The Daily - Trump’s Plan to Take Away Biden’s Biggest Advantage

Episode Date: March 19, 2024

Over the past week, Donald J. Trump has burned down and rebuilt the Republican National Committee, gutting the leadership and much of the staff.Shane Goldmacher, a national political correspondent for The Times, explains why the former president is trying to reinvent such a crucial piece of campaign apparatus so close to an election.Guest: Shane Goldmacher, a national political correspondent for The New York Times.Background reading: Days after allies took over the Republican National Committee, Mr. Trump’s advisers were imposing mass layoffs on the party.The former president is facing converging financial crunches as he and the Republican Party confront a shortfall against President Biden and the Democrats.For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily. Transcripts of each episode will be made available by the next workday.

From The New York Times, I'm Michael Barbaro. This is The Daily. Over the past week, Donald Trump has systematically dismantled the Republican National Committee. My colleague Shane Goldmacher reports that in doing so, Trump is trying to take away President Biden's single biggest advantage in this year's presidential race. It's Tuesday, March 19th. 19th. Shane, can you just describe what has been happening over at the headquarters of the Republican National Committee? I mean, it's been a gutting. I think in a period of about 10 days, the party has gone through really almost unprecedented turmoil entering a general election. Fox News alert.

The New York Times is reporting tonight that RNC chairwoman Ronna McDaniel is set to step down from her role. It starts with the former chairwoman of the party, Ronna McDaniel. McDaniel released this statement, quote, it has been the honor and privilege of my life to serve the Republican National Committee.

Stepping down. Now I'm stepping aside today because I have long promised to put the nominee and their plans for the RNC first. Because she's faced pressure and unhappiness from Donald Trump to stay as chair. Trump then chose the head of North Carolina's Republican Party, Michael Watley, to take McDaniel's place. It continues with Trump picking his hand-selected pick for who he wants to run the party. Michael Watley is the new official RNC chairman. Here just eight months from the general election. Watley, chairman of the North Carolina Republican Party, is a strong Trump ally.

Which includes his daughter-in-law, Laura Trump. Trump's daughter-in-law, Laura Trump, also named RNC co-chair. Who's now been elected as the co-chair of the Republican Party. named RNC co-chair. Who's now been elected as the co-chair of the Republican Party. To be honest with you, it's not a job that I ever wanted or a job that I ever really thought I would pursue, but I also never thought that our country would be in such dire straits, and we truly are, I think.

In the first real full day that the Trump team has keys to the headquarters in Washington, D.C., they arrive with mass layoffs. Wide layoffs, and they really go farther, I think, than many people at the RNC were expected. How mass? More than 60 people were either fired or told that they no longer had their job.

They had to reapply to keep their job in a single day. That blindsided some longtime RNC staff, one of whom told reporters, gutting a committee just before the election seems insane. These layoffs, just to put it in perspective, is something like nearly a third of the total staff that the party has is around 200 people are on the payroll, and about 60 got this kind of a message. Politico is now describing it as less a shakeup, more a bloodbath. And it's not just like the number of people. It's the heads of critical departments, the political department, the communications department, the data department.

This is a full-on remaking of the RNC in Trump's image. There's going to be, guys, very little daylight now between the Trump campaign and the Republican National Committee. And so, look, there's always turnover when a new candidate takes over the party. It is normal to send a couple of your senior staffers over and it's a landing party and you shake things up and maybe you remove somebody or you layer the people who are there with somebody you prefer. This is really an unusual level of change to have been implemented. A top to bottom house cleaning. Yes.

