It’s been roughly a month since former President Donald Trump’s hand-picked allies took the reins of the Republican National Committee — the most tangible example of Trump’s ever-tightening grip on the GOP’s party apparatus. But the takeover isn’t going well.
The committee’s new chairman, Michael Whatley, and co-chair, Lara Trump, immediately ordered a purge of the organization after they assumed their positions. Dozens of RNC staffers were either laid off or asked to resign and reapply for jobs. In a harrowing development, as my colleague Hayes Brown has discussed, applicants were asked for their views on whether the 2020 election was rigged.
It’s clear that a premature rush to cleanse the RNC has pushed out talent that could’ve helped Trump and the party achieve their goals.
Now new reporting indicates that even the purge process has been a mess. In a sign of how haphazard the mass terminations were, most former staffers have reportedly been offered jobs again. That raises the question of why their jobs were terminated in the first place. The rehiring process is going poorly, as well. According to Axios, some rehired staffers are “unsure of what their roles are.”
The result is a critical brain drain from the RNC just as the general election is effectively getting underway. The Guardian reports that multiple sources familiar with the matter say that some staffers have declined to return: “The situation means the RNC has been left without people with deep knowledge of election operations at the Republican party’s central committee.”
It’s not clear what exactly motivated people to turn down opportunities to be rehired. The Guardian’s story speculates that part of it could be tied to the “loyalty tests” at the interviews. Alternatively, it could also be in part because the new RNC is relocating some of its staffers, such as its data team, to Palm Beach, Florida, to embed within Trump’s campaign and further meld the campaign and the party operations.
But whatever the reasoning, it’s clear that a premature rush to cleanse the RNC has pushed out talent that could’ve helped Trump and the party achieve their goals. Colloquially some might refer to this as an “own goal.”
There’s also confusion at the RNC over policy goals. Originally the committee said it was planning to cut an early voting initiative, only for Whatley to backtrack. This is all happening, mind you, as Republicans are beginning to recognize that Trump’s stigmatization of early voting as unreliable hurts the GOP at the voting booth. There are also questions over just how committed the RNC is to pursuing election denialism — and it’s not clear the RNC knows where it stands on the question, either. In mid-March, Lara Trump indicated she intended to hire QAnon conspiracy theorist and “Stop the Steal” organizer Scott Presler for the committee’s “legal ballot harvesting division.” A few days later, the RNC told NBC News that Presler wouldn’t become an employee but would serve as a “valuable voice to the RNC,” suggesting an informal advisory role. And just a few days ago, Axios reported that Presler will be “registering voters at an upcoming RNC event.” This disarray is all at odds with reporting earlier in the year indicating that Trump world was displaying unusual discipline and professionalism compared to the former president’s previous two campaigns. The turbulence at the RNC suggests that its disorganized leadership isn’t exactly sure how far it wants to take the RNC in the direction of becoming a pure election-denying Trump vehicle. And the act of firing and then offering to rehire many staff members might reflect a realization among the RNC’s new leadership that there’s a trade-off between total deference to the MAGA movement and technical know-how. And thus Trump finds himself encumbered by a familiar dilemma — an army of yes-men can feel good to a certain kind of leader, but it’s not going to be competent. One can only hope Trump remains unable to solve this predicament of his own making.
Zeeshan Aleem is a writer and editor for MS NOW. Previously, he worked at Vox, HuffPost and Politico, and he has also been published in, among other places, The New York Times, The Atlantic, The Nation, and The Intercept. You can sign up for his free politics newsletter by clicking the link at the top of this bio. 
