‘I am your warrior’: Fiery Trump promises to end wars, pay baby bonus

National Harbour, Maryland: Donald Trump has ramped up his 2024 presidential bid with a fiery speech in which he attacked his own party, pledged to stop funding endless wars, and vowed to give out baby bonuses to kick off a reproductive boom in America.

Three months after announcing his candidacy for the Republican presidential nomination, Trump appeared at the Conservative Political Action Conference to make his pitch amid deepening divisions among conservatives, questions over his ongoing influence, and a spectacular fallout with media mogul Rupert Murdoch.

Former President Donald Trump speaks at the Conservative Political Action Conference, CPAC 2023 in National Harbour, Maryland.Credit:AP

In an address lasting more than 100 minutes, the former president returned to a central theme of his 2016 election campaign: characterising himself as an outsider fighting for ordinary Americans, who could not be “bought” nor “controlled”.

“There’s only one president in history who has ever taken on the entire corrupt establishment in Washington. And when we win in 2024, we will do it again, even stronger faster and better,” he said as his adoring audience chanted: “Trump, Trump, Trump”.

“In 2016, I declared: I am your voice. Today, I am your warrior. I am your justice. And for those who have been wronged and betrayed: I am your retribution.”

Trump took to the stage shortly after winning the annual conference straw poll – in it conference attendees vote for whom they want as president. At the last CPAC in August, Trump won the poll with 69 per cent of the vote, followed by DeSantis at 24 per cent. This time, based on more than 2000 respondents, he was down slightly but still dominated: with 62 per cent to DeSantis’ 20 per cent.

Stickers supporting former US president Donald Trump and criticising US President Joe Biden for sale during the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in National Harbor, Maryland.Credit:Bloomberg

Republican businessman Perry Johnson, who announced his candidacy for nomination to a group of supporters on Thursday night, came third in the poll, with 5 per cent of the vote, followed by former UN ambassador-turned-presidential hopeful Nikki Haley with 3 per cent.

While the poll is unscientific, a poor result – or low crowd numbers during Trump’s speech – would have been viewed through the prism of his waning influence over the GOP.

CPAC, after all, has traditionally been a gut-check of the party’s base and a presidential testing ground for wannabe candidates to raise their profiles.

But this year, some of the party’s biggest potential contenders such, as Florida governor Ron DeSantis and former vice president Mike Pence, decided to skip the three-day event, highlighting the widening chasm within the party following last year’s midterm elections.

Others like Haley showed up to make her pitch, telling her lukewarm audience: “If you’re tired of losing, put your trust in a new generation”.

Former President Donald Trump applauds as he departs after speaking at CPAC 2023. His was the last speech at the conference which closed with Mass.Credit:AP

This particularly audience, however, was almost entirely here for Trump, who used his speech to talk up his record and promise everything from term limits for members of Congress to “stopping the slide into costly never-ending wars”, which is consistent with the push among his base to stop funding weapons to Ukraine.

He also spruiked a radical plan to build “freedom cities” out of unused US land and give baby bonuses to parents to kickstart a new baby boom.

And in a sign of what is to come, Trump widened his attack on his own party, taking aim at multiple Republicans, including “China-loving politician” Mitch McConnell (whose wife is Chinese); former speaker Paul Ryan (who now sits on the board of Fox News) and so-called RINOs (Republican In Name Only).

He did not directly attack DeSantis, his biggest rival, but doubled down on his support for Medicare and Social Security after previously singling out DeSantis as “the man who wants to cut Social Security and Medicare”.

“We are never going back to the people that want to destroy our great social security system … even some in our own party, I wonder who that might be,” he quipped.

Trump’s speech took place in the context of a high-profile fallout with Murdoch, the owner of Fox News. Last week, in a $US1.6 billion ($2.4 billion) lawsuit filed by Dominion Voting Systems against Fox and its parent company, Murdoch revealed that network presenters had “endorsed” Trump’s lies of a stolen election, and that company executives could have intervened to prevent those lies from being aired.

Trump was furious, launching a social media tirade doubling down on his election lies and accusing the media mogul of “throwing his anchors under a table”.

Outrage towards Murdoch also spilled out during other speeches. Earlier in the conference, Steve Bannon, a former top adviser to Trump, branded the Australian-born Murdoch and his family “a bunch of foreigners” and cast them as enemies of Trump’s “Make America Great Again” movement.

“Murdoch, you’ve deemed Trump’s not going to be president,” Bannon added at the close of his fiery speech. “Well, we’ve deemed that you’re not going to have a network. Because we’re going to fight you every step of the way.”

Trump did not mention Murdoch directly, but addressed the network.

“I hope Fox doesn’t turn off, but we did much better in 2020 that we did in 2016,” he said. He later added that, if elected, he would seek to eliminate early voting and get rid of electronic voting machines in favour of paper ballots.

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