Republicans

“Republican-affiliated campaigns, committees and outside groups have spent more than $3 million at various Trump properties since just after the 2016 election through last month, with roughly $924,000 coming from the Republican National Committee,” according to ABC News.

Matt Bai: “A year into Trump’s presidency, Republican activists in the rest of the country seem to have rallied around his politics of grievance, while in Washington, conservative thinkers who once ran the country huddle together in exile. Now it’s Kristol and his contemporaries who find themselves on the frontier side of the border.”

“I asked Kristol if he could still call himself a Republican, and whether he would if Trump was reelected in 2020.”

“The answer to the first question, he said, was yes. The answer to the second was no.”

Max Boot: “In the past I would have been indignant at such attacks and eager to assert my conservative credentials. I spent years writing for conservative publications such as the Wall Street Journal editorial page and Commentary magazine and working as a foreign policy adviser for three Republican presidential campaigns. Being conservative used to be central to my identity. But now, frankly, I don’t give a damn. I prefer to think of myself as a classical liberal, because ‘conservative’ has become practically synonymous with ‘Trump lackey.'”

“If this is what mainstream conservatism has become — and it is — count me out.”

Mona Charen writes about getting booed off the stage at the Conservative Political Action Conference yesterday:

I’d been dreading it for days, but when it came, I almost welcomed it. There is nothing more freeing than telling the truth. And it must be done, again and again, by those of us who refuse to be absorbed into this brainless, sinister, clownish thing called Trumpism, by those of us who refuse to overlook the fools, frauds and fascists attempting to glide along in his slipstream into respectability.

I spoke to a hostile audience for the sake of every person who has watched this spectacle of mendacity in disbelief and misery for the past two years. Just hearing the words you know are true can serve as ballast, steadying your mind when so much seems unreal.

National Review writer Mona Charen “was escorted out of the Conservative Political Action Conference on Saturday after slamming President Trump and conservatives for behaving like ‘hypocrites’ when it comes to women’s issues,” the Washington Examiner reports.

Said Charen: “I’m disappointed in people on our side for being hypocrites about sexual harassers and abusers of women who are in our party, who are sitting in the White House, who brag about their extramarital affairs, who brag about mistreating women.”

According to the Weekly Standard, she added: “This is the party that endorsed the Roy Moore for the Senate in the state of Alabama, even though he was a credibly-accused child molester. You cannot claim that you stand for women and be all right with that.”

“Charen’s comments were met with heavy boos inside the conference hall, and she was later spotted leaving the conference with a three-person security detail.”

Matt Lewis: “The organizers of CPAC apparently searched the four corners of the globe to assemble a ‘legion of doom’-style roster — a collection of some of the worst ‘conservative’ supervillains who generally share a populist, ethno-nationalist brand of politics (and some, I assume, are good people). Of course, it’s not just Le Pen. The lineup is a veritable murderer’s row of nationalists, including UKIP leader Nigel Farage, Jeanine Pirro, and Seb Gorka—and a panel titled: ‘Kim Jong Un-iversity: How College Campuses are Turning into Reeducation Camps.’”