Around this time eight years ago, as Donald Trump’s first term got underway, the Republican National Committee issued a press release introducing the members of its finance team. It became the stuff of legend — and not in a good way.
The RNC finance team, the party announced in early April 2017, would be led by Steve Wynn, Elliott Broidy, Michael Cohen and Louis DeJoy, each of whom became controversial for their own reasons. Indeed, two of the four ended up pleading guilty to crimes unrelated to their work with the party.
Eight years later, the RNC’s finance team is again making headlines, but this time for a very different reason. NBC News reported:
[Vice President JD] Vance will be the next Republican National Committee finance chair, the first time a sitting vice president has concurrently served in the role, the RNC announced today. Vance said in a statement that to ‘fully enact the MAGA mandate’ and Trump’s vision, ‘we must keep and grow our Republican majorities in 2026.’
Trump said in a statement that Vance will do “a fantastic job,” and that might very well be true. But the prediction overlooked a relevant detail: Doesn’t the vice president already have a job?
A New York Times report described Vance’s side gig as “an unusual arrangement,” adding, “In both national parties, the finance chair role has typically gone to a reliable party fund-raiser who has time on his or her hands, not someone with significant governing responsibilities.”
And therein lies the problem: The fact that the vice president intends to tackle both jobs simultaneously reinforces the impression that in this White House, the line between governing responsibilities and partisan electoral responsibilities is much blurrier than it should be.
What’s more, Vance is joining a growing club of Trump administration officials who’ll apparently maintain two positions at once. Kash Patel, for example, has been tapped to lead both the FBI and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. Marco Rubio, meanwhile, is the secretary of state, but Trump also put him in charge of the National Archives in an acting capacity. Doug Collins was named the secretary of veterans affairs and the acting leader of the Office of Special Counsel and the Office of Government Ethics. Russell Vought is the White House budget director, but that didn’t stop Trump from also tapping Vought to serve as the acting director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. What Patel, Rubio, Collins and Vought have in common, however, is that all of their jobs are governmental. What makes Vance’s second job unique is that the vice president, during his term in office, is also taking on a job at a private entity. While I imagine some readers will grow tired of seeing the phrase “this has never happened before” in reports about the Trump administration, I promise to stop using it just as soon as the White House stops ignoring American norms and traditions.
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
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