Trump’s daughter-in-law, Lara Trump, and N.C. GOP chairman Michael Whatley were elected to lead the RNC last week.
Taking the stage before members of the Republican National Committee in the Hilton Americas-Houston ballroom Friday morning, newly elected RNC co-chair Lara Trump waved a $100,000 check in the air to suggest that under new leadership, the national party’s best fundraising days are ahead.
“We’re going to make sure that every single penny of every dollar raised goes towards one goal, which is winning,” former president Donald Trump’s daughter-in-law told members after clinching her new position via unanimous voice vote.
The Trump team is optimistic that in joining forces with the RNC’s newly elected chairman, Michael Whatley, Lara Trump will help rebrand the national party’s image and revamp fundraising during a presidential election year. But with eight months to go until November, both Trump-endorsed co-chairs face steep challenges ahead.
The goal in promoting the GOP presidential nominee’s daughter-in-law to national party leadership is to elevate her as the most high-profile and recognizable co-chair since the job’s existed. As one Trump official described it to NR, when she’s doing fundraising calls it will help to have “an articulate voice” whom the GOP’s 2024 presidential nominee trusts and who shares his last name.
Meanwhile, people familiar with the matter say that Whatley, a known commodity among RNC members who most recently served as the national party’s general counsel, will be tasked with replicating on a national level the work he did last presidential cycle as North Carolina GOP chairman in helping deliver the battleground state for Trump.
“It’s a great team because now you have somebody who’s very, very close to the Trump campaign, and you have somebody who’s integral to the RNC,” New Hampshire GOP chairman Chris Ager told National Review in Houston. “It kind of bridges the gap between the campaign and the RNC. And now it’s like one big happy family. So I like the concept.”
Unfortunately for many national party staffers, last weekend’s official merger between the Trump campaign and the national party has also led to mass layoffs in the RNC building, including the party’s state and regional political directors, as NR first reported earlier this week. The RNC’s digital and finance teams will also relocate to Palm Beach, Fla., to be closer to the Trump campaign headquarters.
“To clear up confusion, this is one team. There will not be redundancies,” a Trump official told NR the day of the layoffs.
The timeline of Monday’s firings came as a surprise to staffers, most of whom had expected restructuring under new leadership but were caught off guard that the firings took place just two days after new leadership was elected.
These developments come weeks after former four-term GOP chairwoman Ronna McDaniel announced in late February she would resign from her post amid a pressure campaign from people in Trump-world, who had grown frustrated with her leadership over the party’s losing electoral record and poor fundraising numbers. Another sticking point was the committee’s decision to sponsor several GOP presidential primary debates in which Trump declined to participate.
Her resignation came nearly eight years after Trump first tapped her for the position after she helped deliver blue-leaning Michigan for him in 2016 in her capacity as state GOP chair — a reality that, in some RNC members’ view, undercuts the narrative that last week’s leadership elections represented a complete Trump overhaul of the RNC.
“Ronna McDaniel was the Trump choice when she first took office,” Alabama GOP chairman John Wahl told NR. “This is not Trump now taking over the RNC. Leadership of the RNC has been Trump’s picks. This is nothing new.”
The difference, of course, is that the Trump campaign began the behind-the-scenes process of merging with the RNC in February, before he had officially locked up the nomination and while Nikki Haley was still in the race.
Even still, RNC members are optimistic. They also maintain that they are getting assurances from new leadership that the national party will not pay Trump’s legal bills as the committee has in the past. The committee spent nearly $2 million in 2021 and 2022 before he announced his 2024 campaign.
Lara Trump suggested in public remarks last month that GOP voters would be supportive of the RNC paying for Trump’s legal bills, but has since walked those comments back in private conversations with members. LaCivita has also repeatedly insisted to reporters that the RNC is not planning to divert funds to the former president’s legal battles.
“I’m on the executive committee that votes on those kinds of things. So maybe there’s a circumstance way down the road that we don’t know about,” Iowa GOP chairman Steve Scheffler told NR in an interview. “But I take LaCivita at his word, and he said: ‘We’re not going to be doing that.”
