The NPR Politics Podcast - Handpicking The RNC

Episode Date: March 11, 2024

The Republican National Committee voted in a new chair and co-chair on Friday — including a member of the Trump family and a man who questions that President Biden rightfully won the 2020 election. Why Trump picked them and what it means for the campaign.This episode: White House correspondents Asma Khalid and Franco Ordoñez and senior political editor and correspondent Domenico Montanaro. Our producers are Jeongyoon Han, Casey Morell & Kelli Wessinger. Our editor is Erica Morrison. Our executive producer is Muthoni Muturi. Listen to every episode of the NPR Politics Podcast sponsor-free, unlock access to bonus episodes with more from the NPR Politics team, and support public media when you sign up for The NPR Politics Podcast+ at plus.npr.org/politics.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Hi, this is Brendan, Maeve, Ellen, and Doug. We're here in Watertown, Massachusetts, about to try nine different chilies for our sixth annual chili cook-off. This podcast was recorded at 12.35 p.m. Eastern Time on Monday, March 11th of 2024. Things may have changed by the time you hear it, but right now, it's Chili Time! They're in sync. Good weather for a chili cook-off, especially in Massachusetts. Hey there, it's the NPR Politics Podcast. I'm Asma Khalid. I cover the White House. I'm Frank Ordonez. I cover the presidential campaign.

And I'm Domenico Montanaro, senior political editor and correspondent. And today on the show, we're going to talk about the merger of the Trump campaign and the RNC. On Friday, the Republican National Committee voted to install a series of new leaders handpicked by none other than the former president and 2024 presumptive GOP nominee, Donald Trump. Before we talk about what this all means, Franco, you were in Houston for that RNC meeting. I am so curious what it was like because it was coming on the tail end of this week where Trump became the presumptive nominee in many ways. He had that huge win on Super Tuesday. Yeah. I mean, I wouldn't describe it as kind of like this rally type event. You know, it was a meeting. It was in a hotel ballroom. There were some speeches, but it had very huge significance.

I mean, this is the next chapter. Trump has been getting ready for the general election, and he has been calling for months for the party to get behind him. And now that Haley's dropped out, this meeting was kind of the next step toward that. As you noted, he got his people elected to the top positions at the RNC, and that is extremely important. When you say top people, who are you referring to? We're talking about Michael Watley. He's the head of the North Carolina GOP. He's now going to be the chairman of the RNC. He also comes with some controversy.

Watley argued against the results of the 2020 election that Biden won. We're also talking about Laura Trump. She's Trump's daughter-in-law. She's married to Eric Trump, his middle son. We're also talking about Chris LaCivita. Chris LaCivita is actually a senior advisor of the Trump campaign. And now he's going to be a chief operating officer for the RNC. Is he keeping dual roles? He is keeping dual roles. So it's a lot of work, but it's clearly an effort by Trump to really get control of the RNC, which is something that he's wanted for a long time. And Trump hasn't quite clinched the nomination yet.

He's expected to do that tomorrow. And it's pretty usual for the nominee of the party to then start to coordinate fundraising with the party. Usually the person who is the nominee or becomes president winds up picking who the head of the organization will be. But there are some differences in how Trump has gone about this versus past candidates. Dominica, you say it's not that unusual for the candidate to start coordinating with the party apparatus around fundraising, right, grassroots operations, etc. But how unusual is it for the presumptive nominee to handpick

the people in power and put in a family member? Well, family member certainly is unusual. We haven't seen that happen. It is usual for a candidate to handpick who the top people will be, but they're usually party professionals. And I think there's going to be a little bit of tension when it comes to Lara Trump, who has never really run anything politically. And really, Trump likes her communication ability. She's somebody who a lot of people see at rallies. She fires up the crowds and sort of warms them up before Trump comes out and has been doing that for years. But she's had a couple early flubs. I mean, you know, saying that she thinks that it's okay for the RNC, for example, to be paying Trump's legal fees. It's not exactly something

that has happened in the past. And usually the RNC is there to, you know, raise money, do a lot of the door knocking, keep a data program going so that people can identify who the voters are that are most likely to vote and also support state parties down ballot. Franco, what did the Republican committee members at this meeting in Houston think of of Laura Trump? I mean, I asked a lot of them about that. I mean, certainly there were some Republicans who have concerns about it for the reasons that Domenico just outlined. But most of them kind of shrug to their shoulders. I mean, some would say this is more of a ceremonial role. And Michael Watley

is going to be the real head. And Chrysler Savita, again, the senior advisor, he is more of the day-to-day operations or the operations person. And Lara is more of the fundraising. And she's going to be on, as Domenico said, she's going to be on camera. She's going to be out there talking. And they say, like, it can actually be an advantage to have her there and have someone with Trump's last name because they're going to try to reach out to voters who don't generally give to the RNC. And they argue that at least maybe they'll have a little bit more trust in Laura Trump because of that. And also, I mean, the reality is so much of the RNC's ability to raise money is tied to Trump himself doing that. There's so many joint events. It's hard to separate the two anyways. So given what you're describing, that it's hard to separate the two, I don't know that any of this news seems particularly surprising to me in this current political moment. Unusual, maybe we could say, but not maybe very surprising. Were there any voices of dissent at this RN this event and some big dissent. I mean, there were actually some members, Henry Barber, he's a member from Mississippi. He introduced a

resolution, a couple of resolutions, one that would have maintained the committee's independence until a presumptive or a nominee was found. Now, that's obviously null and void. But the other one was to prevent the RNC from paying Trump's legal fees. And that got a lot of attention. But it didn't definitely caught a lot of our attention. And I actually asked people about that resolution and what they thought about it. And again, you know, people, for one, they said that the campaign had talked about not needing to do that or that they wouldn't do that. Not using RNC money for Trump's legal fees. Correct. That's what was said by members of the campaign. And the members that I spoke to in Houston said they were going to take their word for it.

