It is the world’s largest conservative event, and having succeeded in returning Donald Trump to the presidency, some are setting their sights on Down Under.
It is the world’s largest conservative event, and having succeeded in returning Donald Trump to the presidency, some are setting their sights on Down Under.
By Michael Koziol
February 23, 2025 — 10.01am
National Harbor, Maryland: “Look at these crazy Australians, who let them in?” Benny Johnson joked as he took to the stage, gesturing to a rowdy group of fans up the front of the ballroom.
“They’re from Australia, they escaped the concentration camps in Australia. The COVID camps. They got out, good for them … We’re going to save Australia.”
Johnson, a charismatic, fast-talking media personality with 2.7 million YouTube subscribers and 3.5 million followers on X, is typical of the guests you will find at the Conservative Political Action Conference, the world’s largest gathering of its kind, held annually just outside Washington.
What started in the 1970s with a keynote address by Ronald Reagan has morphed into a massive vehicle for Donald Trump’s Make America Great Again movement, and the 2025 edition was a full-blown celebration.
From across the country and the world, they flocked to the massive Gaylord National Resort and Convention Centre in National Harbor to declare victory over the woke left and “deep state”, to pray at the altar of Trump and to plan the American revolution they have in mind for the next four years – and beyond.
On stage, you were just as likely to see a cabinet secretary or White House official as an alt-right podcaster or foreign dignitary. In the crowd, among the sea of Trump hats and shirts, was a woman dressed as a turquoise Statue of Liberty, a man in a MAGA Indian headdress and a Frenchman who wandered around the convention centre with a tabby cat sitting on his shoulders.
In the exhibition hall, attendees could watch breakout sessions, have their photo taken at a mock “deportation centre”, or fire a bow-and-arrow at targets marked “DEI”, “illegal immigration”, “government spending” and “forever wars”.
A contingent of up to 40 Australians was present, including mining magnate Gina Rinehart and her lieutenant Teena McQueen, a former Liberal Party vice-president. This correspondent saw no Australian MPs, although 28-year-old Queensland farmer Lachlan Lade, who is running for the Senate, was there in a “Make Australia Great Again” cap.
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CPAC Australia co-founder Andrew Cooper and chairman Warren Mundine spoke on stage during the Friday morning session, in front of an electronic sign that misspelled the country’s name as “Austrailia”. The tiny but vocal crowd audience cheered as Mundine explained the defeat of the Voice referendum.
“What we knew was that Australian people had been so beat up, had been so crushed by the wokes and the cancel culture, that they were scared about voting [No],” he said. “Within four to five months, we flipped it. We gave Australians a voice that they could stand up against this cancel culture … and we won.”
The newly confident MAGA movement wants to export itself overseas to the UK, Europe, Korea and Australia. Within these circles, Australia is best known for its strict response to the pandemic as well as new hate speech laws and the Australian government’s tendency to refuse visas to people who may be planning to utter controversial statements on Australian soil.
Many attendees regarded Australia as something verging on an island prison. “I think Australia’s reputation is permanently damaged from their COVID response,” podcaster and online personality Elijah Schaffer said. They are also critical of Australia’s attempts to legislate against hate speech.
“Nobody’s shocked. It’s just, ‘Australia, they don’t have rights there’,” Schaffer, who has lived in Australia for periods since 2018, said. “While it’s not fully true, it’s the general perception: the Australian government is seen as a proto fascist police state that does not care about the rights of their own citizens.”
[Schaffer made similar remarks at CPAC Australia in 2023 despite reports he was struck from the speaking list after interviewing an Australian neo-Nazi on his show.]
Just as he threatens to overshadow the Trump presidency, billionaire Elon Musk stole the show on day one when he received a chainsaw from Argentina’s right-wing populist president Javier Milei and waved it around on stage.
Wearing a black MAGA cap, gold bling and dark sunglasses, Musk spoke haltingly about his political transition to the right, his plans to inspect the country’s gold deposits at Fort Knox, the war in Ukraine (which he called “the biggest graft machine I’ve ever seen in my life”) and his lack of sleep.
