Presumptive Republican nominee installed allies to run party but loyalty tests have led to weakening of certain areas, including data
Donald Trump’s allies installed to run the Republican National Committee have faced a tumultuous first month in charge, buffeted by staffing problems and operational headaches as they attempt to bring the party apparatus under the control of the Trump campaign before the 2024 election.
The internal strife at the RNC has prompted the Trump campaign to privately admonish its new leaders in recent weeks. And the move to orchestrate a purge may have partly backfired with far-reaching consequences for the RNC, multiple sources familiar with the matter said.
The Trump takeover of the RNC arrived with a show of force just days after the new chair, Michael Whatley, and the new co-chair Lara Trump were elected, when emails went out to entire teams at the organization informing them they could resign and reapply for their jobs, or be terminated.
The idea was to ensure there would be no overlap between the RNC and the Trump campaign, which already had robust political and communications teams, and to weed out any staffers who were not fully committed to Trump and the wider Maga movement.
But the threats of termination and the rumored loyalty tests – which turned out to be accurate when staffers were asked in job interviews if they thought the 2020 election was stolen from Trump, though there has been no evidence of election fraud – may have been too aggressive.
In the weeks that followed, although the new RNC leadership quietly extended offers to a majority of former staffers, with the exception of those who worked in the RNC political department, some staffers on crucial teams declined to return, the sources said.
There’s a ton of people who will say that they can do it for the right price.
The Naked Emperor can pay a hundred brown nosers to tell him how good he looks; he’s still naked. I’m sure that the Boeing engineers who built the terrible planes knew that it wasn’t the best design; but they okayed the plans because that’s what the bosses wanted.
Having worked in corporate for more than a decade now, I’m pretty sure anyone who said that the planes were shitty design throughout the design and review process were asked to explain themselves ad nauseam while everyone who was admiring the emperor’s new clothes was free to leave the offices early for cocktail hour.
That’s the way these things actually work: group think. Someone coming in saying “none of this appears to make sense” has to be a one-in-a-billion level genius because they are lining up for the firing squad. (And what genius would do that?) When the group has already written up the proposal and the customer has already signed off on it, it will not be changed no matter how insane or impossible it is.
And then QA is also a laugh as a gate. Eventually through a variety of tactics, every single QA resource that tries to actually assure quality will be either excised from the company, or be turned into a yes-man / rubber stamp by corporate movements.
Civil service.
When one of our people retires, they get a one page, mimeographed form instead of an exit interview. They are supposed to write down what their 25 years of experience on the job has taught them, and what lessons they would like to pass on to the upcoming leadership.
That’s almost exactly John Barnett’s story.