“We have an elite who have been in power for at least the last 40 years, who fundamentally don’t like western civilization and they wanna destroy it,” said Liz Truss, who was prime minister for 49 days in 2022, as she spoke to a half-full room at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Texas. It was her third such speech.
The Liz Truss who addresses American audiences bears little resemblance to the awkward, growth-obsessed economics nerd who somehow ascended the greasy pole of British politics, only to slide back down at staggering speed.
She’s changed her vocabulary – and her talking points. The few attendees of her panel, snappily titled “Europestan: Can Europe Survive?” could hear Truss lambasting “grooming gangs” and “transgender ideology.” She has become fluent in the language of the “MAGA Republican.” And now she’s returning from the New World – and she’s bringing CPAC back with her to Britain, like the Walter Raleigh of the 21st-century right.
Truss has become fluent in the language of the ‘MAGA Republican’
CPAC has changed a lot in the age of Trump, under the leadership of its chairman Matt Schlapp and his wife Mercedes. One major development has been international franchising. Schlapp brags that “12 countries in five continents” have hosted the conferences. Britain will be next: Schlapp and Truss announced in March that “CPAC GB” will take place in London from July 16 to 18. (The news was actually broken hours beforehand, in this magazine’s Cockburn’s Diary newsletter.)
Truss, in her role as chairman of the CPAC GB organizing committee, wants to set a “Trump-style revolution” in motion in the United Kingdom, or, as she says, the “equivalent of a MAGA movement – a ‘MEGA’ movement, ‘Make England Great Again.’” Who knows what is to become of Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland?
“Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket,” said the late philosopher Eric Hoffer. CPAC, as a flagship event for American conservatism, may be going through a similar process.
The conference was jointly founded in 1974 by two think tanks: the American Conservative Union and Young Americans for Freedom. In the early days, the conference was “very much focused on a Frank Meyer-esque fusionist agenda,” says Tim Chapman, president of Advancing American Freedom, the conservative think tank founded by former vice president Mike Pence. “It built the intellectual foundation for the right.” CPAC’s first keynote speaker was Ronald Reagan, then governor of California, who used the platform to articulate his national vision. He quoted John Winthrop as he described a “shining city on a hill,” a line he went on to employ throughout his political career.
Donald Trump addressed the gathering in 2011, when he was still known mostly as a real-estate tycoon and the host of The Apprentice, though his remarks teased signs of things to come. “If I decided to run, I will not be raising taxes, we’ll be taking back hundreds of billions of dollars from other countries that are screwing us,” he told the crowd. “Our country will be great again.” Sound familiar?
As Trump took over the Republican party, so he took over CPAC. During his first presidential term, the conference’s attendance numbers swelled to tens of thousands.
Republican politicians looking to ingratiate themselves with Trump angled to secure high-profile speaking slots. Nothing said “MAGA” quite like the video clips of candidates taking to the egregiously red, white and blue-lit stage, soundtracked by squalling rock music.
Under Schlapp’s chairmanship of the ACU, and under the influence of Trumpism, the speaking line-up grew less heterodox. “It became clear from 2019 to 2021 that certain personalities weren’t going to get invitations to speak at CPAC because they were perceived as ‘outside of MAGA,’” says Chapman. “It got much more insular. That actually ultimately ended up hurting CPAC. That’s why its impact is dwindling. They’re speaking to themselves in increasingly smaller rooms.”
CPAC’s decision to lean in to Trumpism also led to fringe conferences springing up on the periphery. Principles First appeared in 2019 as a “NeverTrump” alternative to CPAC, while Nick Fuentes’s groypers arranged the America First PAC in 2020, to host speakers considered too far right or white nationalist.
“CPAC has ceased to perform its original function, to be a gathering place for different kinds of conservatives, all united around basic principles, to sift through potential leaders of their movement,” says Chapman. “Now it’s become a carnival. The carnival atmosphere is really unattractive because it has no real political muscle.” Still, the spectacle remained amusing for political journalists. And many of the madder highlights of the Trump era took place at CPAC. Trump offered lengthy speeches every year from 2017 to 2025, usually throwing chunk after chunk of red meat to his base and testing out new stand-up material. Last year, Javier Milei presented Elon Musk with a gold chainsaw before Musk called for America to “legalize comedy!”
Yet CPAC has struggled to bring in younger conservatives over the last five years, with many student groups opting to head to Turning Point USA’s AmericaFest in Arizona instead. Last December’s AmericaFest, the first since TPUSA founder Charlie Kirk’s assassination last September, had around 31,000 attendees, around 8,000 of whom were college students. CPAC has garnered criticism on the American right for growing wide, not deep; for looking at overseas expansion and its potential for moneymaking opportunities. Péter Magyar, the newly elected Prime Minister of Hungary, told reporters that his predecessor Viktor Orbán had directed taxpayer funds toward financing CPAC Hungary. So much for shrinking the state.
