Sequins, Merch, Chain Saws: Trump’s Return to CPAC

The first month of President Trump’s return to office has been very intense. Onstage at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), the annual gathering of conservative activists, the speakers talked about the chaotic energy there as a great thing.

“There’s the speed of government, there’s the speed of business and now there’s the speed of Trump, which is unlike anything I’ve ever seen,” said Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the Arkansas governor, in one representative sample. “He’s doing so much so fast, they don’t even know where to attack him this time.” Elon Musk and President Javier Milei of Argentina appeared onstage with a chain saw.

The Times’s Damon Winter captured the pro-Trump scene in the convention center halls, including the incredible variety of merch that incorporates Mr. Trump and his movement into clothing, hats, posters, stickers and signs, and also Mr. Musk here and there on the edges. That scene is a typical feature of Trump rallies and conservative events, sometimes threading pro-MAGA and pro-MAHA (Make America Healthy Again) messages among sequins on bags and clothes, often emphasizing the singularity of Mr. Trump and the movement he started.

It used to be a perception on the right that Republican presidents were elected without channeling the intensity of the conservative base. CPAC and other activist gatherings have in the past served as a way to imagine a world in which Republicans really took control of the federal government, actually changed the direction of the country and truly embodied the unyielding energy of the base, even if the policy vision back then differed.

But Mr. Trump and the conservative activist core are often now one both in policy vision and certainly in energy, and his second term is all cataclysmic action, firing employees and officials, freezing contracts, ending programs and reworking the post-Cold War framework in one daily shock after another. At the end of all this, the U.S. government might look pretty different and more like the energy of four days of CPAC speeches.