In politics, power isn’t just about who wins elections—it’s about who shapes the ecosystem in which those elections, narratives, and governing battles unfold. The Conservative Partnership Institute (CPI), a $45 million 501(c)(3) controversial nonprofit nestled in the heart of Washington, has become the right’s command center for that kind of power. CPI fuses movement, media, and congressional politics into a permanent infrastructure: it trains staff, aligns messaging, staffs Congress, launches partner organizations, and operates physical campuses like “Patriots’ Row,” complete with studios, strategy retreats, and legal operations.
It is not merely a think tank or training center. It is a nonprofit functioning as a political party within a political party—offering not just ideas, but real estate, communications muscle, and a disciplined personnel pipeline for the MAGA movement. While it launched quietly in 2017, CPI’s influence exploded during the Biden-Harris years, positioning itself as the institutional backbone of the far right’s opposition to Democratic Party rule. It’s time the left took note.
If we want to move from moments of mobilization to durable power, we need more than message tweaks or better candidates. They need institutions capable of synchronizing movement energy, media influence, and governing power. They need a left equivalent of CPI.
How CPI Became the Nerve Center of the Right
Founded in 2017 by former Heritage Foundation president Jim DeMint and Trump’s former chief of staff Mark Meadows, the Conservative Partnership Institute began as a modest support network for hardline Republicans in Congress. Today, it is perhaps the most influential institution in conservative politics that you’ve probably have never heard of.
In just a few years, CPI has quietly assembled a bricks-and-mortar political machine: more than a dozen properties, including nine Capitol Hill buildings and a $7 million rural campus dubbed “Patriots’ Row,” outfitted with podcast studios, donor salons, training facilities, and retreats for conservative elites. But its real power lies in integration. CPI has become the central nervous system of the MAGA movement—training over 500 staffers annually, hosting 2,000+ events a year, and operating a Capitol Hill studio that books far-right lawmakers and strategists into Fox News and far-right digital media to drive the daily message cycle. It funnels pre-vetted CVs to new members of Congress before they’re sworn in and has incubated an entire constellation of aligned institutions—like America First Legal and the State Freedom Caucus Network—to extend its reach across the policy, legal, and state-level landscape.
This is the level of infrastructure the left has yet to build at scale in national politics. Despite a proliferation of strong organizations and ample funding, progressive politics remains fractured—hampered by issue silos, competing priorities, and a lack of strategic integration. Even the most well-resourced groups tend to operate independently as small businesses, focused on short-term wins or narrow policy fights, rather than feeding into a shared architecture of power. What’s missing is not passion or talent, but a backbone—an institutional layer that can align campaigns, coordinate messaging, and convert movement energy into lasting governing capacity. Without it, the left continues to duplicate efforts, dilute impact, and fall short of building a machine that can staff, sustain, and scale political influence across cycles.
The right’s secret is not superior ideas. It is superior design.
Training the MAGA Cadre
Crucially, CPI builds people as much as policy. It teaches them not just how to write a bill or a press release, but how to be strategists. How to wage war on television and social media, how to book into mainstream and far-right media, how to survive the pressure of Capitol Hill, and how to have one foot in the movement and one foot in the realities of Congress. In other words, it builds ideological durability.
In February 2023, CPI hosted a closed-door oversight “bootcamp” for GOP congressional staffers, training them on how to investigate the Biden administration. The retreat, co-sponsored by Heritage, included sessions on subpoena tactics, media strategy, and deposition techniques—led by former Trump officials, an energy lobbyist, and even a pro-Trump reporter from Epoch Times. Other trainings were more explicit, like the “Oversight Shark Tank,” where staffers pitched conspiratorial investigations to a panel of MAGA insiders.
A progressive equivalent would train housing and health care staffers to run oversight hearings, weaponize media narratives, and draft legislation built to withstand procedural choke points—not just dream up ideas, but see them through the gauntlet of governing. The right has well-known figures like Steve Bannon, Stephen Miller, and Christopher Rufo—operatives who don’t just respond to political conditions but actively shape them, moving seamlessly between narrative warfare, institutional design, and legislative influence.
The left has little equivalent bench to speak of. Progressive lawmakers often scramble to find staff who understand both movement demands and the machinery of governance. Media strategy is reactive. Legislative tactics live in silos. The result is a persistent mismatch between progressive energy and progressive outcomes—an ecosystem built for mobilization, not consolidation or control.
The CPI Theory of Change—And Why It Works
CPI’s theory of change is simple but potent: control the environment in which politics happens—media narratives, movement energy, and political pipelines—and you control the outcomes, regardless of who holds formal office. It fuses three domains most political actors treat as separate: movement, media, and governance.
Movement: CPI creates ideological cohesion through retreats, bootcamps, and a shared institutional identity. Its compounds like “Camp Rydin” serve as training grounds and sanctuaries, forging loyalty and strategy across the MAGA ecosystem.
Media: With in-house studios and a daily pitching and booking, CPI floods right-wing airwaves—crafting earned media strategies and driving a coordinated drumbeat across print, TV, radio, podcasts, and social platforms.
Politics: CPI turns elected officials into amplifiers. It trains 500+ staff each year, drafts their oversight memos, and helps shape their floor speeches—then connects those messages back to the movement and media arms. The result is a closed-loop ecosystem where MAGA officials use the bully pulpit to reinforce the narrative, spark mobilization, and build legitimacy—creating an echo chamber that feeds itself across cycles.
This vertically integrated model acts as the general staff for the MAGA movement—turning grievances into governing power. The left has no comparable infrastructure.
If progressives are serious about governing in an era defined by authoritarian threat—not just mobilizing in bursts—they need an institution built for the crisis we’re actually in, not the one our current infrastructure was designed for. Most of our organizations were built for a different strategic landscape: the post-Obama world of base-building, mass mobilization, and piecemeal policy advocacy. But that’s only one dimension of the current fight.
We now face a second, more urgent reality: an administrative coup unfolding in slow motion. Trump and the forces around him are not just preparing to win elections—they are preparing to dismantle the administrative state, purge the civil service, and rewrite the rules of governance itself. In this context, fragmented electoral campaigns and isolated policy fights are simply not enough. We need a permanent institution—part war room, part strategy lab, part retreat center, part media engine—capable of coordinating across the movement-media-governance nexus.
A place that doesn't just develop values-based talent, but tactically fluent operatives who know how to run a congressional hearing, shape a news cycle, resist a coordinated disinformation attack, and hold a coalition together under pressure. It must integrate media strategy, legislative planning, legal infrastructure, and grassroots coordination under one roof—because in this moment, separation is a liability. And if we want a future beyond this authoritarian drift, that’s the third dimension: planting the seeds of durable democratic power while holding the line today.
It will take investment—but likely less than you assume. Our modest experiment, The Bloc, offers a blueprint for how power actually moves: not through viral moments or moral clarity, but through the machinery behind the curtain—legislative drafters, media bookers, comms strategists, policy aides, legal architects, and electeds rooted in movement politics. The left’s fatal mistake has been treating infrastructure as overhead rather than what it truly is: the operating system of governing power.
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