RNC votes to install Trump’s chair pick
HOUSTON (AP) — The Republican National Committee voted Friday to install Donald Trump’s handpicked leadership team, completing his takeover of the national party as the former president closes in on a third straight presidential nomination.
Michael Whatley, a North Carolina Republican who has echoed Trump’s false theories of voter fraud, was elected the party’s new national chairman in a vote Friday morning in Houston. Lara Trump, the former president’s daughterin-law, was voted in as cochair.
Trump’s team is promising not to use the RNC to pay his mounting personal legal bills. But Trump and his lieutenants will have firm control of the party’s political and fundraising machinery with limited, if any, internal pushback.
“The RNC is going to be the vanguard of a movement that will work tirelessly every single day to elect our nominee, Donald J. Trump, as the 47th President of the United States,” Whatley told RNC members in a speech after being elected.
Whatley will carry the top title, replacing longtime chair Ronna McDaniel after she fell out of favor with key figures in the former president’s “Make America Great Again” movement. But he will be surrounded by people closer to Trump.
Lara Trump is expected to focus largely on fundraising and media appearances.
She emphasized that shortly after she was voted in, taking time in her inaugural speech as co-chair to hold up a check for a $100,000 that she said had been contributed that day to the party. When asked by a reporter later, she declined to say who wrote the check.