Top to bottom, house cleaning. Yes. So why, Shane, is Trump doing that? Gutting the leadership and so much of the staff of the most important apparatus within the Republican Party right now? Well, I think you and most of your listeners know that we start this general election in a race that Joe Biden is behind. He's losing in the polls. Voters have concerns about his age. They have concerns about his handling of the economy. They have concerns about his handling of immigration, some of the most important issues that voters say matter to them this year. But the one big advantage entering this general election that Joe Biden has is the sort of infrastructure mechanics

of running for president. They have had a 10-month head start on Donald Trump in hiring staff, in raising money, in preparing for the election that's now upon us. And so for Donald Trump, he looked at what existed at the RNC and he said, this isn't good enough. This isn't focused on what I think is going to matter. And I'm going to get rid of these folks, and I'm going to put in my own team, my own imprint from the party chairman down to the sort of foot soldiers in the swing states. We're going to clean house and start over. And it's a pretty big bet. house and start over. And it's a pretty big bet. It's a pretty big bet that he thinks that by deconstructing the Republican National Committee, he can construct something better.

And it's a race. Well, before we get to why Biden has an organizational apparatus advantage over Trump and why Trump felt the RNC needed to be burned down and rebuilt. Shane, help us understand what a party committee, like the Republican National Committee, what role it plays in a presidential race. I think everyone understands that there's a campaign, and there's a little less clarity around exactly what the party committees do in a campaign. I mean, they're absolutely essential to a successful presidential campaign. One of the big reasons is just money, which is the party and the candidate can together raise vastly more money than just the candidate can. Why? So the way campaign contributions work is there are strict limits for federal candidates.

So Donald Trump can raise something like $6,600 from an individual. But Donald Trump, when working with the RNC and state Republican parties across the country, can form this sort of mega committee. And that committee can raise something closer to $800,000 from that same individual. So the scale you get when working with the party is just incomparable to working on your own. when working with the party, is just incomparable to working on your own. So hundreds of millions of dollars will flow through the Democratic National Committee and through the Republican National Committee. So the number one reason that the party matters is money.

There's also institutional knowledge, knowledge in local states. And there's a whole bunch of smaller things, including whether you send mail and how you do various things that parties offer efficiencies. But the number one thing is cash, that Donald Trump and Joe Biden, by being linked in with the party, which he couldn't do until he becomes the presumptive nominee, gives you an enormous cash pile that you can access from big donors. Got it. So with that understanding, walk us through the advantages that the Biden camp has with its relationship to the Democratic National Committee and the disadvantages that it feels like Trump has with the current version of the RNC that he's now gutting.

Well, we talked about how much bigger checks that Donald Trump can now raise. Well, Joe Biden's been raising those checks for months and months. And what that means is that the Democratic National Committee and Joe Biden in their joint efforts, and they are very much joint efforts, they just announced that they have $155 million in the bank as of the end of February.

Now, the Trump team hasn't announced a number for February yet, but at the end of January, the Republican National Committee had less than $9 million, and the Trump campaign had around $30-ish. Wow. And I have to think it's safe to assume that the Trump campaign and the Republican Party did not make up a more than $100 million deficit

within the last month. Yes, that's right. In fact, it's more likely that the Democrats have an even bigger financial advantage now than they had a month ago. And so this money issue is just really a big daunting one for the Trump team at the beginning of this election and something that the Biden team, not only do they have that cash advantage, they've been spending more money along the way. So look, right after the State of the Union, you can see the disparity in money pretty clearly with the pro-Trump super PAC

announcing its first ad buy of the general election, which is something like above $300,000 on black radio. It's a symbolic ad buy. They're going to target African-American voters who are potentially moving toward Trump. And then the Biden campaign says they're announcing their first ad buy, and it's $30 million over six weeks. This is a 100 to 1 ratio. Like money isn't everything.

In some ways, it's especially less important in a presidential race because voters pay so much attention compared to like a house race or a senate race even but if you gave any candidate a chance to have a hundred to one advertising ratio at any point in an election cycle you'd take it you'd absolutely take it okay so the first really important thing to understand here is that democrats and the dnc are just completely out fundraising trump and the rn Absolutely. That is the first advantage. Okay. What else? The second one, I would say, is sort of the actual infrastructure of a candidacy. And look, there's a moment this last week where Joe Biden was starting to travel to these swing states,

and he went to Wisconsin, one of the closest and most important swing states in the country. Arguably one of two of the most important swing states in this election. Absolutely. And what was he doing? He was helping celebrate the opening of some offices. In Wisconsin, Biden and the Democrats are opening 44 offices in the state. And the contrast is that the RNC and the Trump team are giving layoff notices to the people who might be based in Wisconsin and they have to reapply for their jobs. Right. Does an office win you votes?

