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In the days leading up to this week’s opening of CPAC, the nation’s oldest conservative political convention, organizers still seemed to be holding out hope that some brighter MAGA luminary would agree to headline the event. The CPAC app and social media accounts offered a slow drip of news of newly confirmed speakers. There was the HUD secretary, a low-level HHS official, and a Nigerian lawyer who advocates for Christians in his Muslim country. On March 21, CPAC excitedly announced that Todd Chrisley would be joining the lineup.
Who?
You could be forgiven for not knowing about Chrisley. A minor reality TV star, Chrisley was in prison until May last year, serving a 12-year sentence for bank and tax fraud, when President Donald Trump pardoned him. What Chrisley has to offer the CPAC audience is unclear. “To speak on the process of receiving a pardon?” posited one incredulous Facebook commenter responding to the Chrisley announcement.
During the Trump decade, CPAC had been a showcase for the MAGA faithful, and Trump and his family were its biggest stars. Trump himself first appeared at the event in 2011 when he was toying with a presidential run. He hasn’t missed the event in a decade. “Nobody can deny that [CPAC] is the center of political gravity,” CPAC chairman Matt Schlapp told me in 2022.
But the center of gravity has clearly tilted if the modest crowd in the convention hall at the Gaylord Texan resort in Grapevine is any indication. “It’s shitty,” Warner Kimo Sutton told me of the turnout. “Last time this place was packed.” A GOP stalwart who who ran Trump’s 2016 campaign in Hawaii, he was here two years ago, the last time CPAC came to Dallas. He was still hoping more stars would show up. “I’ve heard the widow is coming,” he whispered, saying he had it on good authority that Erika Kirk, the widow of the murdered Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk, might be making a surprise appearance.
Whether a late showing by “the widow” is enough to spice up the convention remains to be seen. After all, people book hotels and buy tickets months in advance, often expecting to see Trump and some of his famous children. CPAC doesn’t discourage this view. Trump’s previous appearances feature prominently on the CPAC website. But as of Thursday night, not a single Trump family member was on the 2026 lineup, and Trump has reportedly said he is not coming. (A CPAC intern on Thursday held out hope and told Sutton and me that Trump’s visits are often last-minute affairs.)
Still, CPAC attendees won’t even hear from Trump-adjacent Kimberly Guilfoyle, a former CPAC regular who was exiled to Greece as the US ambassador after Don Jr. ditched her for a younger woman. And the primacy of CPAC as a testing ground for future presidential candidates seems threatened. As of Thursday, not a single 2028 aspirant was scheduled to speak in Grapevine. No Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, no Vice President JD Vance. And Secretary of State and National Security Adviser Marco Rubio was way too busy plotting to overthrow Cuba. The closest he has come to the event was appearing on the big screen in the exhibit hall Thursday morning during a broadcast of the president’s predictably fawning cabinet meeting.
Headlining the annual Ronald Reagan dinner is Texas attorney general Ken Paxton. Currently running for the US Senate, Paxton is an underwhelming candidate to fill a speaking slot once occupied in 1985 by the Gipper himself. Paxton has a long history of scandals, ranging from a 2015 securities fraud indictment to his impeachment in 2023, to his messy divorce that revealed a series of infidelities. Despite Paxton’s popularity among MAGA voters, Trump has thus far declined to endorse him in his primary race against incumbent Sen. John Cornyn.
Part of the problem with CPAC this year may be that many of its biggest draws in the past are now part of the government they long railed against. FBI Director Kash Patel, who wrote a whole book about “government gangsters,” is now one of them. Ditto for Pam Bondi, who just last year shared the mainstage with Texas Sen. Ted Cruz but now runs the Justice Department, where she’s under fire from Trump’s own fans for her handling of the Epstein files.
Former White House National Trade Council director Peter Navarro appeared at CPAC in 2024, shortly before heading off to prison for refusing to comply with a congressional subpoena. Now pardoned, he has thus far skipped this year’s event, perhaps to better mismanage the president’s trade war—though he did find the time to show up at Politico’s Economy Summit in Washington, DC, on Wednesday. Those still on the schedule are a sorry lot of wannabes and has-beens. Former Florida representative and catastrophically failed Trump attorney general nominee Matt Gaetz? Check.
