Conservatives gather for CPAC as MAGA fights over Iran war
U.S. President Donald Trump dances on stage after speaking at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) at the Gaylord National Resort Hotel and Convention Center on February 22, 2025 in Oxon Hill, Maryland. (Photo by Win McNamee/Getty Images)
(NEW YORK) — Conservatives from across the country will descend on Texas this week for the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), one of the largest gatherings for Republicans in the year.
But the yearly gathering comes during a fraught time for the party as the ongoing war with Iran has split some of President Donald Trump’s MAGA followers.
And for the first time in nearly a decade, Trump will not attend the event. A White House official told ABC News that Trump could not attend due to his schedule and the ongoing conflict in Iran.
Vice President JD Vance, who spoke at the gathering last year, is also not listed as a speaker.
Since the war began in February, notable Trump allies have publicly broken from him over the conflict. Most recently, former National Counterterrorism Center Director Joe Kent resigned over his opposition to the war, making him the highest-profile administration official to step down over the issue.
Other MAGA allies, such as Tucker Carlson and former Trump adviser Steve Bannon, have spoken out against the war.
Bannon, who will speak at CPAC, said on his “War Room” podcast this month that if the war becomes “a hard slog,” it could cost the GOP voters before November’s midterm elections.
“We’re going to bleed support,” Bannon said at the time.
In an interview with Piers Morgan earlier this month, Carlson said the Iran war was a “betrayal” to Trump’s supporters.
“Breaking faith with those people, those voters, the ones who actually got Trump elected and whose coalition promised a new day in American politics, that’s a big deal. It’s a betrayal on the level that I don’t think people who aren’t in those groups can understand, like, this is heartbreak. This is heartbreaking,” Carlson said.
Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, who is widely seen as a potential 2028 presidential candidate and has been supportive of the war, is also scheduled to speak at the gathering.
A Quinnipiac poll released Tuesday found that a little more than half — 54% — of voters oppose the U.S. military action in Iran, while 39% support it.
But 86% of Republicans overall support Trump’s military action while 92% of Democrats and 64% of independents oppose it, according to the Quinnipiac poll.
CPAC occurs this year as the midterm primaries are underway and comes ahead of the bitter Texas Senate Republican primary runoff between Sen. John Cornyn, who has held his seat since 2002, and state Attorney General Ken Paxton, which Trump hasn’t yet made an endorsement in.
Paxton is slated to address Friday’s Ronald Reagan Dinner, while Cornyn is not scheduled to speak.
Other notable GOP candidates attending the event include former Republican National Committee Chair Michael Whatley, who’s running for retiring GOP Sen. Thom Tillis’ seat in North Carolina, and businessman Nate Morris, who is running for retiring Republican Sen. Mitch McConnell’s seat in Kentucky.
(WASHINGTON) — Sen. Elissa Slotkin, a Democrat from Michigan, said on Wednesday that she is under federal investigation for a video that she and other Democratic lawmakers posted on social media last year that told military service members that they could refuse illegal orders.
“Last week, U.S. Attorney from the District of Columbia, former Fox host Jeannine Pirro, reached out asking to interview me because of a 90-second video that I filmed in November,” Slotkin said in a video posted to X this morning. “This is on top of an FBI inquiry that came in from the counter terrorism division late last year.”
Slotkin, a former CIA officer, first learned that she was being investigated when she was contacted by federal prosecutors — a detail first reported by The New York Times, and confirmed to ABC News by her office.
A spokesperson for the U.S. attorney’s office says they neither confirm nor deny the existence of an investigation. It’s not clear what the basis of the investigation may be.
In the November video under investigation, Slotkin appeared alongside other Democrats who previously served in the military or in the intelligence community telling U.S. service members that they have a right to refuse unlawful orders.
In November, a CIA spokeswoman attacked Slotkin for her participation in the video, saying in a social media post that the senator joins “the ranks of disgraced former intelligence officers” who have abused their “credentials to advance a malicious and disingenuous political agenda.”
The video has been a subject of focus because of separate actions taken by Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth against Democratic Sen. Mark Kelly, who was also featured in the original post on social media. Hegseth last week moved to censure Kelly, which led Kelly to file a lawsuit against Hegseth arguing the censure violated his constitutional rights.
The censure will result in a reduction in rank and Kelly’s retirement pay, a process Hegseth said would take 45 days.
Democrats involved in the video have defended their message as being in line with the Uniform Code of Military Justice and the Constitution.
Much like Kelly, Slotkin vowed that she won’t be silenced by the investigation.