Maybe not a ton. But in a race that could be tens of thousands, 10,000 votes in some of these states, 44 offices, you start to do the math. And like each person in that office wins 50 votes in the next six months or gets 50 people out to vote. Like it actually starts to make a difference in these really close races. And when you talk to the Biden team and you talk to the Trump team, they agree that the Democrats have an advantage here. And by the way, it's not just Wisconsin. That's just one example. This cascades across most of the swing states where Biden has already built out an entire team in Pennsylvania, in Georgia, in Michigan. And the Trump team are

starting from scratch. Right. Okay. So money and infrastructure are the clear Biden advantages that Trump is looking at with some envy and when he looks at the RNC with some dismay. Yeah. We've talked so far about the National Party, right? The Republican National Committee and the Democratic National Committee. Now, every state has a state party too. Which is related to the national parties. Yes. To a certain degree. Absolutely. Money flows back and forth between them, but the state parties are independent, right? They're supposed to elect the governors of those states and the senators of those states, but these swing state parties are really focused on the presidential election.

And it just so happens that the Republican Party has deep problems in some of the most important state parties in the country. Such as? Let's start with Michigan, which has probably been the messiest situation. The former chairwoman of the state party, Christina Karamo, had misspent money so much so

that the party executed a coup against her and overthrew her. The incoming party chairman, at one point, was getting locked out of his emails. There was a dispute over whether he was, in fact, the rightful chairman. It's gone to court. It's been a whole big legal fight.

The House Republicans had sort of sent money down to the Michigan party a few months ago saying, we've got some really important House races in Michigan. And that Michigan Republican Party spent it on other things. And House Republicans are like, what are you doing? They sent this letter that was just in legal terms, like really a crazy letter saying, you are blowing our money. It's like, you don't even want to elect Republicans. What are you doing? So like Michigan, that's one state. Let's take Georgia, another one of the most important swing states.

like Michigan, that's one state. Let's take Georgia, another one of the most important swing states. The former party chairman was among the people who organized this sort of fake elector scheme to back Donald Trump in 2020 when he'd lost the election. Well, he's among the people who've been indicted for his role in that. And before he left the state party chairman, he indemnified himself and all the other fake electors. So I think it's $1.3, $1.4 million of the Georgia Republican Party's funding so far has gone to pay the legal fees of the people involved in that scheme, including the former party chairman. That's less money on organizing. It's less money on all kinds of things.

In Nevada, another important swing state, the party chairman also faces an indictment. In Arizona, another important swing state, the party chairman also faces an indictment. In Arizona, another important swing state, there was another fight and a resignation over who was in control of the party. Again, it happens that the Republicans have these problems at these state parties in several of the most important states in the country. And it sounds like you're saying that this only compounds Trump's problems at the Republican National Committee because if you have a kind of tattered and frayed national political apparatus, you would like to have a very strong state party apparatus to reinforce it. You're saying that clearly does not exist for Trump.

In some of the most important states, Trump now has none of the above. But it's worth noting that in some of these states like Georgia, the problems here are in some sense problems of Trump's own making, right? These are people who tried to help Trump win, steal the 2020 election, and now they're facing legal jeopardy because of it. So they have proven their allegiance to Trump, you could argue,

but they are now a problem for the campaign and its infrastructure nonetheless. Yeah, it's a strange situation, but that's absolutely right. Okay, so put this all together, and it seems like you get to a place where Trump may be justified in doing what he just did, which was kind of inflicting this pretty traumatic set of changes over at the RNC. You can see why the Trump team could look across the Republican landscape and say, yes, we want to start over. We have time to clean house and start over and make this big bet that we can build something better.

