A daily roundup of the biggest stories in right-wing media.
On Friday, conservative publications extensively covered Donald Trump’s address to the Conservative Political Action Conference, discussing both his remarks and the crowd’s reportedly enthusiastic response to his appearance.
The Daily Caller exemplified the latter tendency, featuring one short post headlined “Crowd Chants ‘USA! USA! USA!’ as President Trump Takes the Stage” and another in which, it states, he “drew thunderous applause from the crowd” after promising “to protect the Second Amendment.” (On the site’s home page, that post was headlined, “When Trump Said This at CPAC, the Crowd Jumped to Its Feet and Cheered.”) In a longer article, the publication summarized and quoted from the president’s speech, largely without commentary, though it did describe the performance as “a campaign-style speech.”
LifeZette was more explicitly enthusiastic in its write-up, calling Trump’s return to CPAC “triumphant” and claiming that “he mapped out his vision for the nation” in it. Breitbart, similarly, wrote that the president received “a rock star welcome from the packed ballroom” in its primary recap of the event. Gateway Pundit called attention to a moment in which the crowd “immediately started chanting, ‘Lock her up! Lock her up!’ ” after Trump alluded to Hillary Clinton. The site featured a clip of this moment under a headline that read, in part, “It Never Gets Old.”
Breitbart—which relied on multiple anonymous White House sources in a recent article suggesting that Reince Priebus was on his way out—also singled out Trump’s criticism of anonymous sources in a post describing his remarks about the media. Those comments also featured prominently in CPAC reporting from other sites, including the Daily Caller, which set them side by side with Steve Bannon’s similar assertions from the day before. HeatStreet, for its own part, noted, “In what is sure to be the most controversial segment of his speech, Trump even attacked the First Amendment, calling on journalists to reveal the names of anonymous sources.”
In addition to its multiple articles on Trump’s speech, Breitbart ran several on Bannon’s. One, headlined, “The New Yorker: ‘How Steve Bannon Conquered CPAC and the Republican Party,’ ” quotes at length from a Ryan Lizza article. Another headline on the site declared “Krauthammer on Bannon at CPAC: He Showed He Was ‘the Brains of the Operation.’ ” A third post by Breitbart’s own Lee Stranahan offered similar praise for Bannon, who previously served as executive chairman of Breitbart News.
LifeZette, meanwhile, took Trump’s address as an opportunity to revisit his prior appearances at the conference. “In all four [past] speeches, he offered a glimpse of the bold ideas and agendas that Establishment Republicans were hesitant to embrace once he launched his presidential campaign in 2015,” the publication wrote, proposing that Trump had laid out a relatively coherent set of positions over the years.
Posts about Trump’s speech were widely shared from conservative Facebook pages:
