ORLANDO, Fla. — Former President Donald J. Trump was planning to use his first public appearance since leaving office to lash President Biden and insist that there are no divisions within the Republican Party — even as he plots revenge on those lawmakers who have broken with him.
In a speech prepared for his Sunday afternoon address at the annual Conservative Political Action Conference, Mr. Trump was planning to claim leadership of the G.O.P. and isolate his critics in Congress.
“The Republican Party is united,” Mr. Trump was expected to say, according to excerpts shared by his post-presidential advisers. “The only division is between a handful of Washington D.C. establishment political hacks, and everybody else all over the country.”
While much of the party’s rank-and-file remains devoted to the 74-year-old former president, he is viewed less favorably by some Republicans because of his refusal to accept defeat and his role in inciting the Jan 6 Capitol riots.
A handful of G.O.P. lawmakers have been among of the loudest voices urging the party to move on from Mr. Trump, most prominently Representative Liz Cheney of Wyoming, the third-ranking House Republican.
In response, Mr. Trump’s eldest son, Donald Trump Jr., repeatedly attacked Ms. Cheney in his remarks Friday, and the former president was expected to take aim at her himself on Sunday.
Many of his advisers, however, were urging him to use his time onstage in Orlando to deliver a forward-looking address.
To this end, they also released an excerpt in which Mr. Trump will take on his successor in a manner almost identical to what he said about Mr. Biden when he himself was president.
“Joe Biden has had the most disastrous first month of any president in modern history,” Mr. Trump is expected to say, according to prepared remarks. Ignoring that schools remained closed during his own presidency, Mr. Trump also planned to call on Mr. Biden to open schools “right now. No more special interest delays!”
He will also call Mr. Biden’s more liberal immigration policies “immoral” and a “betrayal of our nation’s core values., according to the excerpts.
How closely Mr. Trump chooses to follow a teleprompter script, though, is always an open question. And perhaps never more than more so now that he has decamped from the White House to his resort in Palm Beach, stripped of his social media accounts.
His address has been crafted by two of the former president’s speechwriters in the White House, Ross Worthington and Vince Haley, with input from other advisers.
The former president’s aides had been looking for an opportunity for him to re-emerge and debated whether to put on a rally-type event of their own or take advantage of the forum of CPAC, which has relocated to Mr. Trump’s new home state from suburban Washington because Florida has more lenient coronavirus restrictions.
Mr. Trump and his aides have worked with him on the speech for several days at his newly-built office above the ballroom at Mar-a-Lago, his private club near the Atlantic Ocean. Without his Twitter feed, Mr. Trump has been using specific moments in the news cycle — the death of talk show host Rush Limbaugh and Tiger Woods’ car accident — to inject himself into the news cycle.
Outside of prepared statements, though, he has said far less since Jan. 20 about the future of G.O.P. and his own lingering ambitions.
Mr. Trump’s advisers said he is not planning to discuss a litany of his own accomplishments, and instead will try to recapture some of how he sounded as a candidate in 2016. Mr. Trump has made clear to allies and advisers that, for now at least, he wants to run for president again in 2024, something he is expected to tease in the speech.
Yet even with a built-in supportive audience, not everyone in the party believes that Trumpism is the way forward.
“CPAC is not the entirety of the Republican Party,” Senator Bill Cassidy of Louisiana, one of the seven Republican senators who voted to convict Mr. Trump on the House impeachment charges, said on Sunday.
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