“My mind is a storm,” Musk said, before seguing awkwardly to his childhood. “I grew up in South Africa but my morality was informed by America. I read comic books, I played Dungeons and Dragons and I watched American TV shows. It seemed like America cared about being the good guys, about doing the right thing. That’s actually pretty unusual.”
Not to be outdone, former Trump adviser and felon Steve Bannon, who is still highly influential in the MAGA movement despite being outside the White House, sparked controversy when he raised his arm on stage in a gesture that was quickly likened to a Nazi salute.
Bannon said it was just a “wave” but French far-right leader Jordan Bardella cancelled his speech in apparent disgust. Outside his “War Room” podcast studio at the CPAC exhibition hall, Bannon told this masthead the National Rally president was a “pussy” who had wet his pants and was unfit to lead France.
Bannon is now just one of hundreds of right-wing podcasters and streamers with a large presence at CPAC, and in the “independent media” market more broadly. Directly outside the main auditorium, you’ll find stands for conservative news brands such as Newsmax, The Epoch Times, Right Side Broadcasting Network and Christian outfit Proverbs Media Group.
You’ll also find stands belonging to controversial figures, such as MyPillow founder and election conspiracy theorist Mike Lindell and discredited medical researcher and anti-vaccine activist Judy Mikovitz. But in here, they are just part of a rich and thriving right-wing echo chamber, from which a growing pool of Americans is exclusively sourcing their news.
One large outlet, The Daily Wire, recorded an episode of Backstage in which founder Ben Shapiro and his co-hosts drank whisky and smoked cigars as they joked about Trump’s idea to turn the Gaza Strip into “Mar-a-gaza” or “Gaz-a-lago” and make Canada the 51st state.
“We don’t want the Canadians – we want Canada, we want the land, not so much the people on it,” Matt Walsh said. “We’ll move them to reservations up in the Arctic, they’ll be quite happy.”
Earlier, former British prime minister Liz Truss, now a staple of the conservative speaking circuit, said Britons were looking across the Atlantic with envy as they watched Trump upend the institutions, “drill, baby, drill” for oil, ban transgender women from women’s bathrooms and sports, and deport illegal immigrants.
“We want a Trump revolution in Britain,” Truss said. “We want to flood the zone. We want Elon and his nerd army of Musk-rats examining the British deep state.” Truss noted she had intended to lift the UK’s ban on fracking. “Sadly, I wasn’t in office long enough to make it happen,” she said of her 49 days in power.
Attendees also heard from Brazilian politician Eduardo Bolsonaro, son of former president Jair Bolsonaro, who just days ago was charged with plotting a coup and planning to poison his successor Luiz “Lula” Da Silva. Bolsonaro denies the allegations.
Italy’s right-wing Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni appeared via video link and defended Vice President’s J.D. Vance’s recent provocative speech to European leaders in Munich – “many pretended to be outraged” – and backed Trump to stay the course and deliver lasting peace in Ukraine.
On the Friday night, guests filed back into the ballroom in gowns and bowties for the pricey Ronald Reagan Dinner, which featured a keynote interview with Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem. But many guests were glued to their phones as news broke Trump had fired the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, the most senior military officer in the country, along with several other top brass.
Much of the real action at CPAC occurs at breakaway parties. The Australian contingent assembled at a hotel gathering after the Reagan dinner, while on the Thursday night, many headed to Butterworths, a Capitol Hill restaurant owned by Australian lawyer Alex Butterworth, which has become a favourite MAGA hangout.
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Throughout the three days, each speaker fawned over Trump so fulsomely that by the time the man himself arrived on Saturday afternoon, it was something of an anti-climax. Trump, who first addressed CPAC in 2011, wheeled out the greatest hits and said he believed an agreement for the US to access Ukraine’s rare earth minerals and oil – “anything we can get” – was close. “We better be close to a deal,” he said.
Only at the very end did Trump really rouse the crowd with a quote borrowed from Revolutionary War naval commander John Paul Jones. “I have not yet begun to fight,” he said. “And neither have you.”
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Michael Koziol is the North America correspondent for The Age and Sydney Morning Herald. He is a former Sydney editor, Sun-Herald deputy editor and a federal political reporter in Canberra.Connect via Twitter.
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