A keynote speaker canceling at the last minute is a conference organizer’s worst nightmare. Any excuse, whether it’s flight cancellations, a public emergency, or a personal matter, is unlikely to fully satisfy ticket holders.

Steve Bannon had to cancel on the last National Conservatism Conference, but no one held it against him. He was in jail.

With Bannon behind bars, Rachel Bovard, vice president of programs at the Conservative Partnership Institute and board member of the Edmund Burke Foundation, took the main stage at the Capital Hilton in Washington, D.C. for a solo act. “I was supposed to be joined in this session by our friend Steve Bannon, who last week became the latest political prisoner of Merrick Garland’s Committee for Public Safety,” Bovard said.

“The people are snickering and high-fiving about persecuting Steve Bannon,” Bovard continued, are the same people who “celebrate the serial sexual predator Bill Clinton,” and “who protected Jeffrey Epstein—and continue to protect both his murderers and his child-abusing Democrat clients.”

And yet, Bovard told the crowd that “as we gather today for this fourth Conference on National Conservatism, we do so with the wind at our backs.”

“The Left is in a global panic. The corporatist Right is utterly irrelevant,” Bovard explained. Which meant that “national conservatism today is the undisputed majority political coalition and persuasion not simply in the Republican Party and in America, but across the West. We’re not part of the conservative movement. We are the conservative movement!”

Trump is undoubtedly the leader of the national conservative movement, both here and abroad. A growing number of international leaders are considered part of the NatCon coterie—Hungary’s Prime Minister Viktor Orban, Argentine President Javier Milei, El Salvador’s President Nayib Bukele and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, are perhaps a few—but the cutting edge remains with the Trump movement in America. 

Trump’s return to power was an astounding win for national conservatism in 2024, but the victory is not yet complete. Ultimate victory will depend on whether the Trump administration’s nationalist and conservative policies succeed. 

The NatCon movement cheering Trump’s return is far from monolithic. The controversies that galvanize the MAGA base—U.S. policy toward Israel and the Middle East, the Jeffrey Epstein revelations, and the coming age of AI—are also flashpoints for the NatCon coalition. Factions within the national conservative coalition are vying to influence Trump’s course of action on the most pressing issues of the day.

The stakes could not be higher. With these policies taking shape and their success starting to materialize, The Daily Signal offers an inside look at what to expect as NatCon is set to return to Washington, D.C. this week.

“NatCon started as a fringe movement,” Bovard told The Daily Signal. “It was on the corners of the Right. I think it now has become the consensus position, so much so that people that participated in previous NatCons are all now in the administration. And so, NatCon ideas are not just things that we talk about in salons or whatever. They’re actually being tested in the furnace of politics and policymaking in real time.”

“NatCon has pitched its tent in the center of the New Right,” Will Chamberlain, vice president of external affairs at the Edmund Burke Foundation, told The Daily Signal. “It’s trying to be the big tent of the New Right.” Being the center mast of a big tent, however, means the circus is happening all around you. 

Bannon plans on making it to this September’s NatCon. On his “War Room” program, he has been warning the Trump administration of the influence of “oligarchs” from the tech world and Silicon Valley. Elon Musk’s influence was of particular concern to Bannon until Musk and the president’s falling out. After the split, Bannon was one of the first to call for an inquiry into Musk’s immigration status.

Musk was........

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