How Trump’s big lie played out on the CPAC stage

In the exhibit hall, vendors displayed various styles of hats declaring "Trump won" and attendees referred to former president Donald Trump as the rightful winner of the 2020 election.

But on the event stage, most prominent Republican lawmakers at the annual Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) didn't bring up Trump's big lie. Instead they largely chose not to repeat his common talking point that rampant voter fraud cost him his re-election.

CPAC this year was seen as a crucial barometer of the likely contours of the 2024 fight. In that regard the majority of conservatives here aligned themselves closely with the former president. But they also chose not to relitigate the 2020 election and looked ahead to the 2024 contest, repeatedly calling Trump the former and future president.

Attendees said they noticed the absence of a talking point that has in the past, including at last year's CPAC, been pervasive.

"There's a lot of gaps in the topic list," said Suzzanne Monk, a DC resident who donned a Maga hat and a T-shirt reading: "Don't blame me, I voted for Trump." "The election integrity issues are kind of soft. We could be hitting a lot harder."

While most speakers focused on issues other than election integrity, prominent election deniers were still given top billing. Kari Lake, a former TV news anchor who unsuccessfully ran for Arizona governor in 2022 and who continues to challenge both the results of her own election and the 2020 presidential election, was the keynote speaker at Friday night's Ronald Reagan dinner.

Though Lake didn't bring up claims that Trump's election was stolen, she dedicated many minutes to describing how her own election last November was rigged.

"They stole that election," she said, referring to Democrats. "The crime was committed in broad daylight on November 8. They sabotaged election day."

She claimed that Democrats "had to pump in hundreds of thousands of phony ballots" and specifically jammed tabulators in Republican precincts to cause long lines at the polls.

"I will not stand by and let these bastards get away with it," she said.

The big lie also snuck its way into other mainstage speeches in small mentions and asides.

Kimberly Guilfoyle, former Trump adviser and fiancee to Donald Trump Jr, declared that conservatives must "never let another election be stolen in this country". Steve Bannon called out Fox News for "illegitimately calling" the race in November 2020 against Trump.

In the event hallways, Bannon interviewed conspiracy theorist Mike Lindell, who was promoting an "election crime bureau". Bannon said that some conservatives view election denialism as a losing issue, to which Lindell replied: "If you give it up, you lose your country."

On Saturday, Hogan Gidley, former press secretary under Trump and now vice-chair of the America First Policy Institute's Center for Election Integrity, moderated a panel called They Stole it From Us Legally, which he said would focus on how to "make it easy to vote but hard to cheat".

Abe Hamadeh, an election denier who lost the race for Arizona attorney general in November, claimed that incompetence cost him the election.

"What happened on election day is a disgrace to democracy," he said, calling out what he said were major issues in Maricopa county. "But it ain't over yet."

Hamadeh, like Lake, has challenged his loss in court and continues to claim that voters were disfranchised. "We need to make sure that there's competency and people are held accountable," he said.

On the same panel, former Republican representative Lee Zeldin said that if Democrats are going to "ballot harvest", conservatives need to lean in and do the same.

"We've got to get out there and ballot harvest the heck out of the next election and they're going to want to change that policy," Gidley said, agreeing with Zeldin.

Ahead of the panel on Saturday, Monk lamented that too many CPAC discussions focused on topics not as relevant to the conservative audience. "Look, I'm opposed to big tech censorship too, but I don't think that's the most pressing issue facing conservatives right now and I think the topics we're listening to right now demonstrate kind of a soft pedaling rather than where I think these attendees are," she said.

Monk said she thinks Matt Schlapp, the chairman of CPAC who was recently accused of sexual misconduct by a Republican campaign staffer, "might be a little off the pulse".

"Long before Donald Trump and the 2020 election, we've had election integrity issues," she added. "It's very hard to prosecute election fraud, so we need to start. We need to fix that before we have elections."

But others were less concerned about the readiness to move on from 2020. "I'm not the type of person who thinks it was, per se, stolen," said Orlando resident Luis Marrero.