Gay GOP group GOProud is pushing a
Donald Trump write-in campaign at the Conservative Political Action
Conference (CPAC), which opened Thursday.
Trump accepted a last-minute invitation
to address the crowd on the convention's opening day.
The real estate mogul told attendees
that he would decide on a presidential run by June. He said he's
considering a bid because the United States has become “the
laughingstock of the world.”
Trump was booed when he said CPAC
favorite Ron Paul could not get elected. (The video is embedded in
the right panel of this page.)
GOProud, the
gay Republican group whose co-sponsorship of the event sparked a
boycott by social conservatives, told POLITICO that bringing in
Trump and campaigning for him as a write-in candidate was not a media
stunt.
“We asked Mr. Trump to come this year
because we wanted to do something positive,” said Christopher
Barron, the group's chairman. “The write-in Trump thing is our way
of saying thank you to Mr. Trump.”
“Of course bringing Donald Trump to
anything is going to bring media attention,” he added. “It's
bringing media attention to GOProud, it's bringing attention to CPAC,
it's bringing media attention to the conservative movement and it's
bringing attention to the conservative issues that Mr. Trump talked
about in his speech.”