CPAC: Scenes from a MAGA zoo

To see how thoroughly warped the Republican Party has become, said Asawin Suebsaeng in Rolling Stone, witness the “apocalyptic form of group therapy” for “frantically aggrieved” Fox News viewers at last week’s Conservative Political Action Conference just outside Washington, D.C. In an atmosphere of triumphant malice, President Trump received standing ovations and shouts of “We love you” while bragging about pardoning the Jan. 6 “political prisoners,” calling MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow “a threat to democracy,” and promising that Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. would “find” the cause of autism.

A frenetic Elon Musk wearing sunglasses gleefully waved around a chainsaw to show what he plans to do to the federal government, while shouting such inanities as “I am become meme” and “Legalize comedy!” Rabid MAGA supporter Steve Bannon made a quick, straight-armed gesture that sure looked like a Nazi salute while calling for Trump to run again in 2028 and shouting “Fight, fight, fight!” All in all, this CPAC carnival was so comically dark that it felt like “a caricature of Trumpist depravity.”

Bannon’s salute “speaks volumes” about the MAGA movement’s flirtation with fascism, said Zeeshan Aleem in MSNBC.com. While some questioned whether Musk’s two straight-armed salutes at Trump’s inauguration were intentional Sieg heil!s, Bannon lacks “plausible deniability” for repeating the gesture weeks later. Even if Bannon was just trolling, his salute “carnivalizes Nazism” and makes “fascism and white supremacy look less ominous and less taboo.”

The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

How far the “party of family values” has fallen, said Dace Potas in USA Today. Its cult leader is a “thrice-married adulterer” with a long history of abusing women, while his new henchman Musk is an admitted drug user who fathered “at least 12 children with three women” and now is accused of fathering a 13th that he’s ignoring. The GOP has jettisoned the conservative ideal of personal responsibility, leaving “young Republicans like me” feeling abandoned and disgusted. A backlash is coming, said River Page in The Free Press. “Normie villagers” didn’t like the Left’s censorious tyranny on race and gender, but “the monster the online right is building” is no less radical. It’s now common for widely followed X accounts to bash interracial relationships and promote Holocaust denial. As the normies realize where the Trump-Musk regime is headed, prepare for the political pendulum to swing back “at breakneck speed.”