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If Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign was a seat-of-your-pants operation slapped together on the run, and his 2020 campaign was an alleged juggernaut, a formidable “Death Star” ready to vaporize opponents, then how should we think of his 2024 campaign?
Your Wonkette tends to think of it as a criminal enterprise planning on two major heists. The first is to jack as many pallets of cash as it can carry out of the Republican National Committee, mostly to pay Trump’s legal bills. The second is to steal the election through a variety of schemes and lawsuits. Why bother running on the up-and-up when being democracy-thieving villains is so much more fun?
The Washington Post had a story on Friday that indicates not everyone in the GOP is in on the joke. Which means that state officials are beginning to fret about funding shortfalls and belated resources coming online as they beg the national campaign for money to acquire more traditional campaign accoutrements like “offices” and “staff.”
The national campaign would simply like you to think of it as being “leaner” and “more efficient,” which is the sort of thing you say when you’re behind schedule, underfunded, and hoping your donors won’t notice:
“We’re focused on quality over quantity. I mean, how novel a concept,” top strategist Chris LaCivita told the crowd of top donors May 4 at Mar-a-Lago in Palm Beach, Fla., according to attendees.
Translation: Listen, do you folks have any idea how many billable hours we’re giving to Alina Habba?
The Post says that officials in the key battleground states of Arizona, Georgia, and Michigan are worried:
The original RNC plan for the state of Georgia, reviewed by The Washington Post, called for hiring 12 regional field directors in April and 40 field organizers by the end of May, in addition to eventually opening 20 offices and a community center in the College Park, a mostly Black suburb of Atlanta. Arizona was slotted to receive six regional field directors, seven offices and 23 field organizers by the end of May. Party leaders had drafted similar road maps for other battleground states before Ronna McDaniel was replaced as chairwoman.
Yeah, but then the Trump team had to toss McDaniel out on her keister in favor of Trump’s highly unqualified dilettante daughter-in-law Lara and a North Carolina wingnut named Michael Whatley. And when one is cast out of Trumpworld, all traces of that person must also be erased. Thus, McDaniel’s plans got tossed in the shredder.
Additionally, since the takeover in March, Lara Trump and Whatley have moved RNC operations to Florida and weeded out employees who may not be sufficiently committed believers that the last election was stolen by Joe Biden’s army of woke transgender undocumented immigrants voting illegally thousands of times each, or whatever paranoid fantasy old Orange Julius Caesar has spinning through the pile of old cobwebs and fossilized dog shit that nominally serves as his brain. That’s a lot of institutional knowledge to walk out the door six months before the election.
PREVIOUS STORIES ABOUT THIS WHICH YOU CAN READ!
One employee Lara and Whatley weeded out just a few days ago was Charlie Spies, the RNC chief counsel who just came onboard during the March takeover. At the time, as our old buddy Liz Dye noted this week, Spies was considered “highly competent and a great get for the GOP” due to his years of experience in Republican politics.
But Spies was also insufficiently MAGA-ish, having concluded that the 2020 election was not stolen and also working for Ron DeSantis during the 2024 primaries. That made him suspect to the same sort of Trump purists who spent so much of Trump’s presidency shivving anyone competent.
So Spies is out while Trump sycophant Christina Bobb, who was hired at the same time and was just indicted for election fraud in Arizona but has the advantage of being a MAGA true believer, is still there.
In short, the Trump campaign is making personnel moves similar to what hurt the Trump presidential administration: pushing out highly qualified and competent establishment Republicans in favor of criminal lunatics who couldn’t successfully boil water if you spotted them the pot and a stove burner cranked up to “High.”
It is no wonder then, that Arizona’s GOP chairwoman this week called Whatley to express her worries. Another Arizona Republican told the paper she thinks it’s a “terrible mistake” to not already have tons of resources on the ground in a state that Trump barely lost to Joe Biden four years ago. Similar comments have come from officials in Georgia and Michigan.
AND ANOTHER ONE!
But then, who needs state offices to coordinate canvassing and door-knocking and get-out-the-vote initiatives when you have Donald Trump, who claims — probably correctly — that he can personally motivate his voters to get out and vote better than anyone else.
Trump told them to not worry about getting out the vote since he could do it himself. He told them to “focus on the cheating.” Party leaders say they are planning a massive operation around “election integrity,” with tens of thousands of volunteers who will monitor precincts and vote-counting across the country.
So based on this story, there are two ways to read the state of play with the Trump campaign. One is that it is a disorganized mess that has struggled with fundraising and has mismanaged the one Republican organization most set up to help it win. Not only that, it has repeated past moves of driving out highly qualified and competent employees in favor of incompetent nuts. And sources are leaking to reporters both anonymously and by name to sound the alarm.
The other way to read it is that the Trump campaign thinks it doesn’t need to participate in the mundane slog of day-to-day campaigns. For starters, the campaign thinks Donald Trump is some sort of secret weapon because they have paid zero attention to every election beginning with 2018. Had they paid attention, they might have noticed that the more Trump is front and center, the more of a drag he is on Republican candidates.
But, more worrisomely if you are attached to quaint traditions like “democracy,” the campaign isn’t bothering with campaign infrastructure because it is planning on trying to steal the elections at the ballot box, and then after Election Day, when its army of lawyers will descend on the nation’s courts with frivolous lawsuits in a more organized replay of 2020. And it is confident of success this time around.
Happy summer, everyone!
[Washington Post / Law and Chaos]
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