Without much fanfare, RNC is gutted

It’s a sign of just how much Novocaine we’ve injected into the jaw of American politics over the past few years that the gutting of the Grand Old Party was received last week with such numbed indifference.

It’s normal for presidential nominees to install their choice for their party’s chair and make other changes, although in this case former President Donald Trump dumped his own handpicked chair of yesteryear in favor of a North Carolina ally and his daughter-in-law. These changes go far deeper than that, however.

Since the installation of Lara Trump and Michael Whatley as co-chairs of the party, more than 60 Republican National Committee staffers reportedly have been fired, including the political and communications directors and lead data officer. The RNC’s chief of staff and chief counsel left voluntarily before the takeover.

Whatley put out a memo saying the party would be continuing the community outreach programs for minority voters in several states and the party’s early voting program, despite earlier comments from officials saying these were being cut. The new management, though, has made no secret of its intention to focus on the presidential election at the expense of everything else.

The deep cuts are not entirely due to Trump’s ambition to take over the party apparatus. The RNC is facing severe financial problems and came into this year with only a third of the money its Democratic counterpart had. But after all the talk about this now being Trump’s party, last week marked a definitive point at which this became a reality. That was the way Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene interpreted it.

“MAGA is now in control of the Republican Party!!” She cheered on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter.

For those who remember the RNC from the Bob Teeter/Lee Atwater days, it’s staggering to see its collapse as a truly national political organization. While there are still going to be thousands of Republican elected officials and organizations like the National Republican Congressional Committee to promote them, a lot of the technical ability and political know-how that were employed so effectively when the GOP was making its breakthrough in the South will be gone, or relocated to Mar-a-Lago.

It remains to be seen what impact the gutting of the RNC will have on the upcoming election, if any. The long-view question is what’s going to be left after the Trump party has had its day. It seems safe to assume that things will never be the way they were.

The two national parties have always been distinctly different not only in their politics but in the way they organize themselves. Both parties hold conventions and distribute yard signs, so to the general public these organizational differences haven’t been so obvious.

Increasingly, the parallels between the parties are fading. With fewer resources to call on at the national level, Republican candidates may look for even more help from interest groups, or form more localized political organizations. The Democrats, meanwhile, remain a national, Washington-based party, and this year they have a lot of money to spend on statewide races.

Gov. Brian Kemp is an interesting barometer of these changes. He has endorsed Trump, and, if you missed that news, don’t worry. He made about as little of it as he possibly could.

At the same time, Kemp has fashioned the Georgians First Campaign Committee into a more reliable fundraising source for Georgia candidates than the state or national party.

With a decline in coordination between campaigns at the national level and less networking in general between the party faithful in different states, there may also be a tendency for state Republican parties to move apart from each other on issues like abortion.

There’s always a chance the demise of one of the parties will lead to the creation of a new, truly national political party, not a movement based on one politician. There’s just as much of a possibility that the collapse of one of the parties will lead to the disintegration of the other, despite the enormous fundraising advantage the Democrats have amassed. It takes two to tango, after all.