ANOTHER POSSIBLE SIGN THAT DONALD TRUMP MIGHT BE TOO SELF-OBSESSED TO COMPLETELY DESTROY AMERICA AS PRESIDENT

Donald Trump is trying to make the Republican Party into Trump Organization 2.0. New York magazine's Ed Kilgore writes:

The former president’s bulletproof standing in the 2024 presidential-nomination contest has made it exceptionally easy for him to begin remolding his party in his own image. This project achieved an early milestone with his planned replacement of RNC chair Ronna McDaniel with an ultraloyalist North Carolina operative named Michael Whatley, along with Trump’s own daughter-in-law Lara ... as co-chair.

Lara Trump is not simply a political nepo baby, however. She could well represent the final subjugation of any broader goals or purpose of the national party beyond hailing the chief. Her first comment about what she wanted to do with her RNC post, as Fox News reported, was highly illustrative:

“The RNC needs to be the leanest, most lethal political fighting machine we’ve ever seen in American history,” Lara Trump told Newsmax ...

“Every single penny will go to the No. 1 and the only job of the RNC — that is electing Donald J. Trump as president of the United States and saving this country.”

I'm not sure what this tells us about the Republican Party. But it might be telling us something about a possible second Trump administration.

Michael Whatley's chief qualification for the job of RNC chair is, in Trump's eyes, the fact that he's a strong believer in Trump's big election lie. Lara Trump's principal qualification is that she's Trump's daughter-in-law (and also an election denialist).

What do we fear about a second Trump presidency? That he'll follow the path laid out in the Heritage Foundation's Project 2025 and do massive damage to vital parts of America's government and democratic system. But his picks for the RNC aren't totalitarian theorists -- they're people who proclaim that the 2020 election was stolen and will say the same thing in 2024 if Joe Biden wins. If that happens, they'll direct party resources to another attempted Trump election theft. That's Trump's sole criterion for the job of RNC leader.

I'll repeat what I've been saying: While it's quite possible that Trump will fully empower Project 2025's America-destroyers as president, I think it's also possible that he'll focus so much on what matters to him personally -- keeping his ass out of prison and bankruptcy, along with making life miserable for the immigrants he despises -- that the rest might not get done. He might politicize but not dismantle the FBI and Department of Homeland Security. He might never get around to invoking the Insurrection Act in order to sic federal troops on anti-Trump demonstrators. He might not wage legal warfare against the mainstream media. (He won't admit it, but in many ways he likes the mainstream media.) He might not even try to jail Joe Biden. (He never tried to lock up Hillary Clinton.)

Trump is focused on winning. I'm not sure he sees past that. He'll do quite a bit of serious damage to America even in this (somewhat) less bleak scenario, but he won't do as much damage as he could.

Unlike, say, Ron DeSantis, Trump isn't a big-thinking totalitarian. He's just the biggest narcissist who's ever lived. If he wins, that might be what (barely) saves America.