It’s been roughly a month since former President Donald Trump’s hand-picked allies took the reins of the Republican National Committee — the most tangible example of Trump’s ever-tightening grip on the GOP’s party apparatus. But the takeover isn’t going well.
The committee’s new chairman, Michael Whatley, and co-chair, Lara Trump, immediately ordered a purge of the organization after they assumed their positions. Dozens of RNC staffers were either laid off or asked to resign and reapply for jobs. In a harrowing development, as my colleague Hayes Brown has discussed, applicants were asked for their views on whether the 2020 election was rigged.
It’s clear that a premature rush to cleanse the RNC has pushed out talent that could’ve helped Trump and the party achieve their goals.
Now new reporting indicates that even the purge process has been a mess. In a sign of how haphazard the mass terminations were, most former staffers have reportedly been offered jobs again. That raises the question of why their jobs were terminated in the first place. The rehiring process is going poorly, as well. According to Axios, some rehired staffers are “unsure of what their roles are.”
The result is a critical brain drain from the RNC just as the general election is effectively getting underway. The Guardian reports that multiple sources familiar with the matter say that some staffers have declined to return: “The situation means the RNC has been left without people with deep knowledge of election operations at the Republican party’s central committee.”
It’s not clear what exactly motivated people to turn down opportunities to be rehired. The Guardian’s story speculates that part of it could be tied to the “loyalty tests” at the interviews. Alternatively, it could also be in part because the new RNC is relocating some of its staffers, such as its data team, to Palm Beach, Florida, to embed within Trump’s campaign and further meld the campaign…
Read the full article here
