‘Trump’s Game of Thrones’: How Ronna McDaniel Survived So Long as RNC Chair
And what it means that she’s on the way out now.
RONNA MCDANIEL PERFORMED A NEAR-IMPOSSIBLE FEAT in politics for the past seven years: keeping both the Republican National Committee and Donald Trump happy while she was chair.
Those days are over.
Trump this week finally called for a new RNC chair along with a complete party takeover by his campaign, determined not to have a repeat of 2020, when his campaign and the RNC had such a dysfunctional relationship that his campaign manager and McDaniel weren’t on speaking terms at one point. McDaniel is expected to step down sometime after the February 24 South Carolina primary that Trump is forecast to win handily.
Though cordial, the Trump-McDaniel breakup was months in the making, fueled by the former president’s mounting displeasure with McDaniel for hosting RNC-sponsored presidential primary debates—even though it’s a tradition for the party without a White House incumbent running.
Trump publicly stood by McDaniel until the RNC posted a relatively lackluster fundraising report two weeks ago. He then started to back away from her publicly, a win for the far-right grassroots activists, insiders, and organizations who had campaigned to unseat McDaniel by starving the RNC of money.
“We cut the oxygen off to her, the small-dollar donors, because she advanced the primary debates the way she did that was just anti-Trump,” Steve Bannon, a 2016 Trump campaign adviser and host of the War Room podcast, told The Bulwark.
For more than a year, Bannon said, he “bludgeoned her relentlessly” and promoted critics of and party challengers to McDaniel, as did the right-wing group Turning Point USA.
McDaniel declined to comment for this article and most of her supporters would speak only on condition of anonymity to defend her, mainly by criticizing the tough-to-please Trump who put her in an impossible position. Some McDaniel supporters said Bannon and Turning Point were unwelcome distractions that needlessly made McDaniel’s job harder.
On one side of the fundraising ledger, insiders say, Trump hogged small-dollar fundraising for his campaign and his legal defense fund to defray costs of the four criminal cases against him. Many institutional big-dollar donors, meanwhile, backed opponents like Nikki Haley or Ron DeSantis chiefly due to concerns about Trump’s electability, his incendiary rhetoric, or his inciting of the mob that sacked the U.S. Capitol on January 6th to stop Congress from certifying Joe Biden’s presidential win.
As the GOP chair in 2018, 2020, and 2022, McDaniel was also blamed for Republican losses in those elections that are more attributable to Trump than her.
“Ronna was in a no-win situation and it was a wonder she held on this long,” said one Republican who worked closely with her. “Perhaps she held on too long.”
Indeed, McDaniel’s historically long tenure at the RNC is an outlier both at the organization and in Trump’s orbit, according to a dozen Trump and RNC insiders who provided information for this account.
“No one lasts in Trump’s Game of Thrones, but Ronna might have played it better than anyone,” said one insider.
A SKILLED POLITICAL OPERATOR and scion of a Michigan political family that counts two governors who had run for president, McDaniel kept power at the RNC by adeptly attending to the moods of Trump as well as the personal and parochial needs of the 168 voting members of the committee who ultimately decide who chairs the organization. And despite the RNC’s widely reported financial troubles, McDaniel-friendly staffers say that the party is on solid financial footing and raised more money last month than in any other month in 2023.
But even McDaniel’s admirers say that she allowed the RNC to grow into too much of an independent body during Trump’s presidency and beyond for Trump’s liking, and that he’s still the center of gravity in the party.
“There are too many people in that RNC building in Washington that think they call the shots. They don’t,” said one former RNC adviser. “This is Trump’s party and Trump is taking this back to the way it used to be: the nominee is in complete control, and his people are running the show.”
Except of course he isn’t the nominee yet. Haley has yet to quit the race and Trump doesn’t yet have the 1,215 delegates needed to clinch the nomination.
But he is pushing ahead as if he already has it. And a national political party, with armies of volunteers and staff in all the states, is a major prize for a presidential campaign.
The RNC, like its Democratic counterpart, can work much more in tandem with a presidential campaign than any other type of political committee, and the RNC can take over or help defray hefty campaign expenses like staging events, fundraising, advertising, polling, transportation, and identifying, reaching, and turning out new and old voters.
Financially outgunned and out-organized so far by Biden in crucial swing states, Trump’s campaign desperately wants to take over the RNC and make it operate as closely as the party did with President George W. Bush’s 2004 re-election campaign. During that race, for instance, the Bush-Cheney campaign was able to offload 50 percent of a pricey Spanish-language ad that ran primarily in Florida simply because it featured other Republicans in the commercial and because it included phrase that it was supported by Bush and “el grupo Republicano” (“the Republican team”).
