[Monday] night, Trump’s handpicked leadership of the RNC took charge and conducted a purge. The new regime ... fired about 60 employees—about a quarter of the staff—as part of “streamlining.” ...Trump's approach seems like Obama's, but pushed to an extreme Obama never approached. Obama may have changed the emphasis of the DNC to some extent, but Trump wants the RNC to be devoted to his interests exclusively.
But some things that are good for Trump are not good for the Republican Party over the long run. This is where Obama offers a cautionary tale.
... Upon winning the presidency, he moved key DNC functions to Chicago, his hometown and political base, despite the protests of party insiders who worried that downballot efforts would be overshadowed by Obama’s reelection campaign. He also created a group outside the DNC, Organizing for America, to support his political movement.
The result was a badly weakened DNC. The national focus led to a neglect of other elections....
As Matt Yglesias calculated in 2017, the Obama years saw Democrats lose 11 Senate seats, 62 House seats, and 12 governorships. The damage was especially bad at the state level. Democrats lost nearly 1,000 seats in state legislatures, the worst loss since Herbert Hoover dragged down the GOP. Republicans captured 29 separate chambers and gained 10 new trifectas—control of both chambers of the legislature and the governor’s mansion....
Echoing Obama’s Chicago move, the RNC is reportedly already moving most of its operations to Palm Beach, Florida, near Trump’s Mar-a-Lago headquarters. All of this makes sense. Trump is a narcissist who can’t and won’t separate his self-interest from the party’s or the nation’s.
Slashing the national footprint of the RNC may weaken the party at lower levels.
Which leads me to a point I've made here in the past. It's widely assumed that Trump will gut the federal government if he's elected in 2024. An Axios story sees a link between Trump's RNC purge and his reported plans for the presidency:
President Trump's ousting of a huge chunk of the Republican National Committee's staff is a preview of what he plans to do with federal agencies if he's re-elected in November....Yes, but the "consortium of Trump allies" -- the Heritage Foundation and similar organizations -- might be wrong to believe that Trump will use these powers to implement their agenda. What we're seeing at the RNC suggests that Trump will expect these newly installed bureaucrats to work for him, not the conservative movement. Do the members of the consortium want to dismantle the administrative state and turn America into a Christian nationalist country? If so, they shouldn't assume Trump is on board. Trump cares about Trump. If he does to the federal government what he's doing to the RNC, he'll turn it into a machine for doing his bidding, not the Heritage Foundation's.
Trump has promised to gut the federal workforce by reintroducing an executive order known as Schedule F if he wins a second term.
As Axios has reported, a consortium of Trump allies are spending tens of millions of dollars to install a pre-vetted, pro-Trump army of up to 54,000 loyalists across government if he's elected.
The idea would be to rip off the restraints imposed on the previous 46 presidents and empower Trump to wield unprecedented power.
At least that's my guess. It'll be bad, but not because it's the fulfillment of the conservative movement's darkest wishes. It'll be bad because it'll be a product of Trump's narcissism, not a right-wing extremist group's master plan. Trump doesn't really care about the extremists' theories of government. He just wants subordinates who are completely loyal and do what he wants.
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