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Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.
Democrats are aiming to seize on Republican “financial disarray and leadership chaos” caused by Donald Trump’s takeover of the party’s apparatus, claiming it will give them an advantage in this year’s election.
In a memo to be released on Wednesday and obtained by the Financial Times, the Democratic National Committee said its counterpart — the Republican National Committee — was “barely able to stay afloat” amid fundraising struggles and internal strife.
“Voters, donors, and staff alike are either fleeing the MAGA-fied Republican party or being chaotically forced out in a mass purge, casting a troubling shadow on the committee’s balance sheet and their prospects at the ballot box leading into a critical election year,” wrote DNC executive director Sam Cornale.
Trump has engineered a big shake-up at the RNC in recent weeks as he steamrollered through the Republican presidential primary — replacing its chair Ronna McDaniel with two handpicked candidates from his Make America Great Again movement, including his daughter-in-law.
Michael Whatley, who was previously chair of the North Carolina Republican party, was selected as RNC chair, and Lara Trump was picked as RNC co-chair last week during a meeting in Texas.
On Monday, the RNC fired dozens of staff members at its Washington headquarters — with the Associated Press reporting that “more than 60 people” would be losing their jobs. The RNC has declined to comment, but the move was billed by Trump’s advisers as an effort to streamline its operations.
“We have to make sure we’re smart with the donors’ money, and if donors are concerned that there is a bureaucracy that’s too bloated, and some of the folks in the building have lost their way, we have to rightsize that,” Jason Miller, a senior adviser to Trump, told Fox News on Tuesday.
With eight months to go until the November election, Trump is leading President Joe Biden by 1.7 percentage points in the Realclearpolitics.com national polling average.
But his campaign and the RNC have been lagging behind Biden in terms of fundraising and in the amount of cash they have on hand, just as an election battle expected to be the most expensive in history gets under way.
At the end of 2023, Biden groups had about $118mn in cash on hand, compared with about $66mn for Trump groups. The difference — $52mn — was equal to the Trump groups’ legal costs in criminal and civil cases.
The mounting legal costs have raised concerns among some donors that any money they give to Trump or the party might be used to cover the former president’s defence in court, rather than help his campaign or other Republicans.
Lara Trump is married to Eric Trump, the former president’s second son who runs the Trump Organization alongside his brother, Donald Trump Jr. She has suggested that Republican voters would be satisfied with the RNC using its funds to pay the former president’s legal fees.
“People are furious right now, and they see the attacks against him . . . I think that [paying the legal bills] is a big interest to people, absolutely,” Lara Trump said during a campaign stop in South Carolina last month. She also told Newsmax that “every single penny” from the RNC would “go to the number one and the only job of the RNC, that is electing Donald J Trump as president of the United States and saving this country”.
Democratic officials believe that Trump’s takeover of the RNC will only harm Republicans — and help their own prospects — in the November election, both at the presidential level and in congressional and other races.
“This latest MAGA rebrand with Whatley and Lara Trump at the helm won’t do the RNC any favours, and it doesn’t bode well for down-ballot Republicans,” Cornale wrote in the DNC memo.
“Pledging to spend the RNC’s non-existent war chest on Trump’s legal bills is not a good pitch to donors, who are already refusing to donate”, Cornale wrote. In contrast, he said the DNC was “breaking fundraising records, and are in a strong position to keep building our already massive war chest”.
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