Views from the nation’s press
The St. Louis Postdispatch on how Jan. 6 (2025) is coming … and Trump just weaponized the GOP’S fundraising arm:
A thought exercise: Describe a scenario under which former President Donald Trump clearly loses the 2024 election — and reacts by gracefully conceding to President Joe Biden.
It’s a trick question, of course. No such scenario exists. As Trump has repeatedly demonstrated, he is psychologically incapable of acknowledging electoral defeat.
That’s why he was willing to fling a mob of his supporters at the U.S. Capitol to disrupt the election certification process on Jan. 6, 2021. And it’s why his newfound control over the Republican National Committee is such a dangerous development.
Trump’s audacious purge of the RNC is about more than just seizing the party’s central organizational apparatus to help fund his campaign and possibly pay his legal bills.
It also gives him a menacing weapon to hold over the heads of any congressional Republicans who might be tempted to resist a repeat of Trump’s Jan. 6 attempted coup — potentially with a different outcome — when it’s time to certify the 2024 election results.
It’s common for presidential nominees to work handin-glove with the RNC and its counterpart, the Democratic National Committee. But as he has clinched the nomination this month, Trump’s relationship with the RNC has been more like hand-on-throat.
He began by pressing the organization to elect his daughter-in-law, Lara Trump, as RNC co-chair. In the process, he effectively booted former Chair Ronna Mcdaniel, whose long tenure as a shameless Trump sycophant apparently (and typically) earned her not one molecule of reciprocal loyalty.
Lara Trump promptly suggested that the RNC — whose primary function is to coordinate fundraising to aid Republican candidates ballot-wide — should help fund her father-inlaw’s astronomical legal fees from his various criminal and civil trials.
Then came the purge. Dozens of RNC employees, including most at the top, have been fired and replaced with Trump loyalists.
Think of it as a practice run for what Trump plans to do with thousands of federal employees in currently nonpolitical jobs should he win back the presidency, according to widespread reports.
And what will be the focus of this new army of loyalists in the GOP’S central fundraising organization? Lara Trump has announced creation of a division of “election integrity“— Republican-speak these days for election denial.
The division has already lobbed a lawsuit against Michigan’s secretary of state (a Democrat, of course) claiming inflated voter rolls. Critics say the suit is as utterly baseless as the dozens of baseless election suits Trump filed after losing in 2020.
In case there was any lingering doubt about what’s going on here, the new RNC hires include attorney Christina Bobb, one of the more notorious enablers of Trump’s various election-denial schemes, including the “fake elector” plots at the hearts of some of the criminal charges Trump faces.