A color revolution at CPAC

National Harbor, Maryland

Cockburn has been poring over ostentatious Elon Musk fan art, reexamining that guide to which salutes are allowed and playing a mental game of “what’s that nice lady done to her face?” He is, of course, addressing you from the press pen of the Conservative Political Action Conference across the river from DC. The crowd seems older than previous years, with fewer college students milling around. Cockburn feels like the only person who wasn’t in the Capitol on January 6, 2021: he saw a couple of gents in Proud Boy attire rolling around, beers in hand, at 3 p.m. on Thursday — and while on his way in he was behind one recently freed prisoner and his four-month-old service dog in training, Whitney.

In the main arena this morning, Sebastian Gorka recounted how Yale academics now refer to him as “Dr. Gorka,” before treating the room to recently declassified footage of a drone strike on an ISIS leader in Somalia Trump had ordered. “Have you ever met a lib? No one wants to breed with those people,” Benny Johnson said shortly after, before leading the room in a “Trump dance” to “YMCA,” cackling away.

On Thursday afternoon, Elon Musk made a surprise first-time appearance at the conference where he was presented with a chainsaw by Argentinian president Javier Milei. A lot of online speculation has centered on Musk’s choice to wear sunglasses for the duration of his time on stage: Cockburn is opting to be charitable to the billionaire and assuming he did so because the CPAC stage lights are as bright as they’ve ever been.

The conference kicked off with a measured interview between Vice President J.D. Vance and Mercedes Schlapp. Vance implored young men to not allow our “broken culture” that “wants to turn everybody into androgynous idiots” who look, talk and act the same to convince you “you’re a bad person because you’re a man.” Who would have thought that the men of CPAC would need a lesson in how to behave around other men? Vance was less diplomatic on X before the conference, picking a spat with British historian Niall Ferguson over what the VP characterized as Ferguson’s “moralistic garbage” over Ukraine.

While nipping downstairs to get coffee, Cockburn managed to miss former British PM Liz Truss: “Easy enough to do given how long she tends to stick around for,” quipped one journalist as your correspondent returned to his seat. Truss once again has a heavy security detail, presumably to guard her from reality…

A Bannon bash at Butterworth’s

As well as a shortage of young folk, this year’s CPAC also seems shorter on events and parties than usual (please do correct him if he’s wrong). The talk of the town Thursday night was back in DC for a party hosted by Steve Bannon’s War Room at, where else, Butterworth’s, sponsored by, who else, the New Federal State of China. Bannon, the guest of honor, was fresh from his well-received CPAC speech — which featured a rather suspect tribute to Elon Musk. “It’s a glorious day, and we’re gonna end it with a glorious night,” he told the crowd upstage, pledging another shindig later in the weekend in National Harbor, “if we can find a venue.”

Butterworth’s part-owner Raheem Kassam led the room in a chant of “take down the CCP!” Incoming Voice of America chief Kari Lake also spoke briefly: “How many of you have had a weight lifted off your shoulders?” she said. “We are back.” The VOA mogul then said, “I wanna see the hands of our strong alpha American men who are gonna save this country.” She was followed by Caroline Wren, who implored the room to vote for Bannon in the CPAC straw poll for who should lead the Republican Party in 2028.

One recent BW’s change Cockburn noticed: you can now order an Uber directly there, rather than having to enter a street address. This is because the space has been added to Google Maps — “They renamed the Gulf of America after Inauguration Day and then added us shortly afterwards,” Kassam told Cockburn under a dwindling heater out front in the 25°F weather.

Guests snarfed down oysters and made good use of the free bar. Attendees included: Bannon, Lake, Kassam, Wren, Jack Posobiec, Maureen Bannon, Natalie Winters, Greg Price, Will Scharf, Harlan Hill, Saurabh Sharma, Luke Twombly, Libby Emmons, Tara Palmeri, Antonia Hitchens, Damir Marusic, Ben Jacobs, Katherine Doyle and Alex deGrasse, Brent Scher, Mary Margaret Olohan, Robby Soave, Kara Kennedy and Nick Clairmont, Andrew Bernard, Jacob Sullum, Louise Callaghan, Freddie Hayward and Ed Roman.

Natalie Winters’s color revolution

“This crowd has got a lot younger and more stylish,” one journalist noted to Cockburn at Butterworth’s. “It’s really annoying.” The dress sense of the New Right has earned a lot of column inches in the first month of the Trump administration, in publications ranging from New York magazine to this one. Cockburn, for instance, is workshopping a theory that the more right-wing a CPAC attendee is, the longer their coat.