What might account for the lackluster affair? Sutton, a three-time delegate to the GOP presidential nominating convention who moved to Texas six years ago, suspects that the war in Iran is likely keeping Trump away. But he also despairs that “there’s a malaise in our party” preventing people from engaging more in this year’s midterms.
Perhaps Americans, even the MAGA faithful, are too pinched by gas prices to shell out for a trip to the resort in Grapevine, where, as Sutton complained, parking costs $29 a day. Maybe a lame duck Trump, whose approval rating has never been lower, has hurt attendance. Or maybe even Republicans have grown weary of an event that has strayed far from its roots as a conservative policy confab and increasingly served as a platform for some of the GOP’s most morally compromised representatives. As conservative radio host Erick Erickson lamented in an X post Wednesday, “’C’ in CPAC is now best represented by the world ‘clown’ than as any semblance of a conservative institution.”
“’C’ in CPAC is now best represented by the world ‘clown’ than as any semblance of a conservative institution.”
It’s also possible, however, that the main problem with CPAC is CPAC itself. The conference has suffered in recent years from competition, most notably from Turning Point USA, Charlie Kirk’s conservative youth group. (T-shirts featuring Kirk as martyr are a hot item in the CPAC exhibit hall.) Turning Point’s national convention in December drew a whopping 30,000 people, which seems about 10 times larger than the occupancy of the Gaylord convention hall.
Even CPAC’s relatively paltry numbers seem padded with enough international visitors to make it a juicy target for ICE Director Tom Homan, who was a featured speaker on Thursday. Chief among these retinues is a huge contingent of conservative South Korean “stop the steal” activists associated with former president Yoon Suk Yeol. Yeol was impeached last year, and in February, he was sentenced to life in prison for starting an insurrection.
But the organization behind CPAC also seems troubled. I’ve been attending CPAC regularly since 2009, mostly when it was held in the DC area. It usually seemed like a decently well-oiled machine. But this year, its Grapevine event feels like it’s coming apart at the seams. Its buggy app wasn’t updated with the schedule until late Wednesday night, and it was clearly being tinkered with all day on Thursday, with headlines for sessions becoming snappier by the hour. A panel originally focused generically on “fraud” was transformed into “Ilhan Omar ‘Family’ Values.”
As of 5:30 pm on Thursday, there was still no public schedule available for Friday or Saturday, and new speakers were still being announced on social media throughout the day. “CPAC is proud to announce that Andrew Giuliani is a confirmed speaker for CPAC USA 2026,” came the news Thursday morning. The son of former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani is the current White House director of the FIFA World Cup task force. Former Trump fixer Michael Cohen once famously said that the younger Giuliani “may be dumber than Eric Trump,” making the former pro-golfer’s addition to the CPAC agenda a mixed bag.
Thursday’s announcement of the last-minute addition of HHS Secretary Robert Kennedy Jr. may help offset some of the disappointment with this year’s CPAC offerings. Even so, it can’t help the convention’s appeal that Schlapp is its MC. In 2024, the CPAC chairman settled a sexual misconduct lawsuit, reportedly for almost $500,000, filed by a man working on Hershel Walker’s 2022 Georgia Senate campaign who had accused Schlapp of groping him in the car.
Nonetheless, Schlapp still plays an outsized role in the convention, which is reflected in his salary. He earned more than $830,000 in tax year 2023, according to the group’s most recent IRS 990 form. Listed as “the Honorable Matt Schlapp” on the CPAC schedule, apparently in reference to his service as George W. Bush’s White House political director, he is the moderator of a disproportionate number of panels, along with his wife, (the Honorable) Mercedes Schlapp, who worked in the first Trump White House.
In fairness, not everyone seems disappointed with the event. I found Enrique Tarrio, the former chairman of the Proud Boys, hanging out and watching Matt Gaetz record his OAN show in the CPAC exhibit hall. Tarrio seemed glad to be here and not in prison. In January last year, Trump pardoned him, saving him from a 22-year sentence for seditious conspiracy related to his involvement in the January 6 riot. He told me he comes to every CPAC and that this one was the same as in 2018, another non-presidential election season.
Tarrio said that a lot of people want to see Trump, and now that Trump doesn’t seem to be coming, they’re not that interested. He said some people at his hotel had cancelled based on the B-list offerings. But he shrugged it off, attributing the turnout to the normal political cycle rather than as a reflection on the current state of MAGA or CPAC itself. After all, he said, “It’s a midterm year.”