But others I talked to, like Morton Blackwell, he's a member from Virginia. He said, you know, there may be reasons to do it. The fact is that there is something called lawfare going on here, where the Democrats are trying to use the powers of the government to punish

Republicans and particularly Trump. And it's absolutely outrageous. To be clear, you know, the indictments against Trump were largely filed by an independent Justice Department. And the White House also has no involvement with those charges. It's not particularly surprising that Barber's resolution was shot down because, you know, he's from an old guard of the Republican National Committee. He's been around for quite some time. He's the nephew of former Mississippi Governor Haley Barber. So this is somebody who's sort of been more of a traditionalist. But what Trump has been able to do over the last eight years has essentially taken over the Republican Party and inserted loyalists,

you know, to a degree that he never had in 2016. And I'd argue even 2020, he's in far stronger shape with the degree of pushback that he would face within the Republican National Committee, which is to say almost none. All right, let's take a quick break, and we'll be back in a moment. And we're back. And, Franco, this leadership change comes at a moment when we're seeing Ronna McDaniel, who's part of another pretty prominent Republican family. She is the niece of Mitt Romney, though we can talk about this. Don't tell anyone. She dropped that Romney part of her name. But this is coming, I was saying, you know, at a moment when she is leaving that leadership position. Explain to us why that's the case, because I also thought Trump handpicked her as the chairwoman at one point.

Yeah, he did. And she actually mentioned that in her farewell speech. I mean, what happened, like a couple of the reasons why she's, you know, leaving or has left the room is primarily is how poorly Republicans have done in the last few election cycles, just in the midterms, special elections. They've just been getting beat and beat and beat and beat. But there's been also other issues. There's been some accusations of exorbitant spending. There's a huge fundraising gap between the Republicans and the Democrats. So she's been coming under a lot of fire in the last few months that it was just kind of time to go. And Trump wanted his people and people who were even more close to him in these roles. Was there a catalyst? Because you mentioned the point that Republicans have been losing elections.

They've been losing elections these past couple of years. It's not like this is a sudden change. I do think kind of like the exorbitant spending and the questionable spending, including like private jets, kind of was the straw that broke the camel's back. that the Republican Party has had in the last few election cycles has really been because of Donald Trump, not really an administrative arm of the party. So many candidates have run in Trump's image, and Trump has handpicked a lot of kind of extreme candidates who haven't been popular in places that are swing areas. And that's a thing that, you know, Republicans are nervous could continue into 2024 when they feel like they should be able to take over Congress and the White House.

Domenico, do you have a sense of where the RNC's fundraising is at this point after Rodney McDaniel is leaving compared to where it traditionally is? Yeah, I mean, they only have about $8 million cash on hand as of the end of 2023. And that's pretty bad. I mean, it's the lowest the RNC has had since 2013. So more than a decade. And Franco noted all of this sort of exorbitant spending that, you know, sometimes, you know, whether it adds up to the real problem, it can be indicative of the larger problem. You know, within a campaign, I mean, a quarter million dollars on limousines, for example, that kind of stuff really gained attention. And it was done, by the way, by people on the right who went and looked into Republicans' finances. And that's why some of this started.

You know, Ronna McDaniel is somebody who now we call Ronna McDaniel. She is Mitt Romney's niece. Trump really kind of forced McDaniel to stop using the Romney part of her name. And even though she had been loyal and had been there over seven years, these disclosures and kind of the party's losses over the last several years sort of forced her out. And let's all remember, we're talking about Donald Trump here. I mean, you can be in favor one moment and be very much out of favor in five seconds later. Is she out of favor? She's no longer even attending these RNC meetings? Oh, she was there and she gave a very emotional parting speech, but she's clearly not in favor because she's leaving. And Trump has called her a friend,

but just said that he wanted to make a leadership change essentially. But this is the way it goes. I think we've seen that for the last several years. He requires fealty. And while she was giving that to him, there were still a lot of problems within the party structurally. So before we go, Franco, I want to get a sense from you of what this leadership change means for the campaign apparatus itself, right? Like you hear Democrats talk a lot about the need to kind of grassroots organize and the synchronization between the Biden campaign and the DNC, and they all kind of think as one. Now that we are seeing Trump handpicking his loyalists at the RNC, are we going to see something different in terms of how they are thinking, strategizing about the campaign? Yeah, I mean, I think you're going to definitely see better organization or

more collaboration between the two, between the Trump campaign and also the RNC. I mean, clearly, when you're using the same donor roles, you're going to have, you know, again, access to fundraising. Some staff are going to go back and forth. And the Trump campaign is going to be able to use RNC staff in key battleground states to kind of prop up their ground game over there. I mean, the Trump campaign is still a kind of a small operation. So they've been clamoring for these kind of needs, this kind of resources for a long time. And we've all remember when Trump was, you know, pushing the RNC to cancel the Republican debates early. I mean, that's because he wanted all resources behind him to look towards the general election

and look towards Joe Biden. Well, now he's going to have that. He's going to have that infrastructure. He's going to be in charge of that party infrastructure. And he now has his most loyal backers, including someone with his own last name, leading. All right. Well, that is a wrap for today's show. I'm Asma Khalid. I cover the White House. I'm Frank Ordonez. I cover the presidential campaign.

And I'm Domenico Monsignor, senior political editor and correspondent. And thank you all, as always, for listening to the NPR Politics Podcast.