Trump has just finished speaking at CPAC.
Stick with us and we’ll bring you more updates and analysis from the conference.
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One of the biggest moments of applause during Trump’s nearly hour-and-a-half speech to CPAC comes as he mentions doing away with DEI policies.
“I notified every DEI officer that their job has been deleted,” Trump says of government staff working on diversity, equity and inclusion policies.
He says he also hopes to end such practices in the private sector.
He also touts the policies he has instituted to restrict access to medical care for transgender Americans to stop transgender servicemembers from working in the military.
DEI programmes aim to promote participation in workplaces by people from a range of backgrounds.
Their backers say they address historical and ongoing underrepresentation and discrimination against certain groups including racial minorities, but critics say such programmes can themselves be discriminatory.
Trump returns to talking about what he says is one of his favourite topics: tariffs.
“The word tariff is my favourite word in the dictionary,” he tells the crowd to applause.
Trump tells the crowd he was criticised for saying tariff is his favourite word, now he says it’s his fourth-favourite word after words like wife and America.
“We were the richest relatively – think of this – from 1870 to 1913,” he tells the crowd. “That was our richest, because we collected tariffs.
Trump has threatened to impose tariffs on US trading partners such as Canada and Mexico, as well as saying the US will impose reciprocal tariffs on countries who charge tariffs on US imports.
You can read more about that here: What are tariffs and why is Trump using them?
Trump now moves on to talking about another major topic of the week: Russia’s war in Ukraine.
We’re dealing with President Zelensky and we’re dealing with President Putin, Trump tells the crowd.
He hits out at “stupid and incompetent” President Joe Biden for involving the US so heavily in Ukraine’s defence against Russia’s 2022 full-scale invasion.
Europe should contribute more money to aid Ukraine than the US, Trump says.
We should get back the money we gave them he says. “It’s just not fair.”
He says “I think we’re close to a deal” to end the war, which he calls a “horrible situation”.
“It would have never happened” if I were president, he says.
“We’re
working on that,” he says. “I don’t like talking about it because we’re in the middle of
negotiations.”
US officials met Russian officials – without Ukrainians – in Saudi Arabia in recent days to begin peace talks. The meetings came as Zelensky and Trump traded barbs, with Trump calling Zelensky a “dictator”.
You can read more about the history of Trump and Zelensky’s relationship here.
Trump tells the CPAC crowd that government bureaucrats who don’t report to work in person are “fired”.
He says that if he didn’t have to work, he’d be focused on improving his golf game.
One of the reasons people are leaving the federal government is because they don’t want to work in person, Trump claims.
Thousands of government employees at the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), the Pentagon and the Federal Aviation Administration, as well as other agencies, have been fired in recent weeks.
Musk – who is running Trump’s efforts to cut government staffing – posted on social media as Trump was speaking saying all federal employees will receive an email “requesting to understand what they got done last week”.
“Failure to respond will be taken as a resignation,” Musk wrote on X, formerly known as Twitter.
You can read more about what Trump did in this week, including the firings, here.
Trump has turned now to talking about his key adviser Elon Musk.
The president says the billionaire Tesla and SpaceX CEO is a “great character”, and says Musk is cutting “waste, fraud and abuse” with his Doge group, which has spearheaded the effort to cut down the federal workforce.
Trump says people ask what Musk’s official government position is, and tells people he says “He’s a patriot”.
Trump’s talking about migrants crossing the southern border.
The president seems to growl as he says “I couldn’t stand it” – referencing the crossing of undocumented migrants into the United States.
He says this issue was why he “had” to run for president again.
Trump then pivots to another topic that has been a major focus of the first month of his second term, saying the US will soon have “so much money coming in from tariffs”.
He is also met with cheers when he mentions pulling the US out of the Paris climate accords and cancelling Biden-era electric car incentives.
Trump is now talking about his one-time presidential opponent, former Vice-President Kamala Harris.
He claims “nobody ever knows her last name” and as he mispronounces Harris’s first name.
“I’m the only one who ever had to beat two people,” Trump says of Joe Biden dropping out as Democratic nominee and Harris stepping up, as the crowd jeers.
A few minutes later, he says his predecessor Biden was the “worst” president in US history.
So far, Trump is sticking to many of his oft-trod topics as his speech garners applause and cheers in the CPAC audience
The president touts his election win, blasts transgender girls and women playing in girls and women’s sports and praises his newly confirmed cabinet picks.
Looking ahead, Trump says he’s going to build a “lasting” political majority and predicts the Republicans will do well in the midterms.
