Donald Trump Will Make The RNC Great Again

Just kidding, he's going to bleed it to death. MAGA!

In this, the summer of our discontent, with Biden’s polling looking lackluster, let us stop for a moment and remind ourselves that Donald Trump’s most salient feature is his absolute, total incompetence. 

This is a man who went broke running a change machine that swallows quarters and spits back nickels. This is a man who installed heavy marble sinks on passenger airplanes at a time when the Gulf War was sending fuel prices through the roof. This is a man who forced the Georgia GOP to embrace Herschel Walker as a Senate candidate. This is a man who advised Americans to treat covid by drinking bleach.

Donald Trump and his team of sycophants could f*ck up a one-car parade. And true to form, they’re turning the Republican National Committee into a one-car parade even as we speak!

On Saturday, NBC News was first to report that the RNC had ousted its chief counsel Charlie Spies, just two months after bringing him onboard. Spies has a long history in Republican politics, including a stint running Jeb Bush’s super PAC, which raised a whopping $100 million for the 2016 presidential primary before his boss had even declared. A Trump campaign official described him to NBC as “the best at what he does, knows the FEC loopholes better than anyone.”

In short, he’s highly competent and a great get for the RNC, which is why he was brought on in March when Trump’s people took over the organization and pushed out Ronna Romney McDaniel in favor of Lara Trump and former North Carolina GOP chair Michael Whatley. Rounding out the roster is Chris LaCivita, who is simultaneously a senior advisor to the Trump campaign and RNC chief of staff.

Whatley and LaCivita hired Spies, along with Trump White House veteran Bill McGinley as “outside counsel for election integrity.” At the same time they named Christina Bobb, Trump’s dimwit consigliere and the author of the book “Stealing Your Vote: The Inside Story of the 2020 Election and What It Means for 2024,” as the RNC’s “senior [inside] counsel for election integrity.” 

The Washington Post reports that Steve Bannon pressed for Bobb’s hiring because “we need that kind of will to fight — someone who is going to contest elections everywhere.” By which he can only mean that she’s happy to repeat any lie, no matter how ridiculous, on camera, since Bobb doesn’t appear to have entered her appearance on a single federal case, election-related or otherwise, in the past five years. (She did represent CrossFit in suits against mom-and-pop gyms for trademark infringement like ten years ago, though. That’s like almost the same thing, right?)

Marc Elias, the attorney spearheading Democrats’ courtroom efforts to protect the vote, was impressed with two of the three hires.

“I worked against Whatley when he ran the North Carolina Republican Party and have had legal fights with Spies and McGinley,” he wrote in March. “They are not Mike Lindell, Jenna Ellis and Rudy Giuliani. None started as Trump sycophants. Each traded away more establishment ties to go all in with MAGA. While they may now be all in with Trump, Spies and McGinley are competent and smart lawyers.”

Elias described Bobb as a “notable offset to the two more establishment figures.” But if Whatley and LaCivita were hoping to satisfy the MAGA gods by employing a zealot with zero election litigation experience, thus freeing them up to make merit-based hires elsewhere, they were sadly mistaken.

Spies worked for Florida Governor Ron “DeSanctimonious” during the 2024 primary, and in the past for ¡Jeb! and Mitt Romney, so he started with several black marks against him. But he might have survived if he hadn’t committed the mortal sin of admitting that the 2020 election wasn’t stolen by dint of massive vote fraud.

“I may get booed offstage for this, but that’s simply not true,” Spies said at CPAC’s annual jamboree in 2021, refuting claims that voting machines had flipped votes to Biden via corrupt algorithms or other fantastical gremlins.

“Let’s win the elections and not worry about things that aren’t true,” he added.

But worrying about things that aren’t true is the animating purpose of the GOP since Trump unhinged his jaw and swallowed the party whole. These are people who believe that Trump is fit and pious, while godless, feeble Biden is admitting hordes of undocumented migrants to vote in federal elections. And so Spies’s perfidy could not stand.

Or, as the Post put it, “Trump had approved of the hiring but later learned about additional comments the lawyer had made.”

The New York Times’s Maggie Haberman reported that the lawyer’s previous work for DeSantis, Bush, and Romney “was highlighted for Mr. Trump by people seeking to oust Mr. Spies.”

That softened the ground to get rid of him, according to the two people briefed on the matter. But in the last few weeks, the fact that Mr. Spies’s firm — from which he did not take a leave when he accepted the R.N.C. job — still has ties to Mr. DeSantis became a particular point of concern for Trump officials, the two people said.

TL, DR: Trump’s purity police decided that Spies wasn’t loyal enough, and they shivved him.

NBC News quotes “RNC spokesperson Danielle Alvarez” saying that “Charlie approached RNC Chief of Staff, Chris LaCivita, about potential time commitment conflicts and it was agreed that, while we appreciate and value Charlie’s expertise and professionalism, he cannot do this role full time and still maintain the obligations to his law firm that he has spent years successfully building.”

Presumably this is the same Danielle Alvarez who is elsewhere described as a spokesperson for the Trump campaign.

Meanwhile, Christina Bobb just got indicted in Arizona for election fraud, and she’s still on the RNC payroll. But Bobb is slavishly devoted to the MAGA cause, and in Trumpland that’s worth more than competence, skill, experience, or even a clean criminal record.

So while there is plenty to be scared of in the next six months, we can at least take comfort in the fact that Trump is poised to do for the RNC exactly what he did for Trump Steaks. And Trump Vodka. And Trump University. And Trump Airlines.

He’s going to suck the life out of it, by doing things like demanding that Republican candidates who use his name or likeness pay a vig.

“Beginning tomorrow, we ask that all candidates and committees who choose to use President Trump’s name, image, and likeness split a minimum of 5% of all fundraising solicitations to Trump National Committee JFC [Joint Fundraising Committee],” Trump campaign manager Susie Wiles and LaCivita wrote in an April 15 letter to GOP candidates, adding that “Any split that is higher than 5% will be seen favorably by the (Republican National Committee) and President Trump’s campaign and is routinely reported to the highest levels of leadership within both organizations.”

JFC, indeed.

In comments to the Post, LaCivita defended the wholesale subjugation of the party’s needs to Trump’s, even as Democrats continue to out-fundraise Republicans by 50 percent.

LaCivita said in response that the rising tide of Trump’s candidacy would lift all Republican boats this year, and that the RNC would continue to work closely with the Republican Party’s House and Senate committees.

Of course LaCivita failed to specify whether he was wearing his “Trump Advisor” hat or his “RNC” hat when he made the statement. (Just kidding, they are the same hat.)

But former RNC staffers seem horrified at the prospect of yoking the entire apparatus to the top of the ticket.

“There won’t be a RNC operation to help the greater party. They don’t care about the greater party,” a former RNC official told the Post. “The RNC is important to lots of people in down-ballot elections. They’re cutting off any service that doesn’t provide help to anyone but Donald Trump. It’s just all about Trump.”

Well, that’s a shame.

Sadly, they won’t be able to get the old Elite Superfriends Strike Force Election Squad back together, since Rudy Giuliani is a little busy right now, and Jenna Ellis got excommunicated from Trumpland for endorsing DeSantis in the primary.

So now it’s all on Christina. You can do it, girl! And if not, well, Herschel Walker’s got some time on his hands.