A montage of images from The Purge movies.
March 17, 2024 by David Silverberg
Tuesday, March 19, Republican voters will have the final opportunity to vote for the candidate of their choice in Florida’s Presidential Preference Primary.
There’s hardly any point in doing so, though. The Republican nominee is known. All his competitors have dropped out and the Florida Republican Party has already endorsed him. There is no suspense here.
Early voting results in Lee and Collier counties are reflecting the inevitability of the outcome and the lack of enthusiasm. As of Sunday, March 17, in Lee County only about 20.25 percent of voters had participated by mail and in-person voting. In Collier County that was only 17.91 percent and in Charlotte County it was 17.17 percent.
The participation rates may go up when the final in-person voting occurs on Tuesday.
But not only is there little mystery about the primary outcome, there’s also little mystery about what a Trump presidency will mean should he accede to the presidency by electoral or other means. If there’s any doubt, people need look no further than the Republican National Committee (RNC) in Washington, DC.
On March 8, Ronna McDaniel (née Romney) stepped down as chair of the RNC. Despite being described as “unfailingly loyal to Trump” by The New York Times, all her past fundraising, hard work and promotion of Trump wasn’t enough. Among her many sins was her insistence on holding debates open to all the Republican candidates, none of which Trump attended.
“It is a little bit bittersweet to be with all of you here today as I step down as chair after seven years of working with you all,” she said in her parting remarks.
Taking her place was Michael Whatley, chair of the North Carolina Republican Party, and Lara Trump, wife of Trump’s son Eric, as co-chairs. Chris LaCivita, a senior Trump campaign advisor, was named the RNC’s chief operating officer. It put the RNC entirely in Trump’s hands.
Observers should regard the takeover of the RNC as a dress rehearsal for a Trump presidency. The way that Trump is treating the organization is the way he will treat the United States—and non-Trump Republicans, or as he calls them, Republicans In Name Only (RINOs)—if elected.
So what are the takeaways from the RNC takeover?
The purge
The first thing that Lara, Whatley and LaCivita did was fire 60 members of the RNC staff and cancel numerous existing contracts. Those who wished to reapply for their jobs could do so and be vetted on the basis of their loyalty to Trump rather than the Party.
The political professionals working at the RNC are hardly radicals, Marxists or Democrats; these are dedicated lifelong Republicans committed to the Party and its goals. The most senior of them had already weathered the Trump presidency, the Big Lie, the insurrection and the midterm elections.
But it wasn’t enough. As Charlie Kirk, head of Turning Point USA, the Trumpist youth organization, stated in a post on X on March 11, “Bloodbath at the RNC is underway. 60+ firings just today. This is excellent. The anti-Trump sleeper cells all have to go. The RNC is getting ready to win.”
Rick Wilson, a Florida-based veteran political operative, co-founder of the Lincoln Project and author of the book, Everything Trump Touches Dies had a very different take on the RNC purge. In a March 11 Substack post titled “The MAGA Mafia's RNC Bust-Out,” Wilson wrote:
“The presumption that in 2024, nine years into Trump’s reign as the GOP’s dominant force, the RNC is stacked to the gills with secret RINO Fifth Column types is beyond ludicrous. Everyone in that building has survived the last few years by being as much of a Trump loyalist as can be imagined, but it does point to the Paranoid Style of MAGA politics. The Purity Posse is riding to the RNC, boys! Mount up!”
The war on competence
It is more than likely that the RNC staffers with institutional knowledge and professional competence will be replaced with people whose only qualification will be the depth of their fanaticism.
The same is likely to apply if Donald Trump attains the presidency. All of the proven knowledge, competence and capability of existing civil servants, diplomats and even—perhaps especially—law enforcement will be erased in favor of pure fanaticism in the service of Donald Trump. Unlike the clear qualifications that now govern government service, hiring will be done on the vague and subjective basis of personal loyalty and ideological purity. Even the military won’t be spared. The country and all Americans will suffer from the extreme loss of competence in running the nation’s affairs. The potential for corruption is immense and almost inevitable as has been proven repeatedly in Third World dictatorships.
This kind of behavior will leach down to the grassroots and it can already be seen in Southwest Florida with election challenges by ideologically driven, unqualified MAGA candidates to proven, veteran candidates for school boards, county commissions and election supervisors. The results have already resulted in School Board paralysis and in Collier County an extreme, MAGA-dominated Board of Commissioners that has passed anti-federal and anti-public health ordinances.
