I was skeptical because this is a picture with minimal context:

• What does the rest of the room look like?
• What time was this taken at?
• Who was the speaker, if any at the time?

So on. For context, the Daily Mirror is a dubiously trustworthy British tabloid. I think this screenshot is lousy evidence for CPAC’s attendance. I watched the Mirror’s video too, and it was still a bit hard to gauge the context.

However, I found probably a better representation of this from NPR, whose thumbnail image for CPAC 2026 shows Greg Abbott actively speaking (the event was in Dallas), yet huge swaths of the relatively small conference room are empty.

(Edit: The article also notes that Trump skipped CPAC this year.)