As Republican Party chair departs, some fear party will become 'Trump's playpen'

Republican National Committee (RNC) Chair Ronna McDaniel will leave her post on March 8, having been forced out of the GOP's national leadership as Donald Trump moves toward another presidential nomination and asserts control over the party.

McDaniel,the committee's longest-serving leader since the Civil War, announced her decision in a statement on Monday morningat a party meeting.

"The RNC has historically undergone change once we have a nominee and it has always been my intention to honour that tradition," she said in a statement.

The move was not a surprise. Trump earlier in the month announced his preference for North Carolina GOP Chair Michael Whatley, a little-known veteran operative focused in recent years on the prospect of voter fraud, to replace McDaniel. Trump also picked his daughter-in-law, Lara Trump, to serve as committee co-chair.

McDaniel, 50,the niece of Utah Sen. Mitt Romney,was a strong advocate for the former president and helped reshape the party in his image. But Trump's MAGA movement increasingly blamed McDaniel for the former president's 2020 loss and the party's failures to meet expectations in races during the last two years.

The party is also struggling to raise money. The RNC reported $8.7 million in the bank at the beginning of February, compared to the Democratic National Committee's $24 million.

In addition to McDaniel, RNC co-chair Drew McKissick said he would leave.

Trump cannot make leadership changes without the formal backing of the RNC's 168-member governing body, but McDaniel had little choice but to acquiesce to Trump's wishes given his status as the party's likely presidential nominee and his popularity with party activists. RNC members from across the country are expected to approve Trump's decision in March.

'He's got to fight his own legal fight'

While the new leadership structure effectively a Trump campaign takeover of the RNC is widely expected to be embraced by members, Henry Barbour, a national committeeman from Mississippi, has been circulating a pair of draft resolutions:one pushing to keep the committee neutral until Trump is officially the presidential nominee and another that would bar the committee from paying his legal bills.

Lara Trump suggested recently that Republican voters would likely want the RNC to cover her father-in-law's legal bills given that they see the 91 felony counts against him as an example of "an attack not just on Donald Trump but on this country."

It's unclear whether the RNC's 168 members will eventually agree, though Barbour made his position clear to Reuters on Saturday.

"The RNC's job is to win elections. It's not to pay the legal bills for any leading candidate. He's got to fight his own legal fight," he said.

Chris LaCivita, Trump's senior campaign adviser who will run day-to-day operations at the RNC, has said the organization won't use party funds to pay Trump's legal bills.

Trump's trial on charges he falsified business records to hide secret payments to three individuals ahead of the 2016 U.S. presidential election campaign will go ahead as scheduled with jury selection starting on March 25.

Trump also faces a scheduled May 20 trial in Florida on allegations he unlawfully retained government documents after leaving the presidency in early 2021, but the pace of pre-trial rulings and hearings has called into question whether that start date will be kept.

WATCH | Trump preps for Michigan primary:

Trump looks ahead to Michigan primary as Haley refuses to concede

7 months ago

Duration 2:36

After trouncing Nikki Haley in the South Carolina primary, Republican presidential front-runner Donald Trump is steaming ahead to the next contest in Michigan. Trump has now handily won four states in a row, but Haley refuses to drop out of the race.

The dates for two trials that centre on his attempts to prevent the formal certification of Joe Biden's 2020 election win one at the federal level and one in Georgia have yet to be determined.

Carolina ally backs voter fraud claims

The leadership shakeup comes as the GOP shifts from the primary phase to the general election of the 2024 presidential contest. While former UN Ambassador Nikki Haley has remained in the race, Trump has won every state in the primary calendar and could clinch the Republican nomination by mid-March. Voters go to the polls in Michigan on Tuesday.

Haley told reporters in Grand Rapids, Mich., on Monday that the RNC was turning into "Donald Trump's playpen."

"The idea that they would be choosing a chair and a director before a primary is a massive control move by Donald Trump," she said.

Trump, meanwhile, wants allies who echo his false theories of voter fraud, a key reason why he is believed to have tapped Whatley.

Whatley has taken credit for hiring an army of lawyers ahead of the 2020 election, which he has said stymied Democratic efforts to commit voter fraud that year. There was no evidence of any intentional efforts to commit widespread voter fraud in multiple investigations and court cases.