Critics slammed Donald Trump's speech at CPAC Saturday as riddled with lies and outrageous, inflated boasts, and marked by a depressing characterization of American life without him in the White House.
As Raw Story reported earlier:
Trump blasted America as a "socialist dumping ground for criminals, junkies, thugs, Marxist radicals and dangerous refugees that no other country wants." He claimed that people in the country illegally are staying in the U.S. in "beautiful hotel suites."
He wasn't much easier on traditional Republicans, whom he ripped as "freaks, neocons, globalist open borders zealots — and fools."
The Trump-critical Lincoln Project flatly called his speech "insane" and as "dark and dystopian as any he's given."
Former FBI agent Peter Strzok tweeted that when Trump mentioned the gruesome killer movie "Silence of the Lambs" during the speech it reminded him about "an FBI agent chasing the malevolent criminal with anti-social personality disorder." Strzok cracked: "Yeah, we've seen that movie before."
Atlantic staff writer Tom Nichols tweeted that he watched Trump addressing CPAC because it was "just weird beyond description. This is way beyond 'weird s---.' This is Lyndon LaRouche type stuff," he added, referring to the American fascist leader.
Conservative pundit Bill Kristol, editor-at-large at The Bulwark, posted after the speech: "Just to make the most obvious point: This man cannot be our next president. And I’ll add: People who are unwilling to say that Trump should under no circumstances be president shouldn’t be president either."
Trump did fare well with people at CPAC, though the conference was far more lackluster than when Trump attended as president, and there were many empty seats for many of the speakers.
But the former president ran away with the CPAC straw poll. He was the choice of 62% of the 2,028 CPAC attendees who participated, compared with 20% for Florida Gov. DeSantis, 5% for businessman Perry Johnson, 3% for Nikki Haley and everyone else at 1% or less.
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