“We had a total partnership, and when you realize what a party and a campaign can do across the country, it’s incredibly powerful,” said Ken Mehlman, President Bush’s former campaign manager who then became RNC chairman from 2005 to 2007, a more typical term than McDaniel’s. During the Bush campaign, Mehlman said he began and ended his days talking with then-RNC chair Ed Gillespie and senior campaign adviser Karl Rove.
“We began and ended each other’s sentences. We began and ended each other’s strategies,” Mehlman said. “Not only was there no daylight, it was a synergistic relationship.”
That was the opposite of the RNC-Trump 2020 relationship.
In 2020, McDaniel and Trump campaign manager Bill Stepien clashed over spending decisions and strategic direction in the waning months of the election. Stepien had been elevated to the post after Trump demoted Brad Parscale. Amid “paranoia and finger-pointing,” McDaniel and Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner brought back an ally of hers, consultant Katie Walsh Shields, but some in the campaign resented the move.
“It was a portrait of dysfunction: Bill and Ronna didn’t talk for months, and Jared interfered and didn’t make anything better,” a Trump adviser said. “Trump 2024 is nothing like the other campaigns.”
SO FAR, TRUMP’S 2024 KUSHNER-FREE CAMPAIGN has been lauded by rivals and admirers alike for smoothly operating under co-managers Chris LaCivita and Susie Wiles. They’ve steered the campaign through three early state primary wins, making Trump the first non-incumbent from either party to do so.
On Monday, Trump announced he wanted LaCivita to act as the RNC’s chief operating officer and said he wanted North Carolina GOP Chair Michael Whatley to replace McDaniel, confirming a report from last week in The Bulwark about campaign staffing as it turns toward the general election. Trump wants his daughter in law, Lara Trump, to serve as co-chair.
Trump has wanted to exert more control over the RNC ever since his 2016 presidential campaign, which had an uneasy alliance with the party at the time. Trump mistrusted the political establishment, but he chose RNC Chair Reince Priebus to be his White House chief of staff. Priebus in turn recommended McDaniel, a fellow Midwesterner, to replace him. She was in Trump’s good graces because she was chair of the GOP in Michigan, where Trump held a huge rally before he became the first Republican since 1988 to carry the state.
Priebus was fired months later. But McDaniel grew closer to Trump.
Those who observed the two interact said McDaniel had a knack for understanding what made Trump tick, using humor, exhibiting can-do deference, and coming to meetings prepared with digestible data-filled printouts to persuade him she was on the right course or to diffuse the incoming from critics.
“She knows how to make a good argument that can bamboozle a political novice, which Trump was,” said one insider. “And she never told him no.”
Two former Trump staffers say that on at least one occasion, during a tense encounter with Trump, he made her cry, and his anger subsided. A spokesperson for McDaniel denies the account.
Another insider said that, behind closed doors, “Ronna held her own and didn’t back down. She gave as good as she got. . . . The fact is, Republicans who want to blame Ronna for all these problems are refusing to admit the reality: This is a lot more about Trump than it is about the chair.”
Part of the reason McDaniel lasted as long as she did is that Trump often values some pushback, provided it’s done respectfully and doesn’t make him appear weak in the eyes of others. Also, Trump is unexpectedly conflict-averse in many personnel matters and he usually doesn’t like to let people go—in sharp contrast to his trademarked “You’re fired!” phrase from The Apprentice.
McDaniel endeared herself to Trump by dropping her maiden name, Romney, because of Trump’s displeasure with her uncle, Mitt Romney, the former 2012 Republican presidential nominee who became a Trump critic. Now a Utah senator, Romney previously served as governor of Massachusetts. His father, George Romney, served as Michigan’s governor, ran for president in 1964 and participated in one of the most painful political lessons in McDaniel’s life.
In 1994, when McDaniel was 21, her newly divorced mother, Ronna Romney, ran for U.S. Senate in Michigan. Her uncle Mitt endorsed her mom. But her grandfather, George Romney, endorsed her mom’s opponent, Spencer Abraham, who ultimately won the primary by 4 points. The next day, McDaniel’s mom appeared at a “GOP Unity Breakfast” with Abraham and endorsed him wholeheartedly.
“To this day, that is probably the most difficult experience I have ever had in politics,” McDaniel said in a speech last year at the Reagan Library. “I forgave my grandfather and loved him, and our family healed because we understood family is more important than politics.”