“This president does not represent the views of the majority of Americans. Even if you voted for him, I do not believe that his vision of America is shared by a majority of Americans because this country is worth fighting for,” Slotkin said in her post on Wednesday. “Our freedom of speech is worth fighting for. Our values, our core values are worth fighting for and right now speaking out against the abuse of power is the most patriotic thing we can do.”
President Donald Trump has criticized the Democrats featured in the video, saying in social media posts in November that they are “traitors” whose actions are “SEDITIOUS BEHAVIOR, punishable by DEATH!”
Asked in November if Trump wants to execute members of Congress, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said the president did not — adding that the Democrats in the video are “encouraging [service members] to defy the president’s lawful orders.”
Hegseth said in his censure letter that the video “Undermines the Chain of Command; Creates Confusion About Duty; Brings Discredit Upon the Armed Forces; and Is Conduct Unbecoming an Officer.”
In her video on Wednesday, Slotkin said that following Trump’s posts, threats against her and her family have gone “through the roof.”
“I went on 24/7 security from Capitol Police, I had a bomb threat at my house. My parents were swatted in the middle of the night and my siblings had cop cars placed in their driveways,” Slotkin said.
She said this investigatory move comes from “the president’s playbook.”
“Truth doesn’t matter, facts don’t matter, and anyone who disagrees with him becomes an enemy, and he then weaponizes the federal government against them. It is legal intimidation and physical intimidation meant to get you to shut up.”
President Donald Trump speaks to announce that the U.S. had begun “major combat operations” in Iran, on the day Israel and the U.S. conducted strikes on Iran, Feb. 28, 2026. (The White House)
(WASHINGTON) — An Iranian plot to kill then-candidate Donald Trump was clearly on the president’s mind when he ordered the attack that killed Iran’s supreme leader.
“I got him before he got me,” Trump Sunday night, not long after he announced Ayatollah Ali Khamenei had been killed. “They tried twice. Well, I got him first.”
President Trump was referring to an Iranian plot to kill him during the 2024 presidential campaign. During the summer of 2024, U.S. intelligence believed the Iranian government was plotting to kill then-candidate Trump.
The plot was not tied to the assassination attempts against the candidate in Butler, Pennsylvania, or West Palm Beach, Florida, but Trump was briefed on the threat and additional resources were added by the Biden administration to his Secret Service detail.
When I spoke with President Trump late Sunday night after he had returned to the White House from a weekend overseeing military operations in Iran from his club in Mar-a-Lago, he sounded like a president who is feeling invincible.
He said he believes the military operation has been an unmitigated success.
“Nobody else could have done this but me, and you know that,” Trump told me.
Trump told me the Iranians had made significant concessions in the last round of talks. He suggested his decision to cut off talks those and order the attack was driven in part by the success of the military operations to capture Venezuelan leader Nicolas Maduro, whom the U.S. said was an illegitimately elected president , and to strike the Iranian nuclear facilities last summer in coordination with Israel.
“A year ago, it would have been great to accept that deal for me,” he said on Sunday, “but we have become spoiled.”
Trump told me that someone in the Iranian government reached out to him, but he would not say who.
“I probably shouldn’t tell you,” he said. “One of the few remaining people who are still alive. He doesn’t report to the Supreme Leader anymore.”
Before the attacks, the administration had identified possible leaders of a post-Khamenei Iran, but Trump said they are all gone. Khamenei was killed on Saturday alongside around 40 senior Iranian officials, the Israel Defense Forces said.
“The attack was so successful it knocked out most of the candidates,” Trump said. “It’s not going to be anybody that we were thinking of because they are all dead. Second or third place is dead.”
When asked about his statement earlier in the day that there would be more American casualties.
“It’s war and you have casualties in war,” he said.
Trump marveled at the level of American losses so far, pointing to last summer’s attack and the operation against Maduro in Venezuela as evidence of his administration’s military precision.
“All the things we went through and we lost three people. We lost three,” he said. “But if you ask Iran how many they lost, they can’t count that high.”
U.S. Central Command on Monday said another member of the U.S. military had been killed during the operation against Iran, bringing the total known U.S. deaths to four people. At least 555 people have been killed in Iran in U.S.-Israeli strikes, the Iranian Red Crescent Society said in a statement on Monday.
When asked on Sunday how long the war would go on, Trump said, “We always thought it was a four-to-five-week deal.”
Was he prepared to go longer?
“Sure. We have a lot of ammunition,” he said. “It could also go less.”
