The Republican National Committee voted Friday to install Donald Trump's hand-picked leadership team, completing his takeover of the national party as the former president closes in on a third straight presidential nomination. Michael Whatley, a North Carolina Republican who has echoed Trump's false theories of voter fraud, was elected as the party's new national chairman in a vote Friday morning in Houston. Lara Trump, the former president's daughter-in-law, was voted in as co-chair, per the AP. Trump's team is promising not to use the RNC to pay his mounting personal legal bills. But Trump and his lieutenants will have firm control of the party's political and fundraising machinery with limited, if any, internal pushback.
"The RNC is going to be the vanguard of a movement that will work tirelessly every single day to elect our nominee, Donald J. Trump, as the 47th president of the United States," Whatley told RNC members in a speech after being elected. Whatley will carry the top title, replacing longtime chair Ronna McDaniel after she fell out of favor with key figures in the former president's "Make America Great Again" movement. But he'll be surrounded by people closer to Trump. Lara Trump is expected to focus largely on fundraising and media appearances. The functional head of the RNC will be Chris LaCivita, who will assume the committee's chief of staff role while maintaining his job as one of the Trump campaign's top two advisers.
"We have to stop ... attacking other Republicans," McDaniel said in her Friday goodbye speech. "If we spend our time attacking each other, we guarantee the Democrats are going to win." While McDaniel got a standing ovation, the new leadership eagerly embraced the change, and Lara Trump, accompanied by her husband, Eric Trump, was greeted like a celebrity, with members lining up to take photos with her. In a letter announcing her candidacy for co-chair, Lara Trump wrote to members of the committee telling them she intends to focus on battleground states; getting out the vote in close races; and combing through the RNC's finances, cutting spending "that doesn't directly go to winning elections." A key priority, she wrote, is working to ensure that the election is secure. "The goal on Nov. 5 is to win, as my father-in-law says, 'bigly,'" she said Friday. Much more here.
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