For much of the fall, Donald Trump was annoyed at Republican National Committee Chair Ronna McDaniel. She was refusing to cancel the party\u2019s primary debates, insisting to him that they were crucial to the early presidential nominating process, that they were actually helping him and that other candidates and members would complain.<\/p>\n
\u201cPeople are really mad at you,\u201d Trump warned McDaniel in one of their many phone calls, recounting both public and private criticism he said he heard about her. \u201cThey\u2019re mad at you.\u201d<\/p>\n
At one point, McDaniel said the nominee deserves an RNC chair they trust and said she would resign if Trump became the nominee and wanted her out.<\/p>\n
Trump \u2014 who personally liked McDaniel \u2014 did not immediately accept her offer. But the moment epitomized McDaniel\u2019s long and tumultuous relationship with the former president, which began when she ran Trump\u2019s successful 2016 effort in her home state of Michigan once he became the party\u2019s nominee; solidified when he chose her as RNC chair in late 2016; and is now winding to a fraught conclusion as Trump seeks to retake the White House \u2014 this time with someone else at the party\u2019s helm.<\/p>\n
\u201cShe\u2019s been kissing his butt for years,\u201d said Bill Palatucci, a New Jersey committeeman. \u201cBut loyalty is a one-way street with Donald Trump.\u201d<\/p>\n
This account of McDaniel\u2019s rise and fall at the RNC is based on interviews with 14 Republicans close to Trump and McDaniel.<\/p>\n
McDaniel\u2019s looming departure first emerged following an in-person meeting at Trump\u2019s private Mar-a-Lago Club in Palm Beach, Fla., earlier this month. Then on Monday, Trump released a statement suggesting his daughter-in-law and two others as leaders of the RNC going forward.<\/p>\n
McDaniel, the second woman ever to lead the RNC, prepares to end her tenure \u2014 the longest for a GOP leader \u2014 with some accomplishments. Advisers say she helped raise more than $1.5 billion for the organization, helped launch WinRed \u2014 a small-dollar fundraising platform for Republicans that now rivals the Democratic behemoth, ActBlue \u2014 and created a permanent department to fund election-related lawsuits.<\/p>\n
Trump often praises her for helping him win Michigan in 2016. And she enjoyed wide support among the committee\u2019s 168 members, winning a record four elections as chair.<\/p>\n
But despite spending much of her time working to placate the former president \u2014 a tempestuous and nearly implacable personality \u2014 she regularly sparked the ire of Trump, a boss who demands loyalty from his subordinates but rarely returns it. Meanwhile, the Republican Party has repeatedly lost or underperformed in national and state elections in recent years, is dealing with turmoil in a number of state parties key to 2024, and has far less money than the Democratic National Committee.<\/p>\n
McDaniel also encountered deep skepticism and hostility from the hard-right, grassroots wing of the party, who viewed her \u2014 the niece of Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah) and granddaughter of the late Michigan Gov. George Romney \u2014 as establishment royalty to be overthrown. Mitt Romney, for his part, warned McDaniel about continuing to stay in the role after Trump left office, a person familiar with his outreach said. He declined to comment.<\/p>\n
People close to Trump described McDaniel\u2019s departure as being driven by a confluence of factors that caught his attention, including the primary debates, a cash crunch, a stretch of negative news media attention, election defeats that he refused to take blame for and complaints from campaign allies and donors.<\/p>\n
But the crux of Trump\u2019s frustration with McDaniel, fairly or unfairly, hinged on fights over money and the 2020 election. During that race, the Trump campaign and the RNC regularly clashed, with the campaign believing that the RNC was not sufficiently supporting it financially and the RNC arguing it was doing as much as it could and that Trump\u2019s operation was flawed.<\/p>\n
Through a spokeswoman, McDaniel declined to comment for this story. A Trump spokesman also declined to comment.<\/p>\n
McDaniel\u2019s problems with Trump grew further after a gathering of Republican donors in Houston last fall. There, donors who had grown frustrated with McDaniel\u2019s leadership of the RNC criticized McDaniel to Trump and said they might not give going forward. The former president, this person added, was taken aback.<\/p>\n
