RNC votes to install Trump's handpicked chair, daughter-in-law
The Republican National Committee voted Friday to install Donald Trump's handpicked chair, completing his takeover of the national party as the former president closes in on a third straight presidential nomination.
Michael Whatley, a North Carolina Republican who has echoed Trump's false theories of voter fraud, was elected the party's new national chairman in a vote Friday morning in Houston. Lara Trump, the former president's daughterin-law, was expected to become co-chair.
Trump's team is promising not to use the RNC to pay his mounting personal legal bills. But Trump and his lieutenants will have firm control of the party's political and fundraising machinery with limited, if any, internal pushback.
Whatley will carry the top title, replacing longtime chair Ronna McDaniel after she fell out of favor with key
figures in the former president's “Make America Great Again” movement. But he will be surrounded by people closer to Trump.
Lara Trump is expected to focus largely on fundraising and media appearances. The functional head of the RNC will be Chris LaCivita, who will assume the committee's chief of staff role while maintaining his job as one of the Trump campaign's
top two advisers.
With Trump's blessing, LaCivita is promising to enact sweeping changes and staffing moves at every level of the RNC to ensure it runs seamlessly as an extension of the Trump campaign.
In an interview Thursday, he sought to tamp down concerns from some RNC members that the already cash-strapped committee would help pay Trump's legal bills. Trump faces four criminal indictments and a total of 91 counts as well as a $355 million civil fraud judgment, which he is appealing.
His affiliated Save America political action committee has spent $76 million over the last two years on lawyers.
People speculating about the RNC paying for legal bills, LaCivita said, do so “purely on the basis of trying to hurt donors.” Trump's legal bills are instead being covered largely by Save America, a separate political entity.
“The fact of the matter is not a penny of the RNC's money or, for that matter, the campaign's money has gone or will go to pay legal fees,” he said.
The RNC was paying some of Trump's legal bills for New York cases that started while he was president, The Washington Post reported, but McDaniel said in November 2022 that the RNC would stop paying once Trump became a candidate again and joined the 2024 presidential race.