When Lara Trump addressed a South Carolina crowd ahead of Saturday’s Republican primary in the state, her message was hardly subtle. “I can assure you that my loyalty is to my father-in-law and I will make sure that every penny is used properly,” she said, referring to Donald Trump’s recent endorsement of his son’s wife as co-chair of the Republican National Committee.
Now that Trump has won the South Carolina Republican primary and is slated to become the nominee, he is presumably in a much better position to have his daughter-in-law allocate RNC funds to pay his legal fees should she assumes the roll of RNC co-chair. “That’s why people are furious right now. And they see the attacks against him. They feel like it’s an attack not just on Donald Trump but on this country. So, yeah, I think that is a big interest to people, absolutely,” she said, adding: “Having someone like me in there I think will go a long way for people.”
The RNC isn’t the only fundraising organization associated with Trump that’s having trouble raising money.
These remarks followed Trump announcing that he was endorsing his daughter-in-law for RNC co-chair, along with election denier and chairman of the North Carolina Republican Party, Michael Whatley, for chair. There will obviously be some internal RNC drama about Lara Trump’s new RNC mandate, but it’s hard to imagine that Trump won’t eventually win out.
The story of current RNC Chair Ronna McDaniel stepping down was first reported in The New York Times in early February. This story didn’t include any comments from McDaniel, but noted that “a press officer for the Republican National Committee did not respond to requests for comment.” Keith Schipper, a spokesman for the RNC, later posted on X that “nothing has changed. This will be decided after South Carolina.”
McDaniel has been a Trump soldier since assuming the job, and who, you may recall, dropped her famous uncle’s name at the request of Trump. But that was way back in 2017. Republicans have lost a lot of elections since then, but McDaniel has continued being reappointed (four times). Unfortunately (or perhaps fortunately, for McDaniel) that streak has now come to an end.
Trump world is using the last few months of anemic fundraising for the group as an excuse for ousting McDaniel. But the problem of raising funds is not of her making. According to The Washington Post, some major donors have expressed concerns: “These people want to win elections, not pay lawyers.”
The fall saw a bad couple months for the RNC. In October, it raised $7.1 million to the Democratic National Committee’s $13.1 million. While raising a more robust $12 million in January, the group is still slightly panicked, according to reports. Sources mused to The Guardian that Nikki Haley dropping out would solve some of its cash crisis. But Haley isn’t the candidate with the millions of dollars in legal fees. In February, Forbes reported that the RNC faced a “poor financial showing after it reported its lowest fundraising totals in 10 years.”
Enter Lara Trump. Or, as she’d known in some circles, Eric Trump’s wife.
This all begs some important questions. First, is Trump putting his daughter-in-law in charge of the RNC so the RNC will pay his legal fees? As of October 2023, The Associated Press estimated that Trump’s Save America political action committee had “paid nearly $37 million to more than 60 law firms and individual attorneys since January 2022.” In January, the Trump leadership PAC spent a further $2.9 million along with “$1.8 million in new debts for legal fees owed to several firms.” Then there’s the hundreds of millions of dollars that Trump owes in legal judgments. The lion’s share of the judgments consists of the nearly half a billion dollars that Trump owes for his fraud settlement — with interest, that’s $464.3 million — plus the $83.3 million he owes E. Jean Carroll. Whether or not a PAC can pay this money is unclear. But in order to appeal the ruling in the Carroll case, Trump must post a bond, and that bond at least theoretically could be loaned. Is Trump putting his daughter-in-law in charge of the RNC so the RNC will pay his legal fees? Here’s the likely bad news for Lara Trump. She may think she can solve her father-in-law’s financial problems by taking over the RNC. But I’m not convinced that a relative neophyte is going to be able to do a better job raising money than the longest-serving RNC chair since the Civil War. The RNC isn’t the only fundraising organization associated with Trump that’s having trouble raising money, according to the Financial Times: “Trump Pacs received contributions from fewer unique donors in the second half of 2023 than during the equivalent period in the 2020 campaign.” And perhaps even more meaningfully, Trump “entered the 2024 election year with about 200,000 fewer donors than in the previous presidential campaign four years ago.” It’s unclear if an RNC takeover will help Trump’s cash flow problems, but if Lara Trump ends up being the co-chair of the RNC, she will inherit a fundraising mess. The RNC needs money. Losing its longtime chair wouldn’t make fundraising easier. Lara Trump will need to make the case to old-school GOP donors that paying Trump’s legal fees will somehow win them back the Senate and the presidency. I’m not convinced that’s going to be an easy sell.
Molly Jong-Fast
Molly Jong-Fast is a political analyst for MSNBC, special correspondent for Vanity Fair and host of the podcast "Fast Politics with Molly Jong-Fast." 