More recently, the RNC disclosed it had just about $9 million on hand, its lowest amount since 2015, according to Federal Election Commission reports \u2014 roughly half of the $17.7 million the DNC reported. Party officials say they expect that number to soon climb, and that Democrats benefit from holding the White House \u2014 but Trump and his advisers were upset about the party\u2019s standing.<\/p>\n
And so, by the time McDaniel traveled to South Florida for a meeting with Trump on the first Monday of February, her ouster was essentially a foregone conclusion. The only question was one of timing.<\/p>\n
Her departure was unfortunate, said Henry Barbour, an influential committee member from Mississippi who has criticized McDaniel at times. \u201cTrump was listening to the wrong people whistling and whispering in his ear,\u201d Barbour said. \u201cRonna wasn\u2019t perfect but she has done a lot for the party.\u201d<\/p>\n
One of Trump\u2019s repeated criticisms of McDaniel was that she did not forcefully back his false claims of election fraud in 2020 \u2014 and that, in his words, she did not do more in that cycle to block states from changing election laws during the coronavirus pandemic. (The RNC was subject to a decades-long federal ruling, called a consent decree, that limited its activities challenging votes and election laws until it was lifted in 2018.)<\/p>\n
\u201cShe\u2019s not good on election integrity,\u201d Trump would grumble repeatedly, people close to him said.<\/p>\n
In the days after the November election, McDaniel and her team tried to help Trump fight his loss in battleground states, even winning a minor court case in Pennsylvania. McDaniel even took part in arranging alternate \u2014 false \u2014 electors, according to the Jan. 6 congressional committee and federal prosecutors. McDaniel and many of her top advisers were either eventually subpoenaed or questioned as part of the federal probe, which examined the party\u2019s fundraising off election claims during the period, among other things.<\/p>\n
But after Rudy Giuliani, one of Trump\u2019s attorneys, held a widely panned news conference at RNC headquarters \u2014 hair dye apparently dripping down his face \u2014 and after his ragtag gang of lawyers made an escalating series of false claims, McDaniel backed away from defending Trump on TV. RNC lawyers also concluded that claims from Trump\u2019s lawyers were hogwash, leading to clashes between the teams.<\/p>\n
In recent days, Trump repeatedly mentioned he thought Michael Whatley, the chair of the North Carolina Republican Party, would do more to fight for what he viewed as election integrity. In North Carolina, he told one adviser, no one brought in boxes of ballots after Election Day to swing the election to Democrats \u2014 a reference to false allegations he and some of his allies made about other states.<\/p>\n
Many Republicans view McDaniel\u2019s inaction in 2020 as her cardinal sin, said Stephen K. Bannon, the former president\u2019s strategist and host of the \u201cWar Room\u201d podcast.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe saw the RNC not do anything beforehand and afterward,\u201d he said, echoing the false claim that Biden lost. \u201cThat\u2019s the burning heart of this issue. This is a MAGA revolt to take over the Republican Party.\u201d<\/p>\n
McDaniel repeatedly told Trump that she was going to work harder ahead of 2024 on \u201celection integrity\u201d and tried to defend her actions in 2020. The party has filed 77 lawsuits in the 2024 cycle and created a permanent \u201cElection Integrity Department,\u201d RNC officials said. But in some cases, McDaniel told others that she just couldn\u2019t back Trump\u2019s most outlandish claims.<\/p>\n
During the 2020 election, McDaniel also regularly clashed with Trump\u2019s campaign leaders.<\/p>\n
Most of the fights were about money, as the campaign struggled financially at times while the RNC was flush with cash. Trump campaign advisers say McDaniel and her staff were secretive and ended the campaign with tens of millions of dollars in their bank account that could have been spent on Trump.<\/p>\n
Trump was generally on good terms with McDaniel during the 2020 election, though he would occasionally grow annoyed or make snide remarks to the chairwoman, people familiar with the matter said.<\/p>\n
McDaniel\u2019s team says Trump was surrounded by an inept coterie of advisers, leading the RNC to produce their own TV advertisements, and that much of the money that remained was designated for other bills.<\/p>\n
