Trump suddenly drops out of CPAC and draws swift conservative scorn: "Not the last time Donald Trump will abandon conservatives"

GOP frontrunner ditches conservative confab as reports of right-wing protest emerge

By Sophia Tesfaye

Senior Politics Editor

Published March 4, 2016 10:59PM (EST)

 (Jeff Malet, maletphoto.com)
(Jeff Malet, maletphoto.com)

After shamelessly fessing up to blatantly flip-flopping on immigration during Thursday night's Fox News GOP debate, Republican presidential frontrunner Donald Trump suddenly announced that he was backing out of addressing this year’s Conservative Political Action Conference on Saturday.

Secured with, yet another, round of vows from his rivals pledging their support to the eventual Republican presidential nominee, Trump's campaign released a statement canceling his CPAC speech in favor of campaigning in Kansas, which votes on Saturday. The Trump campaign statement, released Friday afternoon as the Los Angeles Police Department held a press conference announcing an apparent breakthrough in the decades old OJ Simpson case, misspelled where Trump was campaigning (again), and was widely mocked on Twitter:

In any case, conservatives who were just in an uproar at the mere indication Tea Party Senator Marco Rubio may not be attending CPAC last week, were quick to lash out at Trump's last minute decision. (The Rubio campaign and CPAC eventually agreed on a schedule):

While CPAC may only be willing to express its "disappointment" in Trump's decision, right now, conservatives on Twitter are hardly holding back their hurt at Trump's apparent dismissal of the conservative movement -- after all, Trump has attended the conservative confab numerous times before:

But, of course, there remain the faithful:

There is speculation that Trump's decision was brought on by the threat of a planned protest during his address. The National Review reported this week that a "tricorn-hat-wearing revolutionary" planned a 300-person strong walk-out of Trump's talk Saturday.

We "are going to get up at one time to go the bathroom," William Temple said. “We’re not going to put up with him." In fact, several of the conservative conference speakers are openly hostile to a Trump candidacy:

And the GOP civil war rages on.


By Sophia Tesfaye

Sophia Tesfaye is Salon's senior editor for news and politics, and resides in Washington, D.C. You can find her on Twitter at @SophiaTesfaye.

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