After former President Donald Trump named his daughter-in-law to become the Republican National Committee’s co-chair, she responded by saying that the RNC should have the goal of getting the former president reelected.
This week, President Trump said he is backing Michael Whatley, the head of the North Carolina Republican Party, to lead the RNC as its chair and Lara Trump, who is married to son Eric Trump, to serve as his co-chairwoman. It came amid reports that current RNC Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel is expected to step down from her position in the near future.
“Here’s what I can tell you. The RNC needs to be the leanest, most lethal political fighting machine we’ve ever seen in American history. That is the goal over the next nine-and-a-half months,” Lara Trump told Newsmax on Tuesday night. “If I am elected to this position, I can assure you, there will not be any more $70,000 or whatever exorbitant amount of money it was spent on flowers.”
She added that “every single penny will go to the No. 1 and the only job of the RNC,” which she said is “electing Donald J. Trump as president of the United States and saving this country.”
“We have no time to waste. We’ve got to get to work. We’ve got a lot of money to raise, and we need to ensure that every penny goes to those things that I just mentioned,” Lara Trump said.
Republicans should attempt to ramp up their voting strategy, Lara Trump added, and focus more on voter registration, legal ballot harvesting, and early voting efforts.
She is married to President Trump’s middle son, Eric, and has taken an especially active role in all three of her father-in-law’s campaigns. She briefly considered running for Senate in her home state of North Carolina in 2022, but decided against it, saying she wanted to spend more time with her young children.
Despite the former president’s call for new leadership, Ms. McDaniel said she has no plans to leave the committee until at least after South Carolina’s Feb. 24 primary election, reported The Associated Press. Meanwhile, RNC spokesman Keith Schipper said she has no immediate plans to leave.
“Chairwoman McDaniel has been on the road helping elect Republicans up and down the ballot and she will continue working hard to beat Biden this fall. Nothing has changed, and there will be no decision or announcement about future plans until after South Carolina,” he said.
Ms. McDaniel, the niece of Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah), was chosen by President Trump to lead the RNC shortly after his 2016 election. The 50-year-old from Michigan was a strong advocate for the former president and helped reshape the GOP’s governing body in his image, but she has been increasingly blamed for the party’s struggles in recent national elections.
Social media influencer and Turning Point Action’s founder Charlie Kirk also recently described the party’s leadership as a “bunch of losers,” adding: “They know it. The grassroots knows it. The donors know it
“They lost in ’18. They lost in ’20. They lost in 2022,” he said. We have tried to reach out to them many times, and I’m not going to put up with another culture of losing.”
In response to President Trump’s announcement, Ms. Haley issued a warning this week.
“What we saw yesterday was, he took a different approach,” she said. “Now he has decided he has fired the RNC chair, he’s named who’s going to be the new RNC chair, his daughter-in-law will be the co-chair, and he is making his campaign manager the officer that runs the party. Think about what is happening right now. Is that how you’re going to try and take an election?”
Immediately following Trump’s announcement, Ms. Haley’s campaign manager Betsy Ankney said President Trump is simply “rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.”
President Trump indicated on Fox News this month that he’s distancing himself from Ms. McDaniel. “I think [McDaniel] did great when she ran Michigan for me,” he said. “I think she did OK, initially, in the RNC.”
“I would say right now there'll probably be some changes made,” he said, adding that Mr. Whatley, who has questioned the 2020 election results, is “committed to election integrity.”
