from Fox News and other Trump-friendly media outlets, advertisements for this or that reactionary entity or product, promotions of Christian-right causes, denunciations of Trump’s nemeses, and exuberant celebrations of The Donald himself. (This is, of course, when CPAC staff aren’t pumping intermission music, such as “Hot Stuff” by Donna Summer, into the venue.)
To attend or cover CPAC as somebody who isn’t squarely in the tank for Trumpism is akin to spending several days sitting in the collective living room of the most comfortable, frantically aggrieved parts of Trump’s base, trapped watching and listening to them yell and howl in unison at a large television set.
The annual ritual straddles the thin line between laughable and perverse, and it only feels harder to laugh off when it is performed during a time when Trump, Musk (the richest person on the planet), and their lieutenants are doing everything they can to birth a new era of constitutional crisis, clampdowns, rampant bigotry, mindless chaos, oligarchic corruption, lawlessness, international embarrassment, and democratic backsliding.
There used to be moments of dark humor in events like these. There was nothing funny about watching Trump’s “border czar” whip the room into a giddy frenzy at the thought of loading planes with migrants and flying them to Gitmo — an actual second Trump administration policy that a few years ago would have sounded like a lazy parody or caricature of Trumpist depravity.
But running parallel to the weekend’s banal terror was the pulsating, ever-present bonanza of cultural grievance, aimed by an entire political party and movement not just at the poor and vulnerable, but at the lamest targets imaginable.
During the entire span of CPAC 2025, Trump’s speech wasn’t even the most accurate summation of the petty, petulant heart of the MAGA elite.
It was Megyn Kelly’s.
Around 4 p.m. ET on Friday, Kelly embarked on an extended riff on actress Blake Lively.
“Poor Blake Lively,” Kelly said, in a wah-wah-wah voice of mockery.
This part of the speech went on seemingly forever. This was not a tangent or fleeting gripe. The former Fox News marquee-name went long on what amounted to a gratuitously nasty Wikipedia edit of the Blake Lively-Justin Baldoni controversy.
Kelly characterized Lively as a “brat” and a “bully” who was picking on the “very effeminate”-looking Baldoni. She told the CPACers that she believes the reason some “conservatives are so interested in this” Hollywood saga and legal dispute is because they see her as an “avatar for leftist overreach.” She claimed that the U.S. Agency for International Development, which Trump and Musk have been throttling and terrorizing, is playing the “victim,” which she argued was “just like Blake Lively.”
This went on for a while, and it was unclear if most of her audience knew what she was talking about.
But in essence, this is exactly what the MAGA political phenomenon is about: Trump and his fellow elites vomiting their own grievances and celebrity obsessions onto a crowd, hoping they lap it up in a highly destructive, apocalyptic form of group-therapy.
On Saturday, not even Mr. Trump could top that.
