The wounds from Kevin McCarthy’s House Speaker fight have barely had time to scab over, and already the GOP is bracing for its next intra-party row. Republican National Committee Chair Ronna McDaniel, one of Donald Trump’s most shameless enablers, is hoping to keep her job as the party leader, despite three consecutive disappointing contests. But a challenge from within Trumpworld is threatening her political future, as Harmeet Dhillon — a former legal adviser to Trump’s 2020 campaign, who had openly called on the Supreme Court to “step in and do something” to save the former president’s doomed bid — appears to gather momentum. All of it comes to a head with a Friday vote, which will have major implications for the next presidential race. “[Republicans] are really, really eager for change,” Dhillon told Fox News on Sunday. “And I provide that change, and a vision for how we’re going to win in 2024.”
The RNC chair election has already been contentious — and, because this is the GOP we’re talking about here, a little bit absurd, as well. Dhillon has accused McDaniel of attacking her Sikh faith. McDaniel, who denies the allegation, has accused Dhillon of issuing political threats. MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell, the rabidly pro-Trump conspiracy theorist who is also on the ballot Friday, has hung around the race doing…well, Mike Lindell stuff, mostly related to conspiracy theories about the 2020 election. And looming over this shitshow has been Trump himself, who is said to favor McDaniel, but has declined to endorse her — perhaps believing he can leverage the skirmish to his own political ends as he seeks to reassert his grip on the party after being blamed for its underwhelming midterm performance.
“I like both of them,” Trump said of McDaniel and Dhillon on a conservative podcast last week. “Let them fight it out.”
That fight contains echoes of the one that nearly tanked McCarthy’s speaker bid at the start of this month: McDaniel — whose past concessions to Trump apparently included dropping “Romney” from her public name, because of his ill feeling toward her uncle Mitt — is positioning herself as a figure who could hold together the party’s warring factions. “There’s nobody who’s enjoyed this more than Democrats,” she told the Associated Press of the feuding. “I know, because I love it when they’re fighting each other.” But despite McDaniel’s “unity” campaign line, her struggles to actually bring the party together are likely her biggest weakness, as illustrated by the rise of Dhillon, who cast herself as a populist grassroots figure aiming to upend the GOP establishment. The Trump attorney over the weekend picked up endorsements from the Nebraska and Washington state Republican parties. The Texas and Florida parties in December pushed the RNC to move on from McDaniel.
“The biggest thing is that we want a really strong leader who’s in touch with MAGA, and Ronna just doesn’t have that,” Anthony Sabatini, chair of the Lake County, Florida GOP, told AP by phone from a shooting range. “She’s lost the confidence of voters.”
That could incentivize McDaniel to make even greater overtures to the MAGA right, just as McCarthy did to take the gavel for the GOP’s new House majority. Then again, the battle lines aren’t as clearly drawn here as they were in the speaker fight. While Dhillon, as a Trump campaign lawyer and Fox News regular, enjoys the support of some key MAGA figures — including Tucker Carlson and lead McCarthy holdout Matt Gaetz — the factions seem rather messy, with Dhillon’s campaign also reportedly picking up some support among anti-Trump Republicans, who regard McDaniel as too closely allied with the former president. “You’ve got anti-Trump people that are for Ronna, and you’ve got anti-Trump people for Harmeet,” as Jonathan Barnett, a pro-Dhillon committee member from Arkansas, told Politico. “It’s just the weirdest thing I’ve ever seen.”
Weird, but only fitting for a party with no real principles and no real identity right now beyond Trump, whose own loyalty to the GOP could prove a factor in the RNC race. As the Washington Post reported last week, part of McDaniel’s sales pitch has been that she could keep the former president from mounting a third party presidential run if he fails in the Republican primary. Her argument, in short, is that she can keep this unhappy family together, despite all the bickering and backstabbing. The trouble for her is, it’s not clear her members want the kind of GOP harmony she’s running on. “If you think the last six years were tough and choppy,” John Hammond, a pro-McDaniel committee member from Indiana, told Politico, “wait ‘till you see what lies ahead.”