Another factor in CPAC’s recent decline has been the sexual misconduct allegations against Schlapp, a married father of five girls. In 2023, a male Senate campaign staffer accused Schlapp of drunkenly groping his crotch and filed a complaint of sexual battery and defamation. The accuser was paid a settlement of $480,000 by the ACU’s insurance firm. In February last year, Schlapp was accused of groping a man’s genitals in a bar in Virginia. Ticket prices, crowd sizes and the number of sitting US politicians speaking at the conferences have all declined since.
It’s this shrunken version of CPAC that Truss has addressed for the last three years. The former PM has often been spotted around the conference’s media row, accompanied by her taxpayer-funded security detail. Perhaps she was searching for inspiration for the podcast she launched in December. She was not widely lauded at first. “Oh, that’s Liz Truss,” one young attendee said as she passed us in the corridor at the 2024 conference. “She sucks. What’s she doing here?” Truss then told former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon, “I need a few more friends,” when he asked whether she’d welcome Nigel Farage back to the Conservative party. (Though that may not have been a tempting offer; his Reform party is now trouncing the Tories in the polls.)
CPAC GB, then, is a joint revival effort for Truss and Schlapp. The conference will take place at the Intercontinental Hotel by the O2 Arena in Greenwich, which has a 3,000-capacity ballroom. Early-bird tickets are £75. Other than that, details are scant. While Truss is serving as the conference’s figurehead, CPAC GB is being organized by a team of directors, including political strategist Joseph Robertson. How will CPAC GB differ from this year’s US iteration? “The scale will be pretty similar,” Robertson says. “The conference layout will be pretty similar.” For him, a successful CPAC means “having it packed out and having a really good time.” As far as speakers go, Robertson promises “all the big names you’d expect, coming from the US, the Americas, a couple of people from Europe as well and the UK, obviously. Plenty of top administration people and heads of state are invited.”
‘We’re looking for serious people. In terms of the politics, it’s going to be credible’
Trump is unlikely to attend. His next trip across the pond will be for the Irish Open golf tournament at his club in Doonbeg, County Clare, in September. But what about Farage? The Reform leader has been a well-received speaker at CPACs stateside for the last ten years, and could often be spotted fraternizing with attendees at the convention center’s bars and restaurants. “You’d have to build it around Nigel,” an American conservative organizer says. A recent Guardian report, however, quoted a Reform source as saying the party will be “steering well clear” of the event. Robertson says that is “categorically untrue, as far as I know” but Farage appears to have little time for Truss. Sources have repeatedly indicated that, contrary to reports saying she might be about to join Reform, she would not be welcome in the party. And Farage and his top team have been trying to put some distance between themselves and Trump, especially since the US President keeps attacking the UK and its armed forces for being insufficiently supportive of his Iran adventure.
Before deciding whether or not to speak at CPAC GB, then, it’s likely that Farage is waiting to see if relations between Trump and Britain improve following King Charles’s visit to Washington at the end of this month. If Farage did commit, you would think other Reform figures such as Zia Yusuf and Robert Jenrick would follow. Whether they’d be joined by party outcasts such as Rupert Lowe and Ben Habib is another matter entirely.
It’s reasonable to ask, too, whether Elon Musk might cross the pond for CPAC GB. Musk, who had an English grandmother, has a keen interest in British politics. After falling out with America Firsters over whether H-1B visas for tech workers were “MAGA,” Musk pivoted and started hyper-fixating on the grooming-gang scandal. And after a brief flirtation with Farage and his advisors, he then began criticizing Reform and boosting Lowe and his rebel Restore party’s messages to his 237 million followers on X.
In some respects, CPAC GB seems to be designed to address Musk’s version of Britain: an Islamified failing state where you’re jailed for making the wrong joke. There certainly seems to be significant overlap between Musk’s view of the UK and Truss’s: last year, the former PM told CPAC: “Let’s be honest, Britain isn’t working.” As well as calling for a Trump-style revolution, Truss asked “Elon and his nerd army of Musk-rats” to come and probe the British deep state.
At this year’s conference in Texas, Truss refused to answer when a fellow YouTuber asked her if Tommy Robinson would be invited to speak. “We’re looking for serious people,” says Robertson. “In terms of the politics, it’s going to be credible. It’s going to be people we think are either likely to be elected or people that we think are there on merit in terms of their body of work. There won’t be any rogue speakers.” What passes for “rogue” these days, though?
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