Former CPAC Chair Tells CNN’s Erin Burnett The GOP Is Now ‘A Cult’

Mickey Edwards, a former chairman of the Conservative Political Action Conference, told CNN’s Erin Burnett the Republican Party on display at CPAC in Orlando this weekend bears little resemblance to the party he was a part of until the attack on the U. S. Capitol on January 6 forced him to leave. “The people at CPAC are living in an alternate reality in which facts don’t matter, the Constitution doesn’t matter. They have no principle except whatever their leader says.”

In an interview Friday evening on CNN’s Erin Burnett OutFront, the former Oklahoma Congressman said “the Republican Party really no longer stands for any kind of principles, conservative or otherwise,” Edwards said, comparing the Republicans attending CPAC to followers of dictators around the world. “They’re no different than they are in Hungary...whatever the Great Leader says, they do.”

“The party seems now to be completely following the lead of one man wherever he goes, which is the definition of a cult,” Edwards said. “All that matters is ‘Trump is for this, we’re for this.’ And that includes denying truth, denying facts, denying reality.”

In Orlando, a succession of speakers including Sen. Ted Cruz and Sen. Josh Hawley, who told the crowd that he objected to the Electoral College certification. “Maybe you heard about it,” Hawley said as the crowd cheered. On Sunday, the conference will hear from former President Donald Trump, in his first major speech since leaving the White House.

Asked by Burnett about remarks made by current CPAC chair Matt Schlapp in an interview with CNN’s Jim Acosta, where Schlapp repeated false claims of widespread voter fraud in the 2020 election, Edwards said “he doesn’t have the job I used to have, because when I was the head of CPAC, it was a group that was based on conservative principles. We were strong supporters of the Constitution. We believed in free elections. We believed in democracy. These people don’t believe in any of those things.”