A decision to fund the former president’s legal battles could drop the RNC further behind the Democratic National Committee, which already has a cash-on-hand advantage. Trump’s legal bills burned through $51.2 million last year alone. Without the RNC, estimates indicate Trump could deplete the funds of an allied super PAC by July.
The Biden campaign, which had $56 million on hand at the end of January compared with the Trump campaign’s $30 million, recently released its first spot in a $30 million ad blitz that will focus on key battleground states.
Trump and Biden officially won their respective parties’ presidential nominations on Tuesday after a series of additional primary wins. That Trump has become the presumptive nominee in March will give him more time to line up with the RNC and merge resources to take on Biden. GOP strategist Alice Stewart told NR last week this will provide an “immeasurable” benefit to the former president.
In seeking to get its finances in order, the RNC is also reportedly looking at cutting a minority outreach program that launched ahead of the 2022 midterms and saw RNC field staff hosting gatherings and events in areas with significant minority populations. The new guard is poised to slash the program just as the committee was readying to open 40 new centers across the country in communities with large numbers of Latinos, blacks, Asian Americans, Native Americans, Jews, and veterans.
Along with strategic budget cuts, RNC members are hopeful that legacy donors will start flooding the national party’s coffers with cash now that the party has its nominee.
Vermont GOP chairman Paul Dame, one of the few RNC members to publicly express concern about Trump’s eagerness to exert influence over the national party before Nikki Haley dropped out of the race, said he is optimistic about the party’s new leadership, particularly after such a dismal fundraising year in 2023.
“Fundraising was hard for me last year,” Dame said in an interview, in which he suggested that member morale has improved even since the RNC’s winter meeting earlier this year in Nevada. “I think at the Las Vegas meeting, Ronna asked, ‘How many of you had a good fundraising year?’ And there was like one state that stood up.”
Around NR
• Georgia secretary of state Brad Raffensperger writes on leftist activists’ efforts to open the gate to noncitizen voting — and his efforts to push back:
This is the simple and incontrovertible point: American elections should be decided by American citizens. We must remain steadfast in our commitment to the democratic values that have defined our nation for more than two centuries. The protection of our electoral process is not a partisan issue; it is a civic responsibility that transcends political partisanship.
• Dan McLaughlin explains how political calculations will affect Biden’s policy toward Israel and Gaza as long as the war continues:
Joe Biden, like many mainstream Democrats, has traditionally been a supporter of Israel, at least in broad outline. So why do he and his administration keep pandering to progressive anti-Israel sentiment? We know that Biden is a hollow man who lacks the courage to stand up to his own party, and will pander to its factions even when he knows they’re in the wrong and even when he has to sacrifice long-held positions.
• Biden’s State of the Union offers an insight into what the next eight months of pseudo-campaigning might look like, writes Jeffrey Blehar:
The sole act of “outreach” (if you will) to the great American center in Biden’s pitch was his reminder of Trump’s role in January 6. It’s going to feature heavily in Democratic appeals to swing voters over the next several months, and its effectiveness in 2022 is what gives Dem strategists hope that the trick can be repeated. But it is a strangely negative appeal to the people who will decide Biden’s fate: Vote for me not because of what I’ve done for you — those direct appeals are for the Left only — but rather because of who I am not.
• Jack Butler explores whether Biden has given any indication he would actually do anything differently to earn the votes of Trump-skeptical conservative Haley supporters:
It is doubtful. His outreach resembles similar overtures by figures on the left during the Trump era. Their entreaties, in apparent good faith, to conservatives skeptical of Donald Trump take for granted that such conservatives should receive, at best, nothing in return and, at worst, must sacrifice their own principles.
• No Labels has a big problem. It has no candidate, writes Dan McLaughlin, who lays out the difficulties in recruiting a strong third-party candidate:
We’re stuck with Biden and Trump because they have selfishly insisted on running again, Democratic officials couldn’t or wouldn’t give their voters another choice, and Republican voters rejected the strong choices they were offered. One by one, the existing third parties and the independent organizations have failed to step forward. Nobody’s coming to save us.
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