At CPAC, Trump revels in political payback

WASHINGTON — President Donald 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,” 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,” 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 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.

Not only at the 2023 CPAC but throughout last year’s campaign, after he was charged with dozens of state and federal felonies, 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, Trump declared that revenge tour to be well underway.

“The fraudsters, liars, cheaters, globalists and deep-state bureaucrats are being sent packing,” said Trump, who is presiding over an effort to drastically shrink the federal bureaucracy.

A group of pardoned Jan. 6 participants stood at the back of the ballroom in which 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 police officer from Helmetta, New Jersey, said as Trump spoke. 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 Trump’s speech, Yetman wore his old prison identification card on the lapel of his suit jacket.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

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