Former Republican congressman Charlie Dent couldn’t find enough bad things to say about what went down at CPAC over the weekend. Between Donald Trump admitting that he labels any polls that aren’t a win for him “fake” and Donald Trump Jr. trying—and failing—to get a laugh out of the crowd (which in and of itself was actually really funny), Dent seemed to nail the general atmosphere of the gathering when he referred to it as a “freak show.”
As Raw Story reports, while discussing this weekend’s bananas Conservative Political Action Conference on CNN’s New Day, Dent—a GOP member who served Pennsylvania’s 15th congressional district from 2005 to 2018—keenly observed that “CPAC has always been kind of an odd gathering and now it’s been taken over by a bunch of radicals, anti-vaxxers. It’s a land of misfit toys, it’s a political freak show, it’s like the Star Wars bar. This is just bizarre.”
Putting aside the fact that it’s technically a cantina, not a bar… Dent had plenty more to say about just how wacky his former colleagues have gotten during and following the Trump years:
“The fact that we’re celebrating that we’re not meeting our vaccination targets is actually reprehensible, we all know this. I can’t imagine—serious people are not showing up to this thing. I mean, look what happens. they have their stupid straw poll and have a ranked-choice straw poll too apparently now. But this whole group it’s not serious and one doesn’t know if you should laugh or cry or be alarmed about what we’re watching and witnessing at these CPAC gatherings.”
But it seems like CPAC has always attracted the nuttiest Republicans. “I stayed away from them when I was in Congress,” Dent said of the kind of folks who count down the days to CPAC. “I never wanted to be associated with some of the types who showed up there, but again, it says a lot that serious aspirational presidential [Republican] candidates weren’t there.” Clearly, Dent doesn’t see Trump as a “serious aspirational” candidate.
You can watch the full clip below.
(Via Raw Story)