The Republican National Committee voted last week to install a new leadership team hand-picked by former President Donald Trump. North Carolina Republican Party Chairman Michael Whatley is the new chairman; Lara Trump, Trump’s daughter-in-law, is co-chair; and Trump senior campaign adviser Chris LaCivita is chief operating officer. Now the new team is moving to ultra-Trumpify a party apparatus that was already deeply beholden to the aspiring autocrat.
The new RNC chiefs have terminated more than 60 people, by either laying them off or asking them to resign and reapply for jobs, two people familiar with the matter told The New York Times. Several of the people reportedly laid off were senior staffers, including the heads of the communications, data and political departments. According to an internal email obtained by NBC News, a deputy of LaCivita said the goal of the staffing assessment is “to ensure the building is aligned with his vision of how to win in November.”
Turning the RNC into an official cult of Trump could hurt the party — and Trump’s capacity to govern if he were to win.
It’s not unusual for a party to see a shake-up after the emergence of its presidential nominee. But in this case all signs indicate that Trump allies are most likely gutting the party apparatus to help streamline the organization entirely around Trump’s personal interests. Mass layoffs help pre-emptively quell any potential internal resistance to the GOP’s operating solely as an extension of Trump.
The RNC is supposed to support Republicans running for every level of office across the country and help the party grow. It should be expected to achieve its goals through rapid-fire messaging, financially backing candidates up and down the ballot, promoting voter registration and sharing policy information and other kinds of support. But Trump’s hand-picked RNC leaders have suggested that the RNC be nothing but a vehicle for Trump’s re-election. “Every single penny will go to the No. 1 and the only job of the RNC — that is electing Donald J. Trump as president of the United States and saving this country,” Lara Trump said in February.
Trump’s takeover of the RNC also seems poised to make the party’s central organizing committee a glorified legal defense fund for his many alleged crimes. The RNC has already paid some of Trump’s legal bills, but an increasing number of RNC members have recently backed the idea of having the RNC’s campaign arm pay for them continuously. Those members also blocked a resolution proposed by one member of the RNC to prohibit those expenditures once Trump officially becomes the nominee.
In 2020 the RNC was pro-Trump, but it wasn’t pro-overturning the election. Trump reportedly resented the RNC for not challenging the 2020 election results the way he’d hoped. The RNC’s top lawyer discouraged staffers from backing Trump’s false claims about ballot fraud and, in correspondence with another party official, described Trump’s legal efforts to overturn the 2020 results as a “joke.” Expect that to change. The RNC is now far more likely to back election disinformation and invest in efforts to help push Trump’s bogus voter fraud claims. So while party committees typically use voter registration drives to help voters get to the polls to vote for them, don’t be surprised if Trump’s RNC trains its attention on how to disenfranchise the American public.
Turning the RNC into an official cult of Trump could hurt the party — and Trump’s capacity to govern if he were to win. Dwindling money and support for Republicans not named Donald Trump could hurt their odds at winning an election, and Trump would need majorities in both chambers of Congress to pass any meaningful agenda. There’s also the possibility that the RNC will show more overt favoritism toward Republican candidates who are most deferential to Trump and his messaging, without regard for strategy or prioritizing money where it’s most needed to secure majorities or win competitive races.
While it’s unlikely that anyone laid off from the RNC was anti-Trump in any significant way, the layoffs still help impose new ideological and organizational discipline around Trump. The layoffs also serve as a preview of a future Trump administration in which there will most likely be mass firings of civil servants in the federal bureaucracy to remove obstacles to one-man rule. There’s one underlying principle: concentrating as much power as possible in the hands of one man.