Christina Bobb And QAnon Are Running Election Integrity Dept.
When a Democrat wins the presidential nomination, he takes control of the DNC and when a Republican becomes his party’s nominee he takes control of the RNC. What’s different today is that Trump has had control of the RNC since 2016 and he has just stepped in to obliterate it and, basically, make it an appendage of the Trump Organization. Eric Lutz referred to it as Trump’s mob-lke takeover of the RNC. Señor T installed his daughter-in-law, Lara, along with a dependable lackey, Michael Whatley, as co-chairs and had them fire 60 staffers, which influential neo-fascist Charlie Kirk called “anti-Trump sleeper cells.” Lutz noted that Trump sieve Marjorie Traitor Greene cheered that “MAGA is now in control of the Republican Party!!”
Let’s be honest here: The RNC was MAGA-fied long before Trump pushed McDaniel out. It yielded to him during his presidency, contributed to his legal bills afterward, and let him thwart its own 2024 primary process, which McDaniel herself practically declared over after the first two contests in Iowa and New Hampshire in January— two months before Trump’s last rival standing, Nikki Haley, would actually suspend her bid.
And yet, the McDaniel RNC still wasn’t quite Trumpy enough for him. If his campaign and the RNC had been working side-by-side before, they will now be working more or less as one entity: “We are not playing games,” Lara Trump said earlier this month, ahead of her big promotion. “There is no one more loyal to Donald Trump and the Make America Great Again movement than this person you’re looking at right here— than me.”
“There will be no funny business,” she insisted.
This being a Trump enterprise, though, there is sure to be plenty of funny business— including Lara Trump’s stated plan to use RNC donations to help her father-in-law chip away at his formidable mountain of legal debt: “I think that is a big interest to people,” she said recently.
Of course, there’s not much for the former president to pull from the piggy bank at the moment: The party is coming off an awful fundraising year in 2023. It’s also flopped in five years’ worth of election cycles: 2018, 2020, 2022, and 2023. “There’ll probably be some changes made,” Trump said in February, effectively numbering McDaniels’ days. But Trump was the biggest reason for the party’s struggles, and an apparatus composed solely of his yes-men would hardly seem likely to improve its fortunes.
Then again, Trump has never really cared about the GOP, beyond the ways it could serve his interests. Now, it seems it’ll exist to do only that. Let that be a clarion call to any anti-Trump Republicans still holding onto hope there is room for them in the party tent: Trump is the establishment now. Everyone else, as Lara Trump put it, is “welcome to leave”— and should, if they don’t want him to take over the government as he has the RNC.
Although some will question if it’s serving his interests to gut the RNC’s minority outreach program, which, reports Roger Sollenberger, they just did: Make the RNC White Again’: GOP Ends Minority Outreach Program. “The program at issue,” he wrote, “is an initiative from the 2022 midterms where RNC field staff engaged voters through gatherings and events held at community centers in areas with heavy minority populations, most specifically Latino communities. The RNC had announced it would be redoubling its efforts in this arena and would be “opening 40 new centers in Latino, Black, Asian American, Native American, Jewish, and veteran communities across the country. That would include establishing outposts in key battlegrounds like Las Vegas, Nevada, Tuscon, Arizona, Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and Allentown, Pennsylvania… Jaime Florez, the RNC’s Hispanic communications director, told The Messenger that ‘Democrats have taken the Hispanic community for granted for far too long’ and vowed that the RNC planned to capitalize on those opportunities. ‘Republicans will continue to make historic investments in Hispanic voter outreach, from opening more community centers to launching Deposita Tu Voto, that will further our gains with Hispanic voters and deliver Republican victories in 2024,’ Florez said at the time.”
Sollenberger reported the change of plans this morning: “the community center program now appears to be another casualty of the RNC’s recent restructuring… along with the apparent decimation of field operations and other strategic realignments that could come at the cost of Republican candidates across the country not fortunate enough to be named Trump. Instead of going after minority voters, the RNC apparently plans to remake itself even more in Trump’s image.”
Trump whole sale takeover and gutting on the RNC “could come at great political expense in the long term, especially for down-ballot candidates who depend on the RNC for critical funding and other resources. But there are other intangible losses, like the exodus of talent, a blooming vacuum of institutional knowledge, and sapping momentum from field projects like the community center program. That project not only had promise, it came at the right time. After ignoring their own ‘autopsy’ of the GOP’s 2012 presidential loss, many Republicans began to court minority voters in the wake of Trump’s 2016 win. As paradoxical as that may seem, given Trump’s rhetoric and policies, those efforts appear to be bearing some fruit. Today, a sizable portion of minority voters— historically a reliable well of Democratic support— have exhibited a disaffection with the party, particularly in younger demographics, drifting towards Republicans who champion conservative ideologies that have long been culturally ingrained in those communities but had not in themselves inspired voters to change parties.
[T]he project’s pitch as “a dream intersection of fun, civic life, candidate recruitment, and GOTV muscle,” reporting that in the midterms the centers hosted events like toy drives, religious services, holiday meals, cultural celebrations— and, for some reason, cryptocurrency workshops.
“Community centers continued to pop up in Hispanic communities and positive headlines continued to flow,” The Messenger reported.
While it’s difficult to measure the cost of these programs, people familiar with the effort shrugged off the expenses as comparatively minimal, especially given the positive preliminary returns. Most of the overhead, they said, would be related to renting space for the centers, along with staffing expenses and incidentals for events.
The RNC previously indicated that the rationalization for temporarily closing the centers was financial, considering the party’s cash woes. But if that’s also the explanation for a permanent shutdown, the savings would be thin.
Federal Election Commission filings show that in 2022, the RNC spent a grand total of just over $2 million on rent, with much of it going to campaigns and state and local parties for joint field work in the midterms. But some outlays give an idea of the cost— such as the $3,500 per month that the RNC paid to “No Limits Community Development” in Georgia. By comparison, around the same time, the RNC agreed to pay $1.6 million to cover Trump’s personal legal costs.
Besides, the new MAGA RNC felt it has better ways to spend its money, like hiring crackpot QAnon conspiracy theorist, former OAN propagandist and dismally-failed former congressional candidate Christina Bobb as new in-house senior counsel.
This morning, the DNC responded to Bobb’s hiring with barely-concealed glee, noting that Bobb is “a self-described ‘conspiracy theorist’ who will fit right in with the far-right extremists and election deniers who make up the new MAGA senior leadership at the RNC… Washington Post: “LaCivita is installing Christina Bobb— a former OAN reporter who has espoused false claims that the 2020 election was stolen— as senior counsel for election integrity. Bobb is the author of a book called Stealing Your Vote: The Inside Story of the 2020 Election and What It Means for 2024 and promoted the audit of Arizona elections.”