Nepotism and corruption
Like so many autocrats before him, Trump so needs personal loyalty from those around him that the only people he really trusts are family with blood or marriage ties. This was in evidence in his presidency when he entrusted a variety of sensitive tasks to his otherwise inexperienced and unqualified son-in-law Jared Kushner and elevated his daughter Ivanka to senior advisor.
Now with Lara as RNC co-chair, he can be secure in the knowledge that she will impose his will on the Republican Party.
As Wilson put it: “Lara Trump is there as the eyes and ears of the Family. Chris LaCivita is there to bleed every last drop of revenue and resources to a) the Trump effort and b) his friends and allies. Everyone who gets the jobs and contracts canceled en masse this week will be a LaCivita ally or crony. Lara isn’t sophisticated enough to understand what happens when all this rolls forward, but it won’t matter much.”
The same will apply if he becomes president. Donald Trump can be expected to draw on a variety of family members to do his bidding at the highest levels of the American government. This will run counter to American law and practice of prohibiting this kind of incestuous inside dealing, which violates American principles of merit, competence and honesty in government, replacing it with cronyism, corruption and outright theft.
If president again Trump will undoubtedly treat the United States Treasury as his personal piggy bank and all the previous Republican pieties about stewardship of taxpayer dollars and constraining government spending will be rendered null and void.
From a Party standpoint the change means starving the entire down-ballot ecosystem of the funds it needs to run candidates and campaigns at the state and grassroots levels.
As Wilson put it: the new RNC leadership “will bleed the RNC to a desiccated husk. They will break it, kill off any institutional knowledge or expertise in their desire to root out what human-flounder hybrid Charlie Kirk called ‘RINO sleeper cells.’ They will merge the operations into Trumpworld, and everything in Trump World exists to serve only Trump.”
Grassroots mayhem
More than anything else, what this dress rehearsal means for grassroots-level, conservative Republicans—like the Midwestern Republicans who reside in Southwest Florida—is that a lifetime of party loyalty and adherence to principle is now a hindrance.
This has already manifested itself in the MAGA takeover of Florida Republican Party executive committees. Traditional Republicans have been steadily pushed out over the past several years as committed MAGAs propelled the Party Trumpward.
A Republican—in Southwest Florida or anywhere—now has to be a total Trumper to comfortably remain in the Party. As an example of the consequences of apostasy, last year state House Rep. Spencer Roach (R-76-DeSoto, Charlotte and north Lee counties) had a bullet fired into his home when he dared to challenge the MAGA takeover of the Lee County Republican Party. In a January 2022 op-ed in the newssite Florida Politics titled “No Coronation for Donald Trump in ’24,” he dared to say that while he wasn’t a never-Trumper he also wasn’t an only-Trumper.
There will now be no non-Trumper Republicans of any kind in Trump’s party. There is no diversity or free thought there. Party members must totally endorse any Trump pronouncement, delusion or crime that he commits. The choice is between being a total-Trumper or RINO.
If there was any question of this before, Trump’s actions at the RNC make it official.
Again, Wilson puts it best: “This wholesale slaughter in the RNC is one more sign that the MAGA GOP isn’t simply post-partisan; it’s post-organizational, post-rational, and just another opportunity to monetize Trumpism.”
He continues: “This case of institutional [everything Trump touches dies] means the end of the line for the old GOP. The state committeemen and committeewomen, the state organizations themselves, the major donors, the people who work their way up to get convention seats and tickets are all in for a crashing disappointment. The RNC’s work in voter registration, research, digital, communications, and turnout will wither and die before summer. All that will remain is the RNC’s ability to sluice money (minus a little handling fee and the vig) into Trump’s gaping maw.”
If Trump accedes to the presidency either by election or other means these practices and proclivities will go nationwide.
At the organizational level, Trump will undoubtedly carry out a similar purge of what he and former advisor Steve Bannon have called the “deep state;” i.e., all the experienced, professional civil servants who make the government run to serve the American people. Because their loyalty is to the nation and the Constitution and not to Trump personally, they will be purged, en masse and immediately. The functioning of the country will come to a halt.
Taking their place will be pure Trump loyalists, people who will carry out Trump’s orders no matter how illegal, unconstitutional or even insane.
The country’s needs and priorities will be ignored; the only needs and priorities that will count will be those of Donald Trump himself.
In a way, Trump’s takeover of the RNC is a good thing: it provides such a clear preview of what a Trump presidency will mean.
And that also gives loyal patriots of all party affiliations the time and incentive to organize, mobilize and defend America from what is obviously a clear and present danger from within.
Liberty lives in light
© 2024 by David Silverberg