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For Reuters 
4h ago
By Steve Holland
Washington – Former President Donald Trump will declare himself the dominant figure in the fractured Republican Party on Sunday and will attack President Joe Biden in his first major appearance since leaving the White House nearly six weeks ago.
“I stand before you today to declare that the incredible journey we began together four years ago is far from over,” Trump will tell the Conservative Political Action Conference in Orlando, Florida, according to excerpts from the speech released by his team.
“We are meeting this afternoon to talk about the future, the future of our movement, the future of our party and the future of our beloved country,” he added.
Trump’s tumultuous final weeks in office saw his supporters launch a deadly attack on the United States Capitol on January 6 in an attempt to prevent Congress from certifying Biden’s election victory, a victory that Trump falsely claimed was tainted by widespread fraud.
A civil war has broken out within the Republican Party with establishment figures like Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell eager to put Trump in the rearview mirror and others, like Trump ally Senator Lindsey Graham, believing that the The party’s future depends on the energy of the conservative grassroots pro Trump.
“The Republican Party is united. The only division is between a handful of political pirates from the Washington DC establishment and everyone else across the country,” Trump will say.
Trump’s fervor at the four-day CPAC event has been so strong that Trump’s son Donald Trump Jr. declared it “T-PAC” and participants displayed a golden statue of the former president.
Trump has discussed the possibility of running for president again in private in 2024, according to advisers, but excerpts from the speech give no clue as to what he might do.
“That will be a decision he will make going forward,” Republican National Committee chair Ronna McDaniel told CBS’s “Face the Nation.”
In the short term, he is making plans to establish a superPAC political organization to support candidates who reflect his policies, an adviser said.
Trump’s speech will include attacks on Biden to try to position himself as the new president’s main critic, including on immigration and security along the United States’ border with Mexico, and the slow reopening of closed schools due to the pandemic.
“We all knew that the Biden administration was going to be bad, but none of us imagined how bad it would be and how far they would go to the left,” Trump will say. “Joe Biden has had the most disastrous first month of any president in modern history.”
The Biden White House has made clear that it plans to ignore Trump’s speech.
“Certainly our focus is not on what President Trump says” at CPAC, White House spokeswoman Jen Psaki told reporters last week.
Reuters
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