The Witness Chronicles, April 9, 2024

Empty campaign offices?

Photo by Sergei Wing on Unsplash

Once more into the breech! The eclipse here in Rochester, right in the totality, was a dud due to thick clouds. Can’t do much about that. This newsletter is reader supported observation and opinion. Your support means a lot! Thx, ME

Chaos at the Republican National Committee (RNC)

Choosing loyalty over competence and experience

A political party’s national committee is the central organizer and fundraising arm of the party, the place where campaigns are carefully planned, and executed with extensive ground operations during major elections. Those ground operations include volunteer recruitment, get out the vote efforts, supporting party candidates up and down the ticket, and much more.

They are the lifeblood of a party during an election cycle. But the Donald Trump campaign has drained the blood out of the RNC, replacing it with rapid Trump loyalists whose only criteria for being hired is that loyalty.

To put it bluntly, Trump is sucking that lifeblood out of the Party and changing it into nothing but a means to funnel money into his pockets and pay his exorbitant legal bills.

It started when Trump forced out their extremely loyal Trumpist leader, Ronna McDaniels and replaced her with two co-leaders, a MAGA wack job and his daughter-in-law Lara Trump, wife of son Eric. They then asked for the resignations of over 60 experienced staffers so they could install loyalists.

The results are already disastrous, unless you are a Democrat. Because they removed those with extensive national campaign experience, they currently, well into the election year, have no ground campaign in many key states. Their fundraising is lagging far behind Biden’s, in part because donors may not want to be paying legal bills, money that contributes nothing towards an actual win.

Worse than that, Lara Trump clearly stated that the new RNC was formed to funnel all its resources directly to Trump, leaving nothing for the hundreds of down ballot Republican races from local to vital positions in the Senate and House. She subsequently attempted to backtrack from that but it sounded like an order directly from Trump.

Without those get out the vote, feet on the ground, and heads on phones people, many Republican voters may not be motivated to even go to the polls. And in case you don’t think those voters count, in recent years elections have been extremely close, making every vote count.

Instead it appears that we will get carefully edited video spots from Trump, video where his handlers can keep him on message and limit his ability to do what he loves, which is spout off reams of lies, crazy talk, chest pounding ego rants, and all the rest of the real Trump.

It’s a weak strategy at best, especially with Trump’s total lack of self-control and his inability to stay on message even when threatened by judges. How bad is that lack of control? It has cost him hundreds of millions in very real fines from those judges. Yes, real cash money.

It’s no wonder he has directed the RNC to change course and grab money anywhere it can. His campaign recently held fundraisers, both public and private, that allegedly raised $50 million, though no proof has yet be shown, to prove that the number is real. We will find out from campaign filings in the next several days.

In those events, he has wondered why we don’t get immigrants from ‘nice’ countries like Denmark, i.e. white people, has told Jews that if they vote for Biden they hate Israel, and has promised huge tax cuts to billionaires, continuing his previous batch, set to expire, that added seven trillion dollars to the federal deficit.

Even for Trump, this scam is enormous in scale. But the reality is that he is terrible at scamming people and getting away with it. But even if the money is real, it’s not going to help his fellow Republicans.

These kinds of sweeping actions, taken without any real basis in reality, are contributing to many GOP leaders leaving government, many others openly rebelling, and a Republican House majority shrinking to just above zero.

Pretty good considering we still have months to go this year, multiple trials with Trump stuck fuming in court, a Congress barely on life support, and polls starting to reflect a possible downturn for Trump. His recent video (one of those I referenced) has Trump supporting the right of states to make abortion laws over a national law, splitting anti-abortion voters, his voters.

An interesting thing about those anti-abortion voters: they are a single issue crowd and that issue is extremely emotional and inflexible. In other words, if you lose them, they seldom return to the fold. A reality that divides the Republican Party though they try to keep that divide hidden, knowing it is impossible to navigate.

Especially when you’ve removed those most qualified to handle issues like that, and abortion, though huge, is just one problem the RNC is choosing to ignore by killing the messengers.

Finally, there is an upswell in old school conservative Republicans calling out their far right brothers for blatantly parroting Russian propaganda in Congress, as though it is facts from reliable sources. Remember it has always been the Republicans who stood strong against Russia. No longer, apparently.

Parties rely on competent, experienced staffers to do the heavy lifting of creating policy, writing laws, and keeping their bosses informed and rooted in reality. But Trump has decided to kneecap his own people and turn the party into Trumpland in all its craziness.

~ I write The Grasshopper, a letter for creatives, The Witness Chronicles, a place for my articles on politics and climate, and The Remarkable, a recovery letter, about my addiction and reentry experience. All are weekly and free, however this is how I live and I strongly believe all writers and creatives should get paid, if we provide value. Your upgrade to a paid subscription helps make that happen.

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