“I tell this story,” McDaniel said, because “we have to come together as a Republican family, despite our differences. And that’s the only way we can defeat the destruction and devastation that Joe Biden is unleashing on the country we love. . . . As someone who literally has the entire spectrum of the Republican party in my body, we have got to put aside our differences.”
McDaniel is expected to sound similar notes when she steps down after the South Carolina primary.
IN HIS MONDAY STATEMENT calling for Michael Whatley to replace McDaniel, Trump cited Whatley’s support for “election integrity” as a reason to back him. But RNC officials note that, under McDaniel, the RNC has hired election-monitoring staff in 15 battleground states and has launched 78 lawsuits related to ballot access and voting in 23 states.
Election court cases aside, some RNC members and donors are concerned the party would have to foot Trump’s hefty legal bills, but the Trump campaign and some RNC officials say that they will be financed separately the way it is now.
Last year, Trump endorsed Whatley in his bid for RNC vice chair against South Carolina’s Drew McKissick, but McKissick won. This time, McKissick wants to run for chair, but now the Trump campaign is trying to dissuade him as it begins whipping votes for Whatley.
Oscar Brock, Republican national committeeman from Tennessee, said he would love McKissick to be chair, but he expects him to withdraw because of Whatley’s support from “the likely nominee.” One of the only vocal Trump critics on the RNC, Brock said he felt Trump was “jumping the gun” on the announcement because he’s not yet the official nominee.
Brock said he personally likes McDaniel but was not a fan of her leadership in recent years. He said he couldn’t vote to re-elect her after the last presidential race.
“Nobody ever stays when you lose the White House,” Brock recalled saying to her at the time. “I said, ‘You just lost in 2020. You lost in 2018. This is a catastrophe. What in the world are you doing?’”
McDaniel went on to win that re-election race for the RNC chairmanship, as well another contest against a challenger last year—a sign of her deep support among the members. She’s known for being attentive to their needs, from opening RNC-funded community centers in some states to dispersing more RNC money than any previous RNC chair to the parties in the fifty states and six U.S. territories. That’s a big plus for each state and territory party chair who sits on the RNC along with their national committeeman and committeewoman (hence the 168 voting members).
In an email to The Bulwark, Ohio Republican National Committeeman Jim Dicke gushed that “Ronna is a wonderful human being who has been the best candidate for the job presented in each of the candidate election cycles. She has built an excellent hard working staff, and has enjoyed the confidence of the 168 majority.”
Still, Dicke said, “as presumptive nominee time arrives, it is always best to have a seamless working relationship between the RNC and candidate. That includes the nominee having the chair of his choice.”
Richard W. Porter, a committeeman from Illinois, held similar views, saying via email that he’s “very pleased with his [Trump’s] suggestions,” including the suggestion to install his daughter-in-law as the party’s co-chair.
“She is a great fundraiser and has star power,” he said.
Regardless of the institutional name on the check, Trump is still going to be scarfing donor money down to pay his bills, and that's money not going to any other party purposes. It's going to hurt.
Not only do I have a strong dedication to our democracy, but honestly believe that our country desperately needs Biden's almost 50 years in public service to guide this country through a very difficult time ahead. I spent most of my career living and working in dictator-led and communist countries. As an American, I personally witnessed the "absolute rule" of a dictator and knew that I could be imprisoned or even murdered at any time for any drummed up reason. In 2016, I heard the same type of rhetoric from Trump that I heard from Putin in the early 2000's or from Turkmanbashi (Turkmanistan) in the late 1990s. I worked closely with the Nazarbayev government in Kazakhstan, and was lucky to escape Tajikistan. I was a consultant in Bosnia, Afghanistan, and Rwanda - and was smuggled into Afghanistan wearing a burqa and "local" shoes to access the treatment of women during the first Taliban era.
Believe me, I know what a dictator sounds like and behaves like - and Trump's many-sided destructiveness and his "I am God" attitude fits the bill perfectly. He doesn't care about you or me or democracy but only about himself and maybe a few family members. For him, he wants to Russians to continue paying him millions of dollars to support his lavish lifestyle. Turkmanbashi named the months of the year after his family. Trump is just another pathetic mad-man who thinks the world should worship him.
Joe Biden has the experience to lead this country and all of us need to get out and vote. I am sure that Trump will perform his usual temper-tantrum if he looses, but we survived the last one with only five deaths, vital artifacts destroyed, and over 100 Capitol police injured. To elect Trump again would mean the destruction of our way of life, our democracy, and our freedoms. Encourage every one you know to vote in this upcoming election.
Warm wishes to all of you, Elizabeth