Trump tapped Michael Whatley, the N.C. GOP chairman, and Lara Trump, his daughter-in-law, to lead the organization.
Houston — President Donald Trump’s takeover of the Republican National Committee was made official Friday morning as his handpicked candidates, North Carolina GOP chairman Michael Whatley and Trump’s daughter-in-law, Lara Trump, were voted in as RNC co-chairs.
Whatley, the RNC general counsel who was tapped by Trump last month to succeed Ronna McDaniel, choked up as he took the podium in the Hilton Americas-Houston ballroom, vowing to work “hand in glove” with the former president’s 2024 campaign to defeat President Joe Biden.
The Friday morning vote to install Whatley and Lara Trump at the head of the RNC represents the culmination of Trump’s yearslong campaign to infiltrate and ultimately dominate the GOP establishment, coming as it does just days after he vanquished his last remaining rival in Nikki Haley and secured the endorsements of establishment stalwarts like Mitch McConnell.
In another tear-filled speech Friday morning ahead of the vote, McDaniel told the audience that she originally turned down the job when Trump first approached her to lead the committee back in 2016, the same year she helped deliver blue-leaning Michigan for him during the presidential election. Only nagging from her husband convinced her to take the gig. “I said ‘no.’ And Patrick turned to me and said: ‘Honey, we can do anything for two years.”
Seven years later, she is passing the gavel to Whatley, a familiar face to most RNC members, who spent the morning shaking hands and slapping backs in front of the breakfast line at the Houston hotel. Alongside Lara Trump, Whatley will face tremendous electoral and fundraising challenges to deliver the White House and down-ballot races for Republicans.
In her Friday resignation speech, McDaniel gave the RNC’s newly elected leadership team some advice: Don’t let Republican candidates bury their heads in the sand on the abortion issue, work to attract swing and independent voters, compete with Democrats in early and absentee voting, and don’t engage in GOP infighting that the media so desperately craves.
Today, McDaniel said, the party is engaged in 78 “election-integrity” lawsuits in 23 states.
Whatley and his new counterpart will face massive challenges in ramping up fundraising after a disastrous fourth quarter last year, when the party had just $9 million on hand in November compared with the Democratic National Committee’s $20 million.
McDaniel said in her speech that the party is already turning the corner on fundraising, bringing in $11 million in January and $12 million in February — what the ex-RNC chair calls “the best two months of fundraising the RNC has ever had when we do not occupy the White House.”
Members have long insisted that Democrats’ control of the White House and the Senate has given them an early cash advantage in the 2024 cycle, and that the drag in fundraising for the GOP was mostly due to a contested GOP presidential primary. Now that the party has its effective nominee, they say, the money will start flowing into the RNC’s coffers.
“I believe that our traditional legacy donors are going to be back with us in the coming months,” Virginia GOP chairman Rich Anderson said in an interview ahead of the vote.
Top of mind for members is whether the new leadership team will use the party to pay for Trump’s legal bills, as he continues to battle civil and criminal cases through November. Chris LaCivita, who will now serve as both as the RNC’s chief operating officer and as senior adviser to the Trump campaign, has said that he has no plans to do so, though Lara Trump expressed an openness to the idea just weeks ago.
“That’s why people are furious right now. And they see the attacks against him. They feel like it’s an attack not just on Donald Trump but on this country,” she said. “So yeah I think that is a big interest to people, absolutely.”
“What I have heard from the Trump team is that’s not their plan,” Anderson said. “I haven’t had a lot of discussion with them to really get inside of their heads but some people on his team have said: ‘No, there’s no expectation.’”
In an interview Friday morning, Tennessee’s RNC committeeman Oscar Brock joked that reporters talk about it far more than members do.
“I serve on the budget committee and I was talking to the chairman of the Budget Committee, and she told us that it’s not in the budget to do it,” he said. “If they want to change the budget, they’ve got to come back through the normal order of business to do those things.”
While it’s not unusual for the party to work alongside the presumptive nominee during presidential cycles, what was unusual this time around was how early Trump tried to transform the RNC in his image, maneuvering behind the scenes to merge the party with his campaign back in February, while ex-presidential candidate Nikki Haley was still in the race.
“Yeah, he was a little premature,” Brock joked.
A far less known commodity in this room is Lara Trump, wife to the former president’s second son, Eric. She has experience in media and charity fundraising and is expected to leave the nuts and bolts RNC maneuvering to Whatley.
Privately, many RNC members told NR that McDaniel is just collateral damage, and that she’s seen as a scapegoat for electoral losses the party has endured in recent cycles under Trump. Some declined to praise McDaniel on the record because they are up for reelection to their state’s committee seats, and praising the outgoing chair is seen as a bad look.
“If you’re the coach of the team, if your players screw up, you’re still the coach,” one member told NR after the vote. “She could have put up a fight, but it wouldn’t help the party or the candidate. So I think she did the right thing. And I think she did it graciously.”