Eduardo Bolsonaro

“I’m running to be the senator to the Romanian diaspora,” I overheard a man tell the leader of Spain’s right-wing Vox Party, Santiago Abascal. “I’m running for congress in the Dominican Republic,” Fernando Abreu told me. Argentinians, Salvadoreans, Venezuelans, Brits, Hungarians — all of them were at CPAC 2024. At times it seemed that half of attendees weren’t American. The most interesting foreigners, though, were not just there for the speeches. On the sidelines, they dined, laughed and planned. In a VIP Latin America Luncheon thrown by the Center for a Secure Free Society, a small group of leaders, Heritage Foundation fellows and experienced policymakers met to talk about what’s next for the region.

No sooner did Donald Trump announce the resignation of Dan Coats than the handwringing began in Washington. Coats, an establishment Republican, was the only man who could stand up to Trump. He was tough on Russia. He wouldn’t water down intelligence reports. Almost overnight he was converted into a wise man whose wisdom made him a model of rectitude and probity. In reality, Coats is something of a hack who was occupying a position that should never have been created in the first place. George W. Bush capitulated to conventional wisdom in Washington by vastly expanding the national security bureaucracy after September 11. Trump’s apparent instinct to gut the agency has been put on the back-burner. Now he’s substituting an even worse hack in the form of Rep.