A mail-in ballot issued by Hudson County, New Jersey, for the 2024 U.S. general election is seen on September 22, 2024, in Hoboken, New Jersey. (Gary Hershorn/ABC News)
(WASHINGTON) — The Supreme Court’s conservative majority on Monday appeared sympathetic to arguments by the Republican National Committee seeking to limit the counting of mail-in ballots that arrive after Election Day, even if they were postmarked on or before.
Many justices voiced concerns about a Mississippi law being challenged by the RNC for allowing tabulation of absentee ballots that arrive as late as five days after polls close. “Both sides agree there needs to be a final decision by the voter and receipt [of the ballot] — by somebody — by Election Day,” said Justice Neil Gorsuch. “I think the disagreement is receipt by whom.”
For more than a century, Congress has established the Tuesday after the first Monday in November as the day for election of members of the House, Senate, and presidential electors, in specified years.
Republicans argue that the term “election” means both “ballot submission and receipt” by state election officials. Mississippi and several voter advocacy groups defending the state law insist “election” means when voters make their “choice” by marking and submitting their ballots to a mailbox, drop box, or polling place.
“I think if you were looking at the text in isolation — day for the election — your first instinct might be in-person voting on that day, is what that text literally meant,” posited Justice Brett Kavanaugh, who sounded skeptical of the state law.
Thirty states plus D.C. have measures providing a grace period for voters, including military service members overseas, who rely on the Postal Service or other commercial letter carriers, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.
Justice Samuel Alito suggested that allowing each state to set its own policy for late -arriving ballots has created challenges for administering a national election. “We don’t have Election Day anymore. We have election month or we have election months,” he said, skeptically.
Justice Amy Coney Barrett raised the potentially thorny prospect of states allowing voters to recall — or, change — their ballots once mailed. “Would that be illegal?” she asked Mississippi Solicitor General Scott Stewart. He said he was unaware of any instance of that happening.
The court’s three liberal justices were largely united in support of states’ ability to develop their own voting guidelines, pushing back on claims by lawyers for the RNC and Trump administration, which has advocated for “getting rid of mail-in ballots” altogether.
“The Constitution vests the issue of elections in states, unless superseded by Congress,” said Justice Sonia Sotomayor. “If there is a policy he people who should decide this issue is not the courts.”
Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson noted that, despite decades of precedent of states counting some timely-cast but late-arriving ballots, Congress has never sought to override the laws. “The idea of votes being cast and counted after an election is not new,” she said.
Justice Elena Kagan warned that the Republicans’ rationale for eliminating some mail-in ballots could also implicate early voting. “How are you not taking issue with early voting?” she asked RNC attorney Paul Clement. “You say casting and receipt [of ballots] has to be on Election Day.”
“These things have to be consummated by Election Day,” Clement replied.
“Once we go down this road,” said Kagan, “where are we going to end up?”
Most Americans, 58%, support allowing any voter to cast a ballot by mail, according to a Pew Research Center survey late last year. But there is sharp division among parties, with 83% of Democrats and Democratic-leaning voters favoring mail-voting with 68% of Republicans and Republican-leaning voters opposed.
In March 2025, President Donald Trump signed an executive order that attempted to cut federal election funding to states that have mail ballot receipt grace periods, but it has largely been blocked by federal courts for now.
Trump has also been pushing Republicans in Congress to approve the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility (SAVE America) Act, which would — in part — outlaw voting by mail for anyone without a legitimate excuse, such as military service, illness, or disability, making it impossible to vote in person.
In a nod to Trump and fraud concerns raised by many conservatives, Justice Kavanaugh suggested late-arriving ballots might “open up a risk of what might destabilize election results” — namely, a swing in election outcome as tardy votes are tabulated.
“Is that a real concern?” Kavanaugh asked Stewart. “Does that factor into how we think about how to resolve the scant text and the maybe conflicting or 21 evolving history here?”
“I certainly respect the perception,” replied Stewart, a Republican. “I think one thing notable in this case and I think helpful is that there has not been much of a showing about actual fraud from post-Election Day ballot receipt itself.”
Hundreds of thousands of mail-in ballots in the 2024 general election arrived after Election Day but were still legally counted that year across 22 states and territories with a post-election grace period, according to the U.S. Election Assistance Commssion.
Data on which party benefitted more from those ballots is not clear, neither is the impact of any possible changes to mail ballot rules following a Court decision.
Voting rights advocates warn that an abrupt change in policy could lead to widespread rejection of ballots that were properly cast by well-intended voters but experienced unintended delivery delays by the Postal Service or other circumstances.
Republicans insist there is ample time to educate the public on timely submission of mail-in ballots ahead of the November vote and that limiting late-arriving ballots could bolster election integrity.
A decision from the high court is expected by the end of June.
