Anti-Trump conservative summit charts alternative to CPAC Maga-fest

Source: The Guardian

Fri 21 Feb 2025 11.00 EST
Last modified on Fri 21 Feb 2025 13.50 EST


While Donald Trump and his acolytes take a victory lap at the Conservative Political Action Conference this week, some of the president’s staunchest right-leaning critics will convene for their own event just 10 miles away.

The Principles First summit, which will be held in Washington from Friday to Sunday, has become a venue for anti-Trump conservatives to voice their deep-seated concerns about the “Make America great again” faction of the Republican party, and the gathering has now grown in size and scope. As its organizers confront another four years of Trump’s leadership, they are stretching beyond party lines with speakers such as the billionaire Mark Cuban and Jared Polis, the Democratic governor of Colorado, to craft their vision for a new approach to US politics.

That vision looks quite different than it did six years ago, when the conservative attorney Heath Mayo founded Principles First. At the time, Mayo, formerly a rank-and-file Republican who supported the presidential campaigns of Mitt Romney and Marco Rubio, hoped to present an anti-Trump alternative to fellow conservatives.

“It started as disgruntled Republicans and conservatives, but that was back in 2019 when that objective seemed to be perhaps more realistic or people were holding out hope that the party would come to its senses,” Mayo said. “Over the years, it’s grown.” The group’s first summit attracted just a couple of hundred attenders in 2020, but the guest count at this year’s sold-out event has increased to about 1,100. “We’ve been surprised actually with the number of people that have signed up to come,” Mayo said. “I think it’s this hunger for new spaces in our politics – new ideas, new faces.”

Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/feb/21/principles-first-summit-republicans-anti-maga