Understanding Trump’s RNC Power Play

It's not the first time a presidential candidate has taken over a party

Lara Trump, the new co-chair of the RNC

Donald Trump recently executed a pretty extensive power play with the Republican National Committee. Shortly after Nikki Haley’s withdrawal from the presidential race and Trump becoming the presumptive nominee, he pushed RNC Chair Ronna McDaniel out and had her replaced with two new co-chairs, one of which was his daughter-in-law. Then he engineered the sacking of some 60 employees. Just how should we be thinking about this?

One exercise I like to do with students in my parties class is to think about whether a given event is consistent with parties being strong (exerting influence over elected officials) or weak (being the creatures of politicians). A presidential candidate – one who is neither the president nor even the official nominee – forcing a chair out and replacing her with a blood relative with no relevant experience sure seems consistent with the weak party thesis. (Also, the symbolism of replacing Mitt Romney’s niece with Trump’s daughter-in-law is not subtle.)

But just how unusual is this? It is actually not that rare for the party’s expected presidential nominee to have some power over the national party and to enlist the party in service of his presidential campaign.

Daniel Galvin has written extensively on the behavior of postwar presidents in relation to their parties. In his 2010 book Presidential Party Building, he categorizes presidents as either party builders or party predators. That is, presidents can generally be seen as either trying to build up their party’s capacity to campaign and to recruit strong candidates up and down the ballot, or to repurpose the party’s capacity for their own electoral successes.

Dwight Eisenhower, for example, presided over a Republican Party that hadn’t held any meaningful control over national politics for two decades prior to his 1952 election. They were weak and needed direction, and he was far more popular than his party was. Under Ike’s direction, the party invested in field operations, activist training, candidate recruitment, campaign spending, and more throughout the South and elsewhere. While he was hardly able to return the GOP to majority status, they did come to control the US House after the 1954 election, and he left them in a much stronger and more competitive state than he found them.

Conversely, we might think of Barack Obama as someone who preyed on his party to some extent. Obama was, in many ways, an outsider when he first ran in 2008, hardly the party’s preferred candidate in the early primaries and caucuses, and he used his own campaign organization (Obama For America) as an electoral tool and ultimately as a governing organization separate from the rest of the party. Obama certainly campaigned for fellow Democrats, but he didn’t invest heavily in the success of the congressional party and ultimately repurposed much of the party’s resources for his own reelection in 2012. And the party lost significant ground during his presidency.

Indeed, as Galvin shows, Republicans tended to be party builders in the postwar era while Democrats tended to party predators. Arguably, this is due to the nature of the era, in which Democrats controlled the House and Senate much of that time, and there wasn’t much for Republicans to prey upon.

I checked in with Galvin about Trump’s latest move.