Politico: “Hugging Trump has become priority number one for most House Republicans, with feting the former president in Mar-a-Lago becoming a rite of passage among their leaders. GOP senators, by contrast, are trying to chart a different path forward — one built on policy rather than Trump’s personality — figuring that will make their party’s brand more effective than attaching itself to one man. Don’t expect Mitch McConnell to show up in Florida any time soon.”

Perry Bacon Jr.:  “Voters may like a president’s policies in the abstract but still think he isn’t doing a good job or that his policies aren’t that effective if those policies aren’t bipartisan. Think of this as the Mitch McConnell theory.”

“Put another way: The opposition party can guarantee a lack of bipartisan support — and then criticize the president for lacking bipartisan support.”

“More than 20,000 North Carolina voters have left the Republican Party to become unaffiliated since Election Day, and nearly 60% of them are from suburban areas,” Axios Charlotte reports.

Jonathan Bernstein: “I’ve seen a number of perfectly fine articles about why and how former President Donald Trump still wields influence over the Republican Party, but c’mon! The main reason that Republican politicians feel stuck with Trump is that they know that he’s capable of turning against their party at the drop of a hat.”

“Yes, Trump is good at tapping into resentment, but plenty of Republican politicians are good at that. Yes, he’s popular among Republican voters, but most politicians are popular among their own party’s voters. Yes, he’s willing to take sides in primaries, but he doesn’t actually have a particularly impressive record of swaying primary voters.”

“No, what’s different about Trump is that unlike any other former president — really, any former nominee — in living memory, it’s that easy to picture him telling his voters to stay home and handing elections to the other party. And that’s why he’s been an impossible dilemma for Republican politicians ever since he emerged as a major candidate in 2015.”

New York Times: “Just as striking was what wasn’t said at the event. There was vanishingly little discussion of why Republicans lost the presidency, the House and the Senate over the last four years, nor much debate about what agenda they should pursue to rebuild the party.”

“The absence of soul-searching owes in part to the Republicans’ surprise gains in the House and the denialism of many activists that they lost the White House at all, a false claim perpetuated with trollish gusto by former President Donald Trump himself on Sunday, to the delight of the crowd.”

“The Republican Party is not the party of the country clubs, it’s the party of hardworking, blue-collar men and women.”

— Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX), on Twitter.

Charlie Sykes: “There was no introspection down in Orlando; no sense that conservatives needed to look an the mirror and ask themselves hard questions about violence, sedition, white supremacy, or cults of personality.”

“Less than two months after the insurrection at the Capitol, the event was scarcely mentioned. Even after the deaths of a half million Americans during the pandemic, there was no sense that the GOP needed to re-think its values.”

“In fact, there was remarkably little focus on policy at all — it was all culture war all the time. And, of course, Trump.”

Sen. Rick Scott (R-FL) declined to call the GOP the party of former President Donald Trump and acknowledged President Joe Biden was “absolutely” the legitimate winner of the 2020 White House race, Politico reports.

Scott replied that the GOP is “the voters’ party” and “always has been.”

Washington Post: “Over meals and many Diet Cokes, Trump has already started building his post-White House political operation and cementing his role as the party’s de facto leader. He has begun to formalize a structure of political advisers around him and made plans to start a new super PAC — capable of raising donations of any size — to support candidates he favors. His team is looking to formalize a process for vetting endorsement prospects, assessing what candidates have said and done for Trump in the past.”

“He has also discussed drafting a new ‘America First’ agenda — like the 1994 ‘Contract with America,’ but focused on issues such as border security and trade — to steer the party’s direction.”

Washington Examiner: “Within the sunny confines of the Conservative Political Action Conference, it’s as if former President Donald Trump did not fail to win reelection in November. He is simply not the president right now.”

“It has been nearly four weeks since President Biden evicted Trump from the White House. Prominent Republicans who addressed conservative activists Friday at CPAC acknowledged as much, delivering a series of stirring calls to action to oppose the Democratic agenda in Washington, D.C. But missing from the program was any reassessment of Trump’s defeat and any role he played in the loss the GOP’s majority in the Senate in two subsequent runoff elections in Georgia.”

“One month after Donald Trump left office, thousands of his conservative allies and other far-right leaders on Friday began trying to center the Republican Party around the grievances of his presidency, pushing false claims about the American voting system, denouncing what they called liberal cancel culture and mocking mask-wearing,” the New York Times reports.

“Gathering at the first major conference of pro-Trump conservatives since his defeat, the politicians and activists sought to affirm their adherence to a conservatism as defined by Mr. Trump, and the need to break with many of the policies and ideas that had animated the American right for decades.”

Associated Press: At conservative conference, Trump is still the golden boy.

Sen. Rick Scott (R-FL), who heads the Senate Republicans’ campaign committee, told the Wall Street Journal that he did not ask Donald Trump to refrain from endorsing primary challengers to GOP incumbents the former president regards as disloyal.

Said Scott: “Many are saying it is my job to mediate between warring factions on the right and mediate the war of words between party leaders… Well, I have news for them—I’m not going to mediate anything.”

Associated Press: “The rightward lurch has altered the GOP’s image to one unrecognizable to its pragmatic 20th century standard-bearers, and the direction of the state party here could be an exemplar of other Midwestern battleground states.”

“The move to more hard-line, extreme views in Michigan came into clearer view Wednesday when it became known that Trump devotees, no longer content with the GOP as their political home, had filed a petition with the state elections board to form a new Patriot Party.”

Jennifer Rubin: “The problem is that the GOP has transformed into a cult of the person who instigated the attack, fed propaganda to radicalize his party and refused to denounce white supremacists. The party is thus terrified of recognizing that the problem of violent white supremacists is intrinsically linked to the disgraced former president and his accomplices.”

“We can sit around and have debates about conservative policy… but the question is, when the klieg lights get hot, when the left comes after you, do you stand strong or do you fold?”

— Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R), at CPAC, warning against a return to the old Republican “establishment.”