The main lightning rod for fashion talk has been Natalie Winters, War Room’s executive editor and White House correspondent, who filled in for Steve Bannon during his four months in prison. Winters’s outfits have been scrutinized by everyone from the Daily Mail, whose online columnist Kennedy said Winters dresses like she “wants to be a hostess at Hooters,” to Pearl Davis, who said, “you will not gaslight me into thinking that pose and outfit is appropriate.”

The Mail fired the first shot by zoning in on Winters’s clothing choices for her first day at the White House: “a black top with a white collared shirt layered underneath, as well a short, white leather skirt with a chevron print on it.” How dare she. “It was an Alice and Olivia sweater, an Alice and Olivia leather skirt, with New Balance 530s in navy,” Winters told Cockburn this afternoon. “I was only wearing sneakers because I was eco-friendly and walked to the White House — despite thinking that man-made climate change is a myth.”

The War Room scoop monster drew further ire on Wednesday before CPAC for her hot-pink, Legally Blonde-inspired dress, in which she posed for a couple of photos overlooking the Gaylord National Resort with the caption “waist, fraud, & abuse.” Cockburn is substantially more offended by Winters’s use of the Oxford comma than he is by her attire. “That one was from Lovers and Friends; I paired it with your basic Christian Louboutin pumps and a Chanel shopping bag,” Winters said. “After the Daily Mail was being really mean to me, I watched Legally Blonde — on Valentine’s Day, weirdly enough — and then I went to Tiffany’s to get myself the necklace.”

Winters, to her credit, has responded to her detractors with the same Bannon-esque pugilism she demonstrated on her viral appearances on Piers Morgan Uncensored and the whatever podcast: the retaliation crusade she led against the Mail was so full-throttle that they pulled the reporter’s byline off the story — and she swatted away Davis’s broadside by pulling up a picture of her critic in an equally short, equally pink dress…

The hot-shot reporter also broke down her usual style for your intrepid correspondent: “My typical going-out outfit would be a Herve Leger bodycon minidress.”

“Right now I’m wearing flared yoga pants from Splits59, with a pink Beyond Yoga tank for my post-pilates outfit, with a Barbour — layered with a hoodie and a Canada goose. I was recently gifted that hoodie, which is one of my most prized items of clothing. Then one of my favorite clothing brands is called Boys Lie — I’m wearing one of their hats at the moment which is camo and pink. That’s my uniform, basically.”

Winters was blasé about all the blowback: “Amid all the criticisms of my outfits, I caused Mark Zuckerberg’s fake MAGA grift to short-circuit,” she told Cockburn. “They had to attack my reporting in the New York Times, which only led me to do a follow-up story about how he was bankrolling resistance to Trump that was the top trending story on Twitter for a day. That’s on top of a separate scoop that led to articles of impeachment filed against a rogue federal judge. My outfits are the least interesting thing about me!”

As the woman spearheading Washington’s style revolution, does Winters have any fashion tips for the White House press corps she’s just joined? “Ditch the pantsuits.” 

Cockburn is workshopping a theory that the more right-wing a CPAC attendee is, the longer their coat. Winters agreed, “Until you hit creepy trench-coat length — then I might think you’re gay.”

What’s next for defeated Democrats?

Kamala Harris can’t help but shadow former presidents Barack Obama and Joe Biden. While the former vice president won’t join Barack or Joe in the exclusive club of residents of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue any time soon, she is following them to a deal with Creative Artists Agency, one of the top talent firms in America, which recently re-signed Biden after his White House departure.

“CAA will work closely with Harris on her post-White House initiatives, creating strategic opportunities that expand her platform in support of the issues she has championed throughout her decades-long career in public service,” the agency wrote on an Instagram post announcing its latest acquisition.

Harris joins presidents 44 and 46 on the elite agency’s roster, but the CAA clients she is most like at this point are actually Beto O’Rourke and Joe Manchin, who respectively unsuccessfully ran for president and hemmed and hawed about running for president before deciding against it.

The CAA signing is unlikely to impact whatever political decisions Harris has down the road; she is reportedly mulling campaigns for governor of California or for president again in 2028 (a campaign for which completely baseless rumors claim that she will pick Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez as her running mate have already taken off).

Two other defeated Democrats launched a new venture of their own, but haven’t secured a CAA sinecure just yet: former representatives Jamaal Bowman and Cori Bush are launching, you guessed it, a podcast! Bowman and Bush will launch exclusively on Zeteo, an outlet founded by Mehdi Hasan, who recently found himself in hot water for tweeting, and then deleting, “Make American Planes Crash Again.” The new podcast will “dive deep into what’s really happening in Congress and explore the powerful influence of big money,” per Bush. “Baby, I’m still here,” she said in the launch video.