Donald Trump gave the opening speech at the second day of CPAC 2013, the Conservative Political Action Conference currently happening in Washington, D.C.
While the conference is supposed to showcase the brightest minds and greatest visionaries of conservative thought in the country, there's often a lot of infighting, and Trump dishes out plenty of tough love to his fellow Republicans.
"The Republican Party is in serious trouble," Trump began, before launching into a meandering mix of complaints and admonitions.
He told the assembled Republicans to stop trying to cut entitlement programs, one of the cornerstones of conservative dogma these days. "As Republicans, if you think you're going to change very substantially for the worse Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security in any substantial way and at the same time you think you're going to win elections, it just really is not going to happen," Trump said.
Then, contrary to efforts by John McCain, Lindsey Graham and Marco Rubio in the Senate, Trump warned that immigration reform would backfire. "Every one of those 11 million people will be voting Democratic. It's just the way it works. And you have to be very, very careful, because you could say that to a certain extent, the odds aren't looking so great right now for Republicans, that you're on a suicide mission, you're not going to get those votes," he said.
Trump also lambasted Karl Rove's efforts in last year's presidential election. "When you watch someone who spends $400 million on campaigns with perhaps the worst ads I've ever seen -- they did ads on Obama I thought were being paid for by the Obama campaign," Trump said. "When you spend $400 million and it's a failure and you don't have one victory, you know something is seriously, seriously wrong."
As for Mitt Romney, Trump said he didn't dwell enough on his successes. "I just feel that the Republicans and Mitt -- and I told him this -- didn't speak enough about the things he did, the great things. They were on the defensive instead of taking that offensive."
Trump has always been an iconoclast, but he surely rankled plenty of Republican powerbrokers today.
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