Not long ago, the marquee names would have been right at home on Fox News: Stephen K. Bannon, Tucker Carlson and Roger J. Stone Jr.
But Fox News fired Mr. Carlson three months ago, and Mr. Bannon, Mr. Stone and a boisterous pro-Trump crowd at the Turning Point Action Conference were eager to take shots at the conservative network, arguing that it has not been supportive enough. of former President Donald J. Trump as he seeks to regain the office he lost in 2020.
At the two-day rally, attended by thousands of pro-Trump activists this weekend in South Florida, mention of Rupert Murdoch, the Fox media mogul, as well as the spokesman Kevin McCarthy.
And after Mr. Trump spoke to that crowd Saturday, any of his Republican rivals for the party’s 2024 presidential nomination took the stage at their own peril.
In a speech on Sunday, Mr. Bannon, the former chief strategist for Mr. Trump, who was found guilty of contempt of Congress, suggested that Mr. Murdoch had been using Fox News to promote Republican governors in battleground states to undermine Mr. trump He cited Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, Trump’s main rival in the party, who follows him for approximately 30 percentage points in national polls, as a cautionary tale.
“Get off,” Mr. Bannon said. “Bring him because we will destroy you just like we destroyed DeSantis.”
Mr. Bannon — the host of a right-wing podcast, which he has used to promote election fraud and conspiracy theories — criticized Fox News for its lack of coverage of the pro-Trump caucus and called the political battles of Mr. . “Jihad” Trump. “
“Donald Trump is our instrument for retribution,” he said.
Although Fox News did not carry the event on its main network, it did show Mr. Trump and the other Republican candidates on Fox Nation, its subscription streaming service. A Fox Corporation spokesman declined to comment on behalf of Mr. Murdoch.
Two of the long-distance Republican opponents of Mr. Trump: Asa Hutchinson, the former governor of Arkansas; and Francis X. Suarez, the mayor of Miami, experienced the wrath of Trump supporters firsthand Sunday when they were heckled and booed.
When Mr. Suárez, to whom El Miami Herald reported that he was under investigation by the FBI in a corruption case, stepped up to the microphone, some people in the crowd shouted “traitor”.
He responded by mentioning his Cuban-American heritage and saying that dissenting voices were welcome in America, unlike in the country of origin of his ancestors.
“It’s okay to have a little hate,” said Mr. Suárez Later, he asked conservative activists to participate in his campaign.
Mr. Hutchinson paused as the crowd began chanting Mr. Trump, and one of his biggest cheers came when he mentioned his successor in the Arkansas governor’s office: Sarah Huckabee Sanders, a former press secretary for Mr. Trump in the White House.
Struggling with cross-talk throughout much of his speech, Mr. Hutchinson said Republicans should have respect for people with different opinions.
At the conference, attendees were allowed to attach sticky notes to cutouts of the Republican candidates’ heads.
A man placed one with a homophobic slur in the face of Mike Pence, Mr Trump’s former vice president. Later, it appeared to have been removed. But a series of stickers branding Mr Pence a “traitor” for refusing to annul the 2020 election on January 6, 2021 covered his face.
Over a cutout of Nikki Haley, the former South Carolina governor and Trump’s ambassador to the United Nations, a sticky note read: “Women in politics? Shrink.”
At the event’s peak on Saturday, about 6,000 people packed the Palm Beach County Convention Center to hear Mr. Trump speak for nearly 100 minutes. Mr. Carlson reflected on his firing from Fox News in April.
In a speech on Sunday, Mr. Stone, who had a felony conviction pardoned by Mr. Trump claimed that federal prosecutors had offered him a deal to uncover dirt involving Mr. Trump in a felony and recalled a pre-dawn FBI raid on his South Florida home in 2019 during which he was arrested.
“I said, ‘You can go to hell,'” he said.
