The atmosphere at this year’s Conservative Political Action Conference isn’t just celebratory, it’s super-charged as President Trump begins to make many of the conservative movement’s dreams come true.
The president’s biggest fans are cheering him on as his sharpest liberal detractors are buried and all but lost beneath a pile of White House executive orders and agency actions that advance conservative causes.
Eight years after Mr. Trump first boasted his supporters would grow tired of winning, many of the political activists who have stuck by him during his turbulent first term, subsequent political ex-communication and triumphant revival, still haven’t had enough.
“Am I tired of winning? No! I want to keep on winning,” said Christopher Martin, 56, an activist who traveled from his home in Springfield, Ohio, to the CPAC gathering just outside of Washington.
“I feel the winning, and I feel the hatred from the other side. And what’s so funny about it? We call it the TDS, the Trump Derangement Syndrome,” he said.
Attendees at CPAC, which bills itself as the largest and most influential gathering of conservatives in the world, are jazzed by Mr. Trump’s whirlwind of early moves.
He’s signed off on mass deportations of illegal criminal migrants, a federal hiring freezes, buyouts and firings of federal workers, a U.S. withdrawal from the World Health Organization and the Paris Climate Agreement, pardons for Jan. 6 defendants and pro-life protesters, a ban on biological men in women’s sports and an end to federal diversity, equity and inclusion programs.
“I love seeing President Trump in the White House again. I’m really excited for him and for what he is doing for our country,” said Tracey Delaney, 51, a federal contractor from Maryland who joined the CPAC crowd.
“He’s bringing back not just the middle class, but government efficiency and making America great again, but also a superpower again,” she said.
CPAC 2025 opened Wednesday and continues through Saturday at the Gaylord National Resort & Convention Center at National Harbor in Oxon Hill, Maryland.
Mr. Trump began telling his supporters during his first presidential campaign that conservatives were losing too often. If he were in the White House, he said, he wouldn’t just carry the conservative football — he would win the game and keep winning until Americans were “sick and tired” of victory.
Just a month after the Washington establishment hoped he had been exiled from the political arena in 2021, Mr. Trump began his comeback with a speech at that year’s CPAC in Orlando, Florida.
Four years later, Mr. Trump has not only retaken the Oval Office, but he’s also ushered in a Republican majority in the House and Senate — and quickly began to reshape the entire federal bureaucracy.
In any gathering of die-hard conservatives, you’re bound to hear grousing about RINOs and squishy GOP leaders in Congress. But those sentiments were muted as CPAC 2025 got underway on Wednesday.
“Are we really winning with the majorities we have? I believe, yes, we are,” said CPAC veteran Dennis Mayo, 74, a retired rancher from Humboldt County, California.
• Kerry Picket can be reached at kpicket@washingtontimes.com.