Do you remember when CPAC was embarrassing? I mean genuinely embarrassing, the kind of thing Republican senators declined invitations to with the soft-voiced relief of a man ducking his cousin’s essential-oils pitch. It was held in a windowless ballroom at a hotel chain nobody wanted to name, the merchandise table sold a T-shirt of a cartoon elephant stomping on a hammer and sickle, and the featured speaker was usually a man who had been indicted in at least one state. That was the deal. That was the point. CPAC was the basement where ideas too weird for the living room went to see if anyone would dance with them.
I bring this up because today the President of the United States will deliver the keynote at the Conservative Political Action Conference, and he will be preceded, in sequence, by roughly half of his own cabinet. This is a detail that has been reported as a schedule and should be read as a diagnosis. The people who run the federal government are flying to National Harbor to address a ticketed audience of activists as though they are reporting back to a board. Which, to be fair, they are.
I was at dinner Thursday night at Eliza’s — she had done a lamb, which she does whenever she wants an argument to stay seated — and a lobbyist I will describe only as bipartisan said, without any detectable irony, that CPAC was “basically the sub-cabinet offsite now.” Everyone laughed, the way people laugh when a joke is also a weather report. Then we moved to dessert.
I want you to sit with the shape of this for a moment. CPAC is a private event put on by a 501(c)(4) whose chairman is currently under indictment on sexual battery charges he denies. The Vice President will speak there. The Secretary of Defense will speak there. The head of the Office of Management and Budget will speak there. They will stand on a stage flanked by sponsor logos and deliver remarks about the direction of the American government to an audience that paid between three hundred and twenty-five hundred dollars to hear it. The White House briefing room, meanwhile, has been reorganized to accommodate podcasters.
The merchandise table is still there, by the way. My sister-in-law Judy, who works at the National Archives and is too dignified to attend anything, sent me a photograph a friend had texted her: a tumbler, forty-five dollars, with the presidential seal on one side and a cartoon chainsaw on the other. I looked at it for a long time. I could not decide which side was the joke.
What nobody quite wants to say out loud — and what Eliza’s lobbyist very nearly said, before catching himself on the lamb — is that there is no longer a meaningful distinction between the conference and the government. The conference is not lobbying the government. The conference is not auditioning ideas for the government. The conference is where the government goes to be applauded for what it already did on Tuesday. This is a loop, and loops, historically, are not how republics describe themselves.
I am old enough to remember when a sitting cabinet secretary addressing a partisan activist convention was considered, at minimum, a question for the ethics office. Now it is the itinerary. Now it is the job. I called a friend who served in two Republican administrations and asked him whether any of this bothered him. He said it did. I asked if he’d say so on the record. He said he would not. I asked why. He said, “Margaret, come on.” That is the sound of civic cowardice in its native tongue — two words and a first name.
The speech the President will deliver today will be covered as news. Cable will carry it live. Newspapers will pull three quotes and a chyron. The analysts will discuss whether he seemed energized or fatigued, whether he departed from the prepared text, whether the crowd responded more warmly than last year. Nobody will ask the only interesting question, which is why the most powerful office in the country now does its most significant talking inside a ticketed ballroom run by a private organization.
And here is the part that actually keeps me up. The audience in that ballroom is not a fringe. It is a constituency that has been, patiently and correctly, told for four decades that it was the real America and that its real America-ness was being suppressed by people named, generally, Margaret. They were promised that one day the basement would come upstairs. It has. The furniture has been moved. The sub-cabinet is on the couch. The President is doing a forty-five-minute set about the enemies within, and the enemies within, for the duration of the set, are whoever is not in the room.
Eliza, clearing plates, asked me what I was going to write about this weekend. I told her. She said, “Oh, Margaret, it’s just a speech.” I love Eliza. I have known her since the Clinton years. But I want to note, for the record, that “it’s just a speech” is the exact phrase she used about the Muslim ban rollout, about the Helsinki press conference, about the first impeachment, about January 6th at roughly 1:40 p.m. eastern. Eliza is a very intelligent woman who has, over the course of a decade, described every unprecedented event of our lifetimes as just a speech.
I am not here to tell you that today’s remarks will contain something new. They probably won’t. He will say the things he says. The cabinet will nod. The tumblers will sell. The chyron will run. That is not what worries me. What worries me is the staging: the fact that our government has quietly, efficiently, and without a vote relocated its center of gravity to a private ballroom where the admission fee is a credit card and the applause is guaranteed.
We used to have a word for countries where the ruling party’s annual rally was indistinguishable from the business of the state. I am not going to use it here, because I am tired and because you already know it. I will only note that in those countries, the dinner parties also kept serving lamb, right up until they didn’t.