Still, Trump\u2019s aides were enraged when the RNC sent money to other committees designed to win House and Senate seats for Republicans in the final weeks of the election, as the party had in past cycles.<\/p>\n
By the end of the campaign, McDaniel and Trump\u2019s team were barely on speaking terms even as she continued to speak with Trump \u2014 and told him he needed a better team.<\/p>\n
On the night of Jan. 6, 2021, McDaniel was ensconced in a suite of the Ritz Carlton on Amelia Island, Fla., for a RNC meeting. She was running for reelection, but McDaniel had broken her foot and was traversing with a motorized wheelchair.<\/p>\n
\u201cHow bad is this?\u201d she asked one aide about the attack.<\/p>\n
She later told people that, with her team stuck in back-to-back meetings, she had not immediately realized how fully out of control the situation in Washington had spiraled.<\/p>\n
She put Trump on speakerphone when he called the next day.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe love you!\u201d chanted RNC members, less than 24 hours after the Capitol had been cleared. He told the members he backed McDaniel.<\/p>\n
It was among the first signs Trump was going nowhere, and he and McDaniel were still inextricably bound.<\/p>\n
By that spring, McDaniel came under criticism for moving part of the party\u2019s donor retreat to Mar-a-Lago. McDaniel defended herself by saying her members wanted to be there.<\/p>\n
Soon, she was enmeshed in Trump-related court cases \u2014 and agreed to pay at least some of Trump\u2019s legal bills, angering some members. She began trekking to Trump\u2019s properties to meet regularly. She signed onto a heavily-criticized resolution that defended some of the alternate electors as participating in \u201clegitimate political discourse,\u201d pleasing Trump.<\/p>\n
The two had a good relationship and she worked to keep it that way. McDaniel could also be candid with Trump privately.<\/p>\n
McDaniel, for example, counseled Trump to wear a mask during the covid pandemic, even as other advisers did not. Before the 2020 debate in Nashville, she stood backstage with Trump and urged him to \u201cflirt with the American people.\u201d His performance was viewed as vastly better than the first debate.<\/p>\n
She also convinced Trump to cut a video for a new RNC program called \u201cBank Your Vote,\u201d which encourages voting early by mail \u2014 techniques Trump had long attacked to the detriment of Republicans. Trump has since said voting should all be done on Election Day.<\/p>\n
\u201cHoney,\u201d he would say to her. \u201cYou\u2019re doing great.\u201d<\/p>\n
But he was also constantly asking others about McDaniel and hearing from her critics unprompted. In 2023, McDaniel began to clash with Trump\u2019s team over the primary debates, as the organization struggled to raise money and criticism on the right grew. Trump would repeatedly mock her for saying she was \u201cneutral.\u201d She also stopped paying his legal bills when he became a candidate.<\/p>\n
Battles over primary debates began at the Four Seasons in Nashville, hours before Trump spoke to top GOP donors last April. Chris LaCivita, one of Trump\u2019s top aides, argued loudly with David Bossie, who was leading the debate process for the RNC. LaCivita wanted to cut RNC debates. Bossie and McDaniel would not agree.<\/p>\n
Over the course of several months, Bossie and LaCivita continued to disagree in phone calls, according to people familiar with the matter, while Trump kept expressing bewilderment to advisers that she was scheduling more. \u201cWhy is she doing this?\u201d he asked one.<\/p>\n
\u201cPeople in the non-Trump campaigns claimed she was too pro-Trump, and Trump people claimed she was anti-Trump, undermining him and wasting money,\u201d said Richard Porter, a national committeeman from Illinois, who praised McDaniel.<\/p>\n
The beginning of the end of McDaniel\u2019s tenure came in November, when tech entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy, then a GOP primary candidate, called for her ouster at a debate in Miami. She was \u201capoplectic,\u201d one person who spoke with her said, and spent the evening calling allies despondent and asking if she should attack back.<\/p>\n
McDaniel had been unhappy for months, complaining to \u201calmost anyone who would listen,\u201d said a person in regular touch with her. At times, she had questioned whether she should have even sought a fourth term, according to a person who talked to her, and that she did not expect things to go this way.<\/p>\n
