At the 2024 Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) held outside of Washington D.C. last week, Donald Trump and his cronies outlined their anti-immigrant police state agenda to a warm reception by the far-right audience, including neo-Nazis who were apparently welcomed by the organizers.

In an article headlined “Nazis mingle openly at CPAC, spreading antisemitic conspiracy theories and finding allies,” NBC News reported that while “the presence of [Nazis] has been a persistent issue at CPAC,” organizers in “previous years... ejected well-known Nazis and white supremacists such as Nick Fuentes.”

This year, however, “racist conspiracy theorists didn’t meet any perceptible resistance at the conference, where Donald Trump has been the keynote speaker since 2018.”

The report noted that at a “Young Republican mixer” this past Friday, a “group of Nazis who openly identified as national socialists mingled with mainstream conservative personalities, including some from Turning Point USA, and discussed so-called ‘race science’ and antisemitic conspiracy theories.”

NBC identified one of the Nazis as Greg Conte, who “attended the deadly 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia.” Another Nazi, Ryan Sanchez, “took photos and videos of himself at the conference,” while “attendees in Sanchez’s company openly” used “the N-word.”

Earlier this month, Sanchez participated in the “Take Back our Border” rally in Yuma, Arizona, where he was interviewed wearing a Brownshirt, black tie, and a leather jacket with a Totenkopf skull.

The open embrace of Nazis at CPAC underscores the ongoing transformation of the Republican Party into a fascist organization that sees little need to maintain a pretense of “democracy.”

This was made explicit during a panel discussion featuring Steve Bannon and Jack Posobiec. The latter began the discussion by stating, “Welcome to the end of democracy. We are here to overthrow it completely. We did not get there all the way on January 6, but we will endeavor to get rid of it.”

Bannon, Trump’s chief White House strategist during the first seven months of the former president’s term, replied, “Amen.”

The conference featured speeches from international far-right politicians, including Santiago Abascal (Spain’s Vox Party), Nigel Farage and Liz Truss (Britain) and Jay Aeba, chairman of the Japanese Conservative Union.

The fascistic president of El Salvador, Nayib Bukele, gave a speech in which he railed against “globalism” and warned of “dark forces taking over your country.”

A day after meeting with US Secretary of State Antony Blinken, Argentine President Javier Milei went to CPAC and embraced Trump, who urged Milei to “Make Argentina Great Again.”

The CPAC conference opened last Wednesday and concluded Saturday night with Trump delivering the keynote speech hours before polls closed in the South Carolina Republican primary election.

Trump entered the primary the heavy favorite and continued to rack up delegates, beating his former UN ambassador and two-term South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley by some 150,000 votes. While decisive, Trump’s margin of victory, just over 20 percentage points, was less than expected. Many polls had Trump winning by 30 percentage points or more.

To the delight of the Nazis in attendance, virtually every speaker at CPAC highlighted his or her anti-immigrant and racist credentials. In a panel featuring North Carolina Republican Rep. Dan Bishop, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton and Trump’s former policy adviser and White House speechwriter Stephen Miller, the latter laid out plans to federalize the National Guard and deploy the regular army to carry out mass deportations.

“[T]he immigration issue is extremely simple,” Miller said. “The simple part is seal the border, deport all the illegals.”

He continued:

You would establish large-scale staging grounds for removal flights. So you would grab illegal immigrants and then you move them to the staging grounds, and that’s where the planes are waiting for federal law enforcement to then move these illegals home...

You deputize the National Guard to carry out immigration enforcement and then you also deploy the military to the southern border, not just with a mission to observe, but with an impedance and denial mission. In other words, you reassert the fundamental constitutional principle that you don’t have a right to enter into our sovereign territory to even request the asylum claim. The military has the right to establish a fortress position on the border, and to say, “No one can cross here at all.”

Rep. Dan Bishop concurred:

The significance of what you just said Stephen, and all the things you just laid out, we got to have a president to do it, but you also cannot proceed in a way in which you are tentative and unsure. The idea that you deport everybody... that’s just cause. It’s obvious because that’s what has to occur.

Bishop concluded by declaring that “Our nation’s survival depends on that sort of aggressiveness in asserting ourselves.”

In a separate panel featuring Rep. Mark Green (R-Tennessee) and Tom Homan, former acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) under Trump, Homan advocated bombing Mexico to stop “the cartels.”

“[Trump] will abolish the criminal cartels in Mexico,” Homan said, adding:

He will take them on, because the country of Mexico is not doing a damn thing about the cartels who have killed more Americans than any terrorist organization. President Trump will declare them a terrorist organization, he will send a Hellfire rocket down there and he will take the cartels out.

Homan reiterated, “There has to be an historic deportation operation… It has to be that way, there is no other option... It’s the right thing to do.”

The CPAC conference served not only as an extended Trump campaign event, but also as an unofficial vice presidential tryout. Seeking to gain the favor of the Republican Führer, former Republican presidential candidates (including Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina), and current governors and US House members delivered effusive homilies to Trump.

In her speech, the chair of the House Republican Conference, New York Rep. Elise Stefanik, defended Trump’s failed coup, telling the crowd that “like all of you on January 6, I stood for the Constitution and election integrity,” and that “the Democrats unconstitutionally rigged the 2020 election.”

Former Democratic congresswoman and 2020 presidential candidate Tulsi Gabbard attacked the “Democratic elite and their cronies” for taking “steps to remove Trump from the ballot.” She denounced recent court judgments against Trump, calling them a “politically motivated hit job.”

Gabbard went on to attack Haley and hail Trump as a “fighter” who had a “sincere love and concern” for “the American people.” On his Twitter/X account, Trump political ally Roger Stone hailed Gabbard’s speech as “glorious.”

At the conclusion of the conference, a straw poll was conducted asking attendees who they thought Trump should pick as his VP. South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem and entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy came in first with a tie vote of 15 percent, while Gabbard finished third with 9 percent.

In a rambling 90-minute diatribe, Trump warned of “bloodshed, chaos and violent crime if Crooked Joe Biden and his thugs” won the 2024 election.

Echoing the neo-Nazi “Great Replacement Theory,” Trump warned that with “four more years of Biden,” the “hordes of illegal aliens stampeding across our borders will exceed 40 or 50 million people,” and “ruthless gangs will explode even more into the suburbs.”

He once again promised to carry out the “largest deportation operation in the history of our country,” and promised, if elected, to “allow the police to do their job” in “New York, Chicago and Los Angeles.”

Trump defended his failed coup, falsely claiming the 2020 election was “rigged” and that his convicted and imprisoned fascist militia foot-soldiers were “J6 hostages.”

Joe Biden and the Democratic Party have done nothing to hold Trump and his accomplices on the Supreme Court and in the Pentagon accountable for trying to overthrow the government over three years ago. They are currently seeking to attack Trump and the Republicans from the right for their refusal to approve another $60 billion for the US proxy war against Russia in Ukraine as well as their rejection of the White House offer to “shut down” the border as part of draconian anti-immigrant legislation.