Trump and CPAC, going on soon. Others, same party, at another event, going on soon. What should you make of that?
Republicans, as if in two separate overlapping camps.
Is that a real split, or a dance where Trump going one way has other Republicans putting that man's thing at a distance. Not active sniping. Product differentiation. Where differences are marginal.
It is early, but our friends within the GOP do have their quirks and behavioral displays.
OXON HILL, Md. (AP) — The annual Conservative Political Action Conference was once one of the premier gatherings on the GOP campaign calendar — a must-stop for serious contenders testing the waters on presidential runs.
No longer.
Many of the party’s best-known likely candidates — from Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis to former Vice President Mike Pence — are skipping the marquee event kicking off Wednesday as the group grapples with controversy and questions over its place in a movement that remains deeply split over its allegiance to former President Donald Trump.
[...]
“I don’t think people go there to meet the next generation of leaders. They go to celebrate the last one,” said Alex Conant, a longtime GOP strategist who remembers attending his first CPAC as a high school student in the 1990s and being star-struck meeting Newt Gingrich, the Georgia congressman who had just stepped down as House speaker.
Conant returned often as an aide, including when he was working for Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, a 2016 presidential candidate who was one of a long list of Republicans with a breakthrough moment on CPAC’s stage over the years.
This time, however, Rubio is absent.
“I think CPAC used to be a place where stars could break out. Now it’s much more the Trump show,” Conant said.
[...]
Pence is a longtime CPAC speaker who has not appeared at the conference since he drew the ire of some Trump supporters by resisting Trump’s efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election. In explaining why Pence declined to attend this year, his aides cited a full schedule of events this week, including a Club for Growth donor summit, a trip to South Carolina, where he will speak at the evangelical Bob Jones University, a speech at the conservative Christian Hillsdale College in Michigan and a Students for Life of America event in Florida.
“We felt that the vice president’s time was best spent hitting multiple constituencies over the course of those four days,” said one adviser, Devin O’Malley.
[...] The conference schedule features a litany of election deniers who reject findings from judges, election officials and Trump’s own attorney general that there was no widespread fraud during the 2020 campaign. They include Mike Lindell, the MyPillow founder who continues to spread election conspiracy theories, and Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, who recently called for a “national divorce” between blue and red states. Kari Lake, the news anchor-turned Arizona gubernatorial candidate who refused to concede after losing last year, will speak Friday night.
Both Greene and Lake are considered potential Trump vice presidential picks.
Activists will also hear from Jair Bolsonaro, the former president of Brazil, whose supporters stormed the country’s Congress, Supreme Court and presidential palace after he refused to accept his defeat in October. [...]
The Club for Growth, the influential anti-tax group that has clashed with Trump, will hold a competing event, a donor summit in Florida, that is attracting DeSantis, Pence and others. Trump was not invited, underscoring the fierce divide in the conservative movement as some elements strongly back him and others look to move in a new direction.
So - Dueling venues.
...................................
Dueling banjos. In a way akin to strutting bird displays. After that music interlude early in things events got messier, riskier and more hostile.
But Deliverance was a float trip film. Turning into a survival story.
Not a multi-million dollar election thing between cheerful good friends.