Daily Beast: “Early this month, as Donald Trump delivered his keynote address to the North Carolina Republican Party’s annual convention, the former U.S. president noticed something: His greatest crowd-pleaser of the night didn’t come when he attacked President Joe Biden, trashed Dr. Anthony Fauci, or repeated his lies about the 2020 election being stolen from him. It came when he railed against critical race theory, declaring that it should be banned from being taught to schoolchildren and government staff. In the days after he left the stage in North Carolina, the twice-impeached ex-president delightedly remarked to those close to him that he drew the biggest, loudest applause from the Republican crowd specifically when he started going after ‘CRT,’ according to two people familiar with the matter. ‘He was going to talk a lot about it anyway; now, he mentioned a few times that he wants to talk about it even more,’ one adviser to Trump recalled.”

“The coming days and months should prove no different, with Trump planning on delivering yet another red-meat-hurling speech on Saturday evening, with plenty of time devoted to dumping accelerant on the flames of the culture wars and asserting his continued, solidified sway over the GOP. But his return to the rally circuit also serves another purpose: scaring off potential competition for holding dominant power over the Republican Party, and keeping himself positioned as the 2024 GOP frontrunner. ‘In [recent] conversations that I’ve had with him, he has said that he wants to be everywhere to remind people, not just Republicans, that he’s still in charge,’ a person close to the former president said, paraphrasing Trump. ‘The message is a pretty straightforward one: I am still leading this party, and if you want to try to challenge me for that, it will get ugly.'”