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.
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.
Even if the GOP loses control of the House before Jan. 6, 2025 — when Congress meets to certify the Nov. 5 presidential election results — the party will still in theory have the power to steal the election.
If it appears Trump has lost, some Republicans will almost certainly object to various states’ electoral results, as they baselessly did last time. If, this time, they are successful in creating an electoral stalemate, the president would be chosen by a House vote — not a vote by member but by state delegation.
But a decisive defeat for Trump at the polls will make it that much harder for his congressional allies to do his bidding and steal the election, even with the RNC blade now hanging over them. The wider the margin, the harder it will be.
It’s the best argument there is for setting aside whatever legitimate qualms that progressives, centrists and good-faith conservatives have about Biden and voting for him.