Now, the steady drumbeat of criticism that began in 2022 grew into a cacophony.<\/p>\n
Kim Borchers, a national committee member from Kansas, said she was flooded with emails and calls attacking McDaniel after the 2022 midterms. She responded to more than 100 of them, hearing a list of complaints about McDaniel that, she said, originated in the right-wing echo chamber and were unfounded. Borchers said she often could convince critics otherwise.<\/p>\n
\u201cCritics have been beating her up since the day she won that last election,\u201d Borchers said. \u201cIt is just terrible.\u201d<\/p>\n
Bannon and Charlie Kirk, founder of Turning Point USA, were effectively waging opposition to McDaniel in part because she previously used Romney as her middle name, said Porter, the McDaniel ally. McDaniel dropped Romney from her name in 2017 after Trump suggested she do so, but she has said that is not why she abandoned the name.<\/p>\n
\u201cThey made Ronna the face of the establishment \u2014 they froze her and they polarized her,\u201d Porter said.<\/p>\n
McDaniel sought to assuage factions that wanted her ouster. At least once, she went over to see Bannon at his Capitol Hill townhouse a few blocks from the RNC.<\/p>\n
\u201cHer presentation was very good,\u201d he said, recounting extensive RNC efforts she said were happening. \u201cIt\u2019s just not reality. None of this is happening.\u201d<\/p>\n
For their part, RNC officials say they boosted the number of donors to 2.9 million in the midterms, built community centers across the country and grew their email and texting files to record numbers \u2014 and that their presentation to Bannon was entirely factual.<\/p>\n
Meanwhile in private, LaCivita, told others that RNC staff had too little campaign experience or were insufficiently loyal to Trump \u2014 and that he planned to overhaul the building. On Monday, Trump announced he asked LaCivita to serve as the RNC\u2019s chief operating officer, along with Whatley as chair and Lara Trump as co-chair.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe president was being forced to defend her constantly,\u201d one person said. About three weeks ago, Trump started saying a change was needed, and McDaniel flew to Florida.<\/p>\n
Unknown to her, Trump had already taped two interviews saying a new RNC chair was needed before she arrived.<\/p>\n
One of her final moves as RNC chair was to publicly say Trump would be the nominee during a Fox News interview on the night of the New Hampshire primary, drawing criticism from challenger Nikki Haley and some fellow RNC members.<\/p>\n
McDaniel told others she wanted to begin fundraising with Trump \u2014 and he was clearly certain to win.<\/p>\n
It did not work.<\/p>\n
On Monday, Trump decided to issue a statement about new RNC leadership, weeks before he previously said he would.<\/p>\n
While McDaniel knew her days were probably over, Trump\u2019s statement upset her, people who talked to her said. It did not even mention her and implicitly criticized the party.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe RNC MUST be a good partner in the Presidential election. It must do the work we expect from the national Party and do it flawlessly,\u201d he wrote, adding: \u201cEvery penny will be used properly. New Day.\u201d<\/p>\n
She said nothing publicly in response. And soon she was on the phone, trying to schedule a March meeting for members to formally approve Trump\u2019s choice of her replacement.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
For much of the fall, Donald Trump was annoyed at Republican National Committee Chair Ronna McDaniel. She was refusing to cancel the party\u2019s primary debates, insisting to him that they were crucial to the early presidential nominating process, that they were actually helping him and that other candidates and members would complain. \u201cPeople are really […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":1141,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1150","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1150","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1150"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1150\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1141"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1150"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1150"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1150"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}