Doug Mills / New York Times
Former President Donald Trump at a campaign rally in Manchester, N.H., Saturday, Jan. 20, 2024. Trump is stamping out the final flashes of independence inside Republican institutions with astonishing speed, demonstrating that his power continues to expand over the new party establishment he has created.
Saturday, Feb. 17, 2024 | 2 a.m.
WASHINGTON — Former President Donald Trump is stamping out the final flashes of independence inside Republican institutions with astonishing speed, demonstrating that his power continues to expand over the new party establishment he has created.
At the Republican National Committee, he is moving to replace longtime supporters with allies even more closely bound to him, including his daughter-in-law, Lara Trump.
In the House, Republicans are more compliant than ever. Most vividly, Speaker Mike Johnson — ostensibly the party’s top-ranking official — backtracked on an endorsement in a crucial Senate race because Trump disagreed. On Thursday, Johnson’s candidate ended his campaign less than one week after opening it.
In the Senate, which has been less beholden to Trump, his influence over a failed border bill made one of the party’s most effective lawmakers, Mitch McConnell, look weak.
The displays of obedience emerging in recent weeks remove any lingering doubt that the Republican Party is aligned to advance the interests of one man, signaling that a sweep of victories from Trump and his allies in November could also mean replacing checks and balances in Washington with his wishes and whims.
For many Republicans, those aren’t risks but the rewards of a second Trump administration. Only a rapidly dwindling minority inside the party remains worried about Trump’s intentions.
“This is a defining moment for our party and our country,” said former Gov. Asa Hutchinson of Arkansas, who ran a long-shot Republican primary challenge to Trump on a promise to restore the party to its traditional principles. “As long as leaders continue to wilt under Trump’s pressure, we’re going to be moving in the direction of a Trump party and not the Republican Party.”
Trump is consolidating control even as he faces 91 felony charges, with a New York judge on Thursday setting a trial date of March 25 in the case concerning hush money payments to a porn actor. On Friday, the judge in a separate New York civil fraud case ordered Trump to pay a $355 million penalty and effectively cut him off from his family business.
At the same time, Trump, who long accused Republican leaders of rigging the system for their self-gain, has come to mirror their methods. The swamp that he once declared in need of draining, he now sees as wetlands in need of protecting.
Trump’s team argues that he is giving voice to popular opinions that had no champion in the party, and that the changes at the Republican National Committee are intended with a single goal in mind: electing him to a second White House term.
“Our mission is straightforward: maximize the Republican Party’s resources to get President Trump elected,” said Chris LaCivita, a Trump campaign senior adviser set to take over as chief operating officer of the RNC.
Presidents tend to become the political establishment, and often install trusted lieutenants in key positions of their party’s apparatus. But Trump has gone beyond traditional norms in both the degree of loyalty he requires and the totality of his project to remake the conservative movement in his own image.
When Trump arrived in Washington, the welcome was as hostile as the takeover he led, pushing for sharp reversals of long-standing Republican principles.
He praised strongmen like Russian President Vladimir Putin and publicly undermined foreign allies. He cast doubt on fair and free elections. He embraced hard-line immigration measures, waved away concerns about the national debt and backed protectionist trade policies.
Eight years later, the only question is whether Trump’s grip can tighten any further.
On the campaign trail, he has made a mockery of traditional conservative powerhouses like the Koch political machine and the Club for Growth, crushing their attempts to oppose him.
The Club for Growth, a well-funded anti-tax group, effectively folded its tent after an allied group spent millions against Trump only to conclude nothing worked. On Saturday, the group’s president, David McIntosh, sat in the front row of a Trump rally in Conway, South Carolina, a detail that the former president repeatedly dwelled on for his audience.
“David, stand up, please,” Trump said as McIntosh quickly jumped to his feet. “He’s now with us 100% — he’s with us 100%. Thank you. Thank you. Good to have you.”
The Koch political network, Americans for Prosperity Action — long among the nation’s most influential conservative outfits — has poured millions into helping Trump’s last remaining primary rival, Nikki Haley. Yet polls show her at risk of being trounced in the primary election next week in South Carolina, her home state.
At the same rally in South Carolina, Trump mocked Haley by insinuating that her husband had left for deployment with the National Guard to escape her — an insult aimed at a military family that met little criticism within their party.
“Why is there silence from the Republican Party?” Haley asked Monday in an interview with Politico. “Where are the Republicans in defense of our men and women in uniform that sacrifice for us and protect our country?”
Haley’s bid was undermined years before she announced a presidential campaign, when the Trump team began working to rewrite rules in Republican state parties to favor front-runners like him. Nevada’s nominating contest this month was so tilted toward Trump that opponents argued it had been manipulated.
But Trump seemed to want to go even further.
At multiple points during the past two years, the former president floated the possibility of canceling the primary process during discussions with Ronna McDaniel, chair of the Republican National Committee, according to two people familiar with the conversations.
McDaniel did not consider Trump’s suggestion to be a serious request, even as the former president complained he was being treated unfairly, the people said. McDaniel did not return a call seeking comment.
On one occasion, Trump fumed that the party would have canceled primaries for George W. Bush if it had been the nation’s 43rd president who had lost reelection and tried to run again, one of the people briefed on the conversations said.
The Trump campaign denied that the former president had made such remarks. LaCivita, the former president’s senior adviser, said the conversations were completely manufactured and used an expletive to describe the disputed exchanges.
Still, McDaniel was no Never Trumper.
She owed her political post and subsequent reelections to Trump’s endorsements, and signed off on a plan for the party to help pay his legal bills. She quickly became a close political adviser, even as she showed an occasional willingness to disagree with him.
McDaniel privately urged Trump to drop his opposition to masks during the pandemic, and cautioned that his attempts to overturn the 2020 election results in Michigan, her home state, were based on lies. She warned that a third presidential campaign would make it impossible for the party to continue paying his legal bills — and cut him off after he declared his candidacy anyway.
Most recently, McDaniel refused to cancel all of the Republican presidential debates — despite badgering from Trump, who refused to participate.
Trump’s next chair at the RNC is likely to be Michael Whatley, a supporter of the former president’s false election claims. Trump also endorsed as party co-chair his daughter-in-law, Lara Trump, who has had various roles in his political operation.
Trump is not the first president to seek a lieutenant from within the family: Ronald Reagan had his daughter, Maureen, installed in the same No. 2 party post.
But previous efforts to overhaul parties were aimed at winning elections across the ballot, not just the presidency, said Michael Steele, an anti-Trump conservative who served as Republican National Committee chair during the rise of the Tea Party movement.
“Many of us have made the argument that the Republican Party has grown old and stale and frayed at the edges,” Steele said. “But we addressed that by encouraging a new generation of leadership, and it was never so selfishly oriented around one person.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
