Trump praises foreign leaders, slams Biden and other takeaways from CPAC

President Donald Trump continued his long-running streak of addressing the GOP’s most loyal activists at the annual Conservative Political Action Conference gathering in Washington, doing so Saturday after a month back in office, while touting to a gushing audience the aggressive actions he has taken so far.

For the 15th time — more than any other individual in the conference’s history, said CPAC president Matt Schlapp — Trump took the stage at CPAC, an organisation that stood by and celebrated him even as he left office with cratering approval numbers and calls from within the Republican Party to step aside.

“We fought through hell together,” Trump told his supporters in the crowd. “But in the end, we achieved the great liberation of America.”

This time, Trump took the stage with more power and influence, not only giving shout-outs to world leaders who had traveled to be there, but running through a list of ways he had proved his skeptics wrong by winning the election, including the popular vote, and picking up each of the seven swing states.

Here are five takeaways from Trump’s speech Saturday afternoon:

Trump boosted populist leaders from around the world

Trump called out prominent populist leaders from Europe and South America in attendance at the Gaylord National Resort & Convention Center, as his administration increasingly seeks to support nationalist and anti-immigrant political movements around the world.

Trump thanked Argentine President Javier Milei, Reform UK leader Nigel Farage, Slovakian Prime Minister Robert Fico, and the leader of a far-right party in Spain, Santiago Abascal, for attending. He also recognized Eduardo Bolsonaro, the son of former Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro.

“Say hello to your father,” Trump said, as the senior Bolsonaro faces charges over his attempt to stay in power after losing the 2022 election.

Just before his speech, Trump held a makeshift bilateral meeting backstage with Polish President Andrzej Duda in front of American and Polish flags and convention room-style piped draping.

Trump reaffirmed the United States’ “close alliance” with Poland, and he praised Duda for committing to increase the nation’s defense spending amid neighboring Ukraine’s war with Russia. Trump called Duda, who ran on an anti-LGBT message, “a fantastic man and a great friend of mine” during his speech.

Trump can’t leave the campaign trail behind

After discussing his poll numbers at length and touting his election results, Trump launched into attacks on the pair of Democrats he is no longer running against.

“Our border tsar was Kamala,” Trump said of President Joe Biden’s vice president. “I haven’t said that name in a while.”

Trump then bragged about how he had been leading Biden in the polls before “they changed him” out for Kamala Harris, and how he was “the only one who ever had to beat two people.”

He surveyed the crowd, as he frequently did at his rallies on the campaign trail, asking whether they preferred the nickname “Crooked Joe” or “Sleepy Joe.” (They still preferred Crooked, he determined, based on the level of cheering.)

Trump, who seems to be unable to stop talking about Biden, then railed against him as a “horrible golfer” and disputed the former president’s claim that he had a “6 handicap” in the game, before mocking his physical condition. “He could barely walk in the sand,” Trump said of past footage showing Biden on the beach. “Somebody thought he looked great in a bathing suit.”

“He was the worst president in the history of our country,” Trump said of Biden, continuing to press his disdain for his former opponent. Trump also claimed that former president Jimmy Carter “passed away a happy man” knowing Biden had been worse at the job.

Trump bragged about the Cabinet he’s assembling

Riding high on the success he has seen with some of his most controversial nominees being confirmed by the Senate, Trump bragged about the people who would be running the country’s government - mentioning Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Mehmet Oz, who will make decisions at the country’s top health agencies, for example.

He praised his nominee for labor secretary, former congresswoman Lori Chavez-DeRemer of Oregon, despite calling the Republican “a little bit on the slightly left of center.” Trump said he nominated her as a way to throw a bone to union members, with whom he saw gains this election. Chavez-DeRemer faced her Senate hearing this week but has not yet been confirmed.

“We had tremendous support, so I think it’s nice to give them a person in the center, because that’s what she is,” Trump said, describing the decision as a way to “do something nice for these people that voted for me.”

Other top administration officials took the CPAC stage before Trump.

“I’m glad to be back, and I’m not leaving until we fix this,” said Trump’s “border czar,” Tom Homan, in a profanity-laced, rousing speech about further cracking down on illegal immigration.

Homan, who worked on immigration issues during Trump’s first term, was one of several new administration officials who addressed the audience ahead of the president, including Interior Secretary Doug Burgum and United Nations Ambassador Elise Stefanik.

Trump is impressed by the flurry of action he has taken - even if he faces some legal challenges

“Together,” Trump said during his speech, “we’ve achieved more in four weeks than most administrations achieve in four years.”

As he has done at several other speaking engagements in recent days, Trump celebrated the drastic cuts made to reshape the federal workforce and rattled off lists of purported evidence of fraud and waste that his new administration has identified, claiming that millions of people well over the age of 100 were still collecting Social Security benefits.

A Washington Post analysis found that many of his administration’s efforts to cut federal spending that it deemed excessive are overblown.

“The whole thing is a scam,” Trump said about the operation of the nation’s Social Security program, which he has vowed not to cut.

He then praised the work of the US DOGE Service advised by tech billionaire Elon Musk, which has led the charge to cut federal programs and positions it deems wasteful, and again vowed to visit Fort Knox to see if the nation’s gold reserve is “still there.”

Musk has pushed an unproved claim that the stockpile of tons of gold may have been “stolen” from the secure location. Trump, in turn, has said he will give Musk access to the facility.

Trump also referred to the U.S. Agency for International Development as the “left-wing scam known as USAID” and slammed the “ultraleft CFPB,” referring to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau - both agencies that his administration has effectively shuttered.

And Trump proudly bragged about the organizations he has withdrawn the United States from: the “corrupt World Health Organization,” the “anti semitic U.N. Human Rights Council” and the “terrorist-supporting U.N. Relief and Works Agency,” to a cheering crowd.

Trump took a victory lap for all the other actions he has taken since he was sworn in: the diversity, equity and inclusion programs he ended; the security clearances and details he has revoked from former top officials; the Jan. 6 defendants he had pardoned; the gulf and mountain he had renamed.

Many of Trump’s actions clearly fall within his power as president, though some quickly faced legal challenges.

Trump said a Ukraine-Russia deal is ‘pretty close’.

Trump revealed little about the latest in the ongoing negotiations to end the war in Ukraine, which he claimed on the campaign trail he could end in “one day.”

“I don’t like talking about it, because we’re in the middle of negotiations,” Trump said, adding that he thought “we’re pretty close to a deal - we better be close to a deal.”

Angry about the billions of dollars the federal government has given to Ukraine’s war efforts, Trump reiterated his position that Ukraine should give the United States “something for all of the money that we put up.”

“We’re asking for rare earth and oil, anything we can get,” he said. “But we feel so stupid.”

Trump also launched into a tirade about Afghanistan needing to return American military equipment that they “parade.”

“They have tanks and trucks and guns and goggles,” Trump said. “They have goggles. They have night goggles better than we have, brand new, right out of the box. It’s unbelievable.”

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Zakrzewski reported from Washington.

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