“The people have given us a resounding mandate” in Washington, and we’re going to use it, Trump says.
He says his administration has achieved more in four weeks than most administration accomplish in four years: “We’ve made a lot of progress.”
Trump starts by repeating some his go-to lines hitting out at “radical leftists”.
He also welcomes the foreign leaders attending CPAC, which include Argentinine President Javier Milei, Poland’s President Andrzej Duda and Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni.
Trump has taken the stage and will be speaking shortly.
Stick with us and we’ll bring you the latest.
Donald Trump is expected to take the stage at CPAC shortly. We’ll bring you all the top lines from his speech – which you’ll be able to watch live at the top of this page, so stick with us.
Merlyn ThomasNorth America correspondent
The crowd here were revved up and excited by the speech from the Trump administration’s so-called border tsar Tom Homan, which was full of profanities and touched on steaming ahead with the president’s immigration agenda.
He ended the address with chants of USA coming from the crowd, waving their arms in the air.
Trump administration border advisor – the so-called border tsar – Tom Homan began his remarks a just a bit ago by using an expletive to say he was not bothered “if I offend anybody”.
Homan, who sprinkled profanities throughout his remarks, attacked former President Joe Biden’s record on the border, saying that even former Presidents Barak Obama and Bill Clinton took steps to secure the border because “they clearly understood you can’t have national security without border security”.
Homan also went after specific law enforcement agencies for what he said was their lack of cooperation on immigration policy priorities, including the police department in the city Boston.
“The police commissioner of Boston, you said you’d double down on not helping law enforcement of ICE. I’m coming to Boston, I’m bringing hell with me,” Homan said.
Merlyn ThomasBBC Verify
The main room here it CPAC is buzzing and crammed full with the crowd excited ahead of President Trump’s speech.
This conference has long been a church for a wide range of Republican faithful. Now seems to have been fully subsumed by MAGA Republicans – who seem to be more excited about being supporting President Trump in particular than the Republican Party as a whole.
Earlier, White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller spent his time speaking at CPAC today touting Trump’s agenda in his first 30 days back in the White House.
Miller, who also worked for Trump’s first White House, told the crowd that the entire federal bureaucracy “works for President Trump and not the other way around”.
The comments come in the wake of the administration’s ongoing efforts to drastically cut the federal workforce.
“He is the elected head of our government,” Miller said in response to any potential critics.
He went after Democrats for expressing concerns about democracy under Trump, saying the president is “the one saving our constitution”.
“Any federal bureaucrat who defies the lawful orders of this president will be fired,” Miller told an enthused crowd.
Merlyn ThomasNorth America correspondent, reporting from CPAC
Deborah Yanna is here at CPAC, she says, supporting President Trump because he is going to “make America sparkle again”.
She was a delegate for the midwestern state of Iowa last summer’s Republican National Convention – where Trump was officially named the presidential nominee for his party. She brought her her personalised sequin jackets – which is displaying at CPAC today – to that gathering as well.
Her own sequin-studded jacket she’s wearing today reads “Big Mac Daddy” and “Make Fries Great Again”.
President Donald Trump has just departed the White House to head to CPAC in suburban Washington.
He briefly spoke to reporters outside as he left, telling them he’d address their questions in his speech on stage.
“I’m going now to make
a speech at CPAC so I think we’re going to include a lot of your subjects and I know it’s going to be covered by all of you. And
so I’ll see you at CPAC,” he said.
International conservative breakout star Javier Millei, president of Argentina, spoke at CPAC this morning.
He compared government spending cuts he has made in Argentina to those the Trump administration is making in the US.
“Reviewing office by office, keeping what is working and discarding the rest,” he said, according to an English translation of the remarks he gave in Spanish.
“That’s why we gave him a chainsaw like us,” Millei said referencing his Thursday appearance at the gathering in which gifted billionaire US presidential advisor Elon Musk a chainsaw, which he wielded on stage.
Milei also told the crowd there would be a phase two to the government cuts he has introduced in an effort to “shrink the state by returning to the people the wealth that should never have been taken away from them”.
The Argentine leader said a free trade agreement between the US an Argentina is under negotiation: the deal would be “mutually beneficial and that does not burden the shoulders of Argentine producers, nor those of the Americans”, he said.
The main event at the Conservative Political Action Conference today is when US President Donald Trump takes the stage at 14:30 ET (19:30 GMT)
But there’s a full slate of speakers at the event. Let’s take a look at some of the major names.
