GOP: President Trump is

working to hold sway over the Republican National Committee even if his bid to overturn the election fails.

As President Trump brazenly seeks to delay the certification of the election in hopes of overturning his defeat, he is also mounting a less highprofile but similarly audacious bid to keep control of the Republican National Committee even after he leaves office.

Ronna McDaniel, Trump’s handpicked chair, has secured the president’s support for her reelection to another term in January, when the party is expected to gather for its winter meeting. But her intention to run with Trump’s blessing has incited a behindthescenes proxy battle, dividing Republicans between those who believe the national party should not be a political subsidiary of the outgoing president and others happy for Trump to remain in control of it.

While many Republicans are hesitant to openly criticize their president at a moment when he is refusing to admit he has lost, the debate crystallizes the larger question about the party’s identity and whether it will operate as a vessel for Trump’s ambitions to run again in four years.

Trump will have no political infrastructure once he leaves office except for a political action committee he recently formed, and absent a formal campaign, he is hoping to lean on the RNC to effectively give him one, people familiar with his thinking said.

The continuing influence of Trump could also have implications for some of the national committee’s most critical assets: Its voter data and donor lists contain thousands of names of contributors and detailed information about supporters.

While the committee and the Trump campaign are in the process of untangling joint agreements over access to that information, Trump sees control of the lists that he helped build over the past four years as a way to keep a grip on power — and to neutralize potential challengers for supremacy over the party, according to Republicans close to the White House.

The power play is alarming a number of RNC members, party strategists and former committee aides, who are highly uneasy about ceding control of the committee to a potential candidate in 2024, a step that they fear would shatter the party’s longstanding commitment to neutrality in nominating contests.

“Trump always wants to use other people’s money,” said former Rep. Barbara Comstock, a Northern Virginia Republican who lost her reelection in 2018 thanks to the suburban anti-Trump wave that also felled the president this month.

The RNC, the Trump campaign and related committees raised more than $ 1 billion this cycle.

Comstock — while allowing that “nobody dislikes Ronna” — said the committee should not be a piggy bank for the president’s political endeavors.

Traditionally, the chairs of the national committees of both parties have relinquished control when the other party takes the White House. Yet as with so many other aspects of his presidency, Trump has little regard for precedent. And many of his lieutenants, particularly those eyeing their own political future, are happy to defend him.

But what is troubling to some Republicans is the risk that Trump will try to bend the national party to his will by exacting retribution on those lawmakers who have not pledged total fealty to him.

The dismay among Republicans that Trump is trying to seize control of the party machinery has prompted McDaniel to try to reassure both camps, the Trump diehards and those Republicans who want the committee to remain independent.

“The 168 RNC members choose who will lead the RNC. I hope to win their support, and that is the most important endorsement,” McDaniel said.