2024-03-12 16:35:56
Donald Trump Might as well get his name in big gold letters on the Republican National Committee. He owns the joint now.
It was clear after his new loyalists – the former chairman of the Democratic Republic of North Carolina Michael Whatley to the bride Lara Trump– Started cleaning house with dozens of layoffs. The explanation given for the reported purge? Get rid of the former chair Rona McDanielTrump’s “bureaucracy” blamed her for the RNC’s money problems. “This is streamlining the Republicans,” Chris Lecivita, a senior Trump campaign adviser who now serves as the RNC’s chief operating officer, told the Associated Press. But that’s just a polite way of saying “all the old anti-Trump cells have to go,” as a far-right activist Charlie Kirk put it Monday, when the 60 reported shootings went off.
“MAGA now controls the Republican Party!!” A Trump ally Marjorie Taylor Green cheered.
Let’s be honest here: The RNC accepted MAGA long before Trump pushed McDaniel out. It yielded to him during his presidency, contributed to his legal bills afterward, and let him scuttle his 2024 primary, which McDaniel herself actually announced after the first two contests in Iowa and New Hampshire in January — two months before Trump’s final opponent. standing, Nikki HaleyIn fact, cancel her offer.
And yet, McDaniel’s RNC still wasn’t tropical enough for him. If his campaign and the RNC worked side by side in the past, they now work more or less as one entity: “We don’t play games,” Lara Trump said Earlier this month, ahead of her big promotion. “There is no person more loyal to Donald Trump and the Make America Great Again movement than this person you are looking at here – me.”
“There will be no funny business,” she insisted.
However, being a Trump establishment, there is no doubt that there is abundance of funny business — including Lara Trump’s stated plan to use RNC donations to help the son-in-law discharge his massive mountain of legal debt: “I think it’s a big deal for people,” she said recently.
Of course, the former president doesn’t have much to pull out of the piggy bank right now: The party is coming off a terrible fundraising year in 2023. It also fell short in five-year election cycles: 2018, 2020, 2022, and 2023. “There will probably be some changes,” Trump said in February, effectively counting down McDaniels’ days. But Trump has been the biggest cause of the party’s struggles, and an apparatus made up entirely of his yes-men hardly seems likely to improve its fortunes.
Again, Trump has never really cared about government, beyond the ways it can serve his interests. Now, it seems that it will exist to do only It. Let this be a clarion call to all the anti-Trump Republicans still holding out hope that there is room for them in the party tent: Trump is the establishment now. Everyone else, as Lara Trump put it, “is welcome to leave”—and should, if they don’t want him to take over the government the way he has the RNC.
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