But it is a bet. It's a big bet that we can build something better. But it is a bet. It's a big bet. We'll be right back. Shane, before the break, you made very clear Republicans do have serious organizational disadvantages. The question is, will Trump's wrecking ball strategy actually fix that problem? I mean, we don't know the answer to that question yet. We do know that the strategy comes with some downsides, right? That there was work that was happening that is stopped or paused, that there are people who were going to be doing political work or other types of work who are now spending their time justifying their jobs

or reapplying for their jobs or onboarding new people, which can take time. It can take weeks. And you don't have that much time over the course of an election, especially one where you are beginning less organized than your opponent. I'm curious what kind of work has been most impacted by these layoffs. There's one really important program that the chair of the Republican Party, who Trump just had removed, Ronald McDaniel had put into place, to try to get Republicans to start voting early again.

Right, despite the fact that Trump in 2020 told Republicans that this wasn't a priority because he was busy denouncing mail-in ballots as a corrupt function of the Democratic Party. And she has spent years trying to fix that message to say to Republicans, guess what? Republicans for years had benefited from early voting. They would get their voters out early and then they could go focus on the folks who are less likely to vote and get them out to vote. Now, the new chair that Trump has just brought into the Republican Party is pretty clearly not as focused on this issue. Michael Whatley, the new chairman,

came from North Carolina where he ran the party last cycle. And one of the reasons that Trump was drawn to him is that he has been a promoter of this idea that there's massive voter fraud and yet you have to fight it. And it certainly suggests that they're moving their emphasis

back to this idea of voter fraud. And so this is one of the changes that is coming about for the party, maybe not for the better for them this fall. Okay, so the reality of this house cleaning when it comes to the person leaving the Republican National Committee is that it could end up being a setback on the very important logistical and organizational question of getting Republicans to vote early and vote by mail. Yes, it could. Okay, I want to turn to the larger question of who Trump is putting at the RNC as he is getting rid of all these folks and bringing his new team in. And the one that stands out the most, and you mentioned it at the very beginning of our conversation,

is Trump's daughter-in-law. We don't think in American politics of generally putting our family in positions of huge prominence within party apparatus. No. And I think it's so important because it speaks to the symbolism of the complete and total takeover of the Republican Party by Donald Trump. Not only is he the presumptive nominee now, he's putting a family member at the decision-making table of the party as co-chair. And look, this isn't a shock, right?

Donald Trump had Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner in key roles at the White House. Fair enough. You had Jared Kushner serving as sort of the quasi-chairman of his 2020 campaign, but he didn't have an official role in the party. And so she's important in that regard. And I've actually heard that people are already responding in terms of small donations to her name, right?

The Republican base is so excited for Trump that they want to give to any Trump. That's interesting. That adds to the appeal of giving to the RNC for some Republicans. The party said that the first weekend after she was there was the strongest weekend for online fundraising that they had had since 2020. And she's gone on Fox News and said that she's already gotten $2.7 million in pledges of donations now that she's the co-chair of the party. But at the same time, there would seem to be a fine line between installing people at the Republican National Committee who are loyal to Trump and installing people at the Republican National Committee who are incapable of anything first things that Laura Trump said when she was given this new appointment was that she was open to using RNC funds to pay Donald Trump's legal bills and suggests that she's truly only thinking about Trump versus any version of a RNC that has some objective distance from Trump.

Now, she's backed away from the legal fees. She said that the party won't now, in fact, pay for his legal fees. But you're exactly right that she and the other team that have gotten there have said the party now exists to elect Donald Trump. Now, you could think of the Republican National Committee of having a broader purpose and helping down ballot races. They've made the argument, you help Trump, then a rising tide lifts all boats. The rest of the boats are the rest of the Republicans out there in the sea. We're going to lift Donald Trump, and that's what our focus is going to be.

And just to be clear, this is or isn't unusual because you have made clear that the Democratic and Republican committees do exist to a certain degree to get their party's nominee for president elected. But is this level of integration and kind of loyalty, daughter-in-law, co-chair of the party, is that usual? No, this is really unusual. And look, you only have to look as far back as Donald Trump's first race in 2016

when he was a sort of up-and-coming candidate who didn't have political experience. And when he became the presumptive nominee that year, he arrived at the Republican National Committee headquarters and found professionals who knew what they were doing. And he integrated into the existing party apparatus. And in fact, empowered them to run much of his campaign. Eight years later. They flipped the entire direction of it all. The campaign is now completely running and directing the party.

