President Trump made a triumphant return to the Conservative Political Action Conference on Saturday, gleefully recounting his acts of retribution against the Biden administration to a crowd of loyal supporters that included people he had pardoned for their roles in the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol.
Two years after he used an address at CPAC, an influential conservative gathering, to declare to his supporters that “I am your retribution,” Mr. Trump took a victory lap amid his wide-reaching efforts to reshape the federal government in his image, including firing thousands of federal workers and dismantling the government’s main international development agency.
“We have escorted the radical-left bureaucrats out of the building and have locked the doors behind them,” Mr. Trump said. “We’ve gotten rid of thousands.”
The speech took place against the backdrop of a conference that for several days has sought to cast Mr. Trump’s second win as a turning point in a global and increasingly successful crusade by right-wing political movements against institutions and norms that they believe have oppressed them.
Mr. Trump later added, “I ended Joe Biden’s weaponization as soon as I got in. I said, ‘I’m going to hit him with the same stuff.’”
Not only at the 2023 CPAC but throughout last year’s campaign, after he was charged with dozens of state and federal felonies, Mr. Trump had vowed revenge against his political enemies. He promised that his election would be a “judgment day” for “the liars and cheaters and fraudsters and censors and impostors who have commandeered our government.”
On Saturday, Mr. Trump declared that revenge tour to be well underway.
“The fraudsters, liars, cheaters, globalists and deep-state bureaucrats are being sent packing,” said Mr. Trump, who is presiding over an effort to drastically shrink the federal bureaucracy.
Toward the end of his speech, Mr. Trump lingered on his own criminal investigations and the scrutiny — or arrests — that people supporting his falsehoods about the 2020 election had faced.
He singled out Mike Lindell, the MyPillow founder who championed Mr. Trump’s false claims of widespread election fraud, whose phone was seized by federal agents in 2022 and who is the subject of several defamation lawsuits involving his claims. “That man suffered,” Mr. Trump said of Mr. Lindell, adding that the “F.B.I. thugs” had gone after him.
“And he never changed his mind,” Mr. Trump said. “He said that election of 2020 was rigged.” Now, Mr. Trump said, laughing, “It’s OK to say it, Mike.”
Greeting fans in the hall after the speech, Mr. Lindell recalled meeting with Mr. Trump last week at the White House. He said they met for two and a half hours to discuss voting systems and his longstanding ambition to return the country’s elections to all paper ballots.
“I’m not done yet,” said Mr. Lindell, who was sued by Dominion Voting Systems and Smartmatic for defamation. “I’m going to get rid of the machines. How many times have you heard me say that?”
A group of pardoned Jan. 6 participants stood at the back of the ballroom in which Mr. Trump spoke, cheering boisterously and holding up records from their imprisonment, chanting “J6! J6!” One woman shouted to the president, “Thank you for the pardon!”
“Thanks to that man right there, I’m no longer a felon,” Gregory Yetman, a former military policeman from Helmetta, N.J., said as Mr. Trump spoke. Mr. Yetman, 48, who had pleaded guilty to assaulting an officer at the Capitol, was serving his sentence at a federal prison in western Pennsylvania when he was released last month. Watching Mr. Trump’s speech, Mr. Yetman wore his old prison identification card on the lapel of his suit jacket.
Mr. Trump has been making appearances at CPAC off and on since 2011, when he was considering a run for the 2012 Republican primary to challenge President Barack Obama. He has used the venue at various times to lob attacks against his political rivals and to lay out his vision for his administration.
Last year, Mr. Trump turned his many legal troubles into a core part of his campaign message.
Like nearly everything else about the Republican Party since 2016, the event — formerly a gathering of staunch conservatives with a libertarian fringe represented by followers of Representative Ron Paul — has morphed into a reflection of Mr. Trump.
He had once come to CPAC as an outsider, addressing the convention as a former Democrat and political neophyte who had few allies in the Republican Party. After his victory in the 2016 election, Mr. Trump soon began to dominate the convention. By 2020, he had definitively transformed the gathering into a celebration of himself, his family and his ideology of “Make America Great Again.”
Even after his defeat in the 2020 election, Mr. Trump enjoyed overwhelming support among the convention’s attendees in 2021, and he used his address that year to settle scores with dissenters in the party. Mr. Trump drew the loudest applause during that address when he pledged to purge Republicans who had criticized him or refused to support his lies that the 2020 election had been stolen from him.
Many prominent figures from the Jan. 6 riot were fixtures at CPAC this week and attended Mr. Trump’s speech on Saturday. Among them was Enrique Tarrio, the Proud Boys leader, who had been convicted of seditious conspiracy and pardoned by Mr. Trump, before he was arrested yesterday on assault charges.
Another was Stewart Rhodes, the leader of the Oath Keepers militia, who was also convicted of seditious conspiracy for his role in the Capitol breach and was serving an 18-year prison sentence when Mr. Trump commuted his sentence to time served. Mr. Rhodes, who said he had not spoken to anyone in the new administration since his release from prison, set a high bar for Mr. Trump’s second term.
“I just hope he goes full-bore — within the constitutional bounds,” Mr. Rhodes said before the president spoke. “I hope he goes all the way.”
