The members of the “Trump Tribe of Texas” \u2013 wearing matching gold sequined jackets and necklaces spelling out the president’s name \u2013 were an older crowd. Its founder, Michael Manuel-Reaud, was attending his sixth CPAC and said Iran posed a danger that needed to be dealt with.<\/p>\n
“If there’s a threat for the United States getting bombed with a nuclear bomb, who can say no to that?” he asked. “[Trump] can’t just quit. He’s not going to stop until he finishes.”<\/p>\n
The rest of the tribe agreed.<\/p>\n
“I trust Trump to know what he’s doing,” said Penny Crosby. “I just think whatever Trump believes needs to happen, needs to happen to take care of the job.<\/p>\n
“He’s protecting us, protecting the American people,” Blake Zummo said. “They’re coming for us.<\/p>\n
If conference-goers here have been split over the war, on Thursday they were largely drowned out by vocal group of Iranian-Americans who have been boisterously celebrating the US military operation.<\/p>\n
They chanted “Thank you Trump” during a morning panel featuring two women that had been injured in anti-regime protests in Iran. They filled the hallways with shouts of “regime change for Iran” while holding photographs of Reza Pahlavi, the son of the late Shah of Iran, who was deposed following the nation’s 1979 Islamic revolution.<\/p>\n
In the afternoon, the activists rallied outside the conference centre, waving Iranian lion-and-sun flags from the Shah’s time as monarch.<\/p>\n
“It’s just so refreshing to see… the people of Iran finally having a shot at liberation after 47 years of oppression and tyranny under the Islamic regime,” said Nima Poursohi, who was sporting a “Persians for Trump” T-shirt and a “Make America Great Again” hat with “Persian Excursion” embroidered on the side. <\/p>\n
“No other president dealt with Iran or had even the courage to take a step forward like President Trump has,” she said.<\/p>\n
The outpouring of emotion of Iranian-Americans at CPAC didn’t surprise Matt Schlapp, the event’s organiser.<\/p>\n
“If you were deprived of freedom for a generation, you probably want to be pretty excited to get it back,” he told the BBC. But he said there was “no guarantee” that would happen.<\/p>\n
Schlapp, president of the American Conservative Union, has been running CPAC for 12 years. And he noted that \u2013 Iranian activists aside \u2013 there was a debate over where the war goes from here.<\/p>\n
“Conservatives trust President Trump,” he said. “They give him a lot of latitude. But behind that is some concern about where this goes.”<\/p>\n
That concern wasn’t just expressed among the rank-and-file at the conference. It also spilled out onto the conferences main stage.<\/p>\n
On Thursday afternoon, former Congressman Matt Gaetz warned that, with thousands of new US soldiers heading to the Middle East, a ground invasion of Iran would make the US “poorer and less safe”.<\/p>\n
“It will mean higher gas prices higher food prices,” he said, “and I’m not sure we would end up killing more terrorists than we would create.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The members of the “Trump Tribe of Texas” \u2013 wearing matching gold sequined jackets and necklaces spelling out…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":499669,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[49,50,51,47,52,48],"class_list":{"0":"post-499668","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-headlines","8":"tag-headlines","9":"tag-news","10":"tag-top-news","11":"tag-top-stories","12":"tag-topnews","13":"tag-topstories"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/499668","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=499668"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/499668\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/499669"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=499668"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=499668"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=499668"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}