Look, it's normal to send staff to start taking over the functions of the party. This is how we want it to be done. It isn't common to replace the chair. And in fact, I look back and it has been 30 years since a Republican nominee swapped out the party chair for someone of their choosing in an election year. So this is an unusual setup all around.

The question that's still unresolved in my head, Shane, is whether creating a Republican National Committee with this level of loyalty and, I guess, emotional and ideological integration with Trump's mission and thinking and campaign is, is that the best strategy for Republicans and Trump to catch up with Biden and the Democratic National Committee? And I know it's early, but just based on your reporting, does this feel like a potentially winning formula for catching up? You know, it's so hard to answer that question, but I would say that for the Trump team,

they're confident. Donald Trump has entered the 2024 race with a different level of confidence in his own decision-making and his own political instincts than he had when he ran in 2016, and then even when he ran in 2020. That's interesting. And this feels like a bet, and his team's bet that they know best. Shane, I want you to play with this proposition. We started this conversation by you saying Biden's biggest strength was organizational. But thinking about everything you're saying here, it feels like Trump has eight months to figure out how to integrate the RNC and his vision of it into his campaign, and that it's largely doable. And if you're Trump, wouldn't you rather

have that challenge than Biden's current set of challenges, which feel more intractable. Widespread disapproval of him from polls, disillusionment from young voters, voters of color, and the entire conversation about age that surrounds him in this moment, that seems like a bigger hurdle than putting the right people in at the RNC and raising a bunch of money over the next few months.

That's definitely the way the Trump people view it. They admit that they're behind on some of the mechanics and infrastructure as a solvable problem. They think they can close the gap in the coming months. And that even if they can't, they think that their message is going to be more resonant with the American people this year

than Joe Biden's message. Of course, that's not how the Biden people see it. They think that in the coming months that the polling disadvantage he has right now, that that's going to erode or disappear or flip entirely, that voters are going to start to focus in on Trump's weaknesses, on the things they didn't like about him when he was president before, and some of the more radical things he's proposing if he becomes president again, that the politics around the issue of abortion have changed dramatically, and that this is the first election since January 6th, and that democracy itself is something that voters are going to think about. What I would tell you is that as boring as the idea of state party apparatuses and financial advantages sound,

that if this election is anywhere near as close as the last two have been, which is thousands and tens of thousands of votes in just a couple of states, that money and mechanical advantages is exactly the kind of thing that can make the difference between winning and losing, the kind of thing that can make the difference between winning and losing, which is why it's so urgent for the Trump team to make changes and close the gap and for the Biden people to press their advantage in the coming months. Well, Shane, thank you very much. We appreciate it. Thank you. We'll be right back.

Here's what else you need to know today. On Monday, Trump's lawyers said that he had failed to secure a bond that would guarantee payment of a nearly half-billion-dollar court judgment against him in New York, despite negotiations with 30 different bond companies. Trump owes New York State more than $450 million, stemming from a civil case in which the judge found he had lied about the value of his properties for years. Unless Trump pays the money or secures a bond for it within the next week, New York State may begin to seize his assets. And in closely watched oral arguments, a majority of Supreme Court justices seemed ready to reject a Republican-led

attempt to prevent the government from pressuring social media companies to remove posts that it deems dangerous to the public. The case revolves around a claim made by Republicans in Missouri and Louisiana that the Biden administration has violated the First Amendment by trying to censor social media companies. But most of the justices appeared convinced that government officials should be able to communicate with tech platforms about problematic posts related to issues like public health, national security, and elections. Today's episode was produced by Michael Simon-Johnson and Asta Chaturvedi,

with help from Muj Zaydi. It was edited by M.J. Davis-Lynn, with help from Lexi Diao, contains original music by Marian Lozano, and was engineered by Alyssa Moxley. Our theme music is by Jim Brunberg and Ben Landsberg of Wonderland. That's it for The Daily. I'm Michael Bavaro. See you tomorrow.