Reporting from various outlets in recent weeks paint a picture of the Trump 2024 campaign’s wholly-owned subsidary, the Republican National Committee, as a disorganized shitshow being watched with steadily increasing panic by an array of candidates and allies on several key fronts, all of them more or less directly attributable to the Orange God Emperor’s singular focus on winning the presidential election and staying out of prison above the party’s overall electoral fortunes.
Last week the Federalist reported that the RNC pulled the plug on the website for “Bank Your Vote,” an effort spearheaded by loser former Chairwoman Ronna Not-Romney to convince GOP voters to cast their ballots in-person or by mail early. It was stupid but at least it was something after years of starting election days in the hole against Dems who had already built solid leads from people who don’t believe Soros is sending his stormtroopers to secretly confiscate them. Trump Campaign (not RNC) spokeswoman Danielle Alvarez said “the website is down for reconstruction as we refocus our operation on not only banking votes but growing votes,” without actually explaining that “refocus.”
On Friday the Dispatch reported that the party’s “ground game” is nowhere near operational, much less on par with the Biden campaign and the DNC’s, meaning “few if any regional and local campaign headquarters, little to no deployed field staff, and little to no traditional voter turnout activities, such as door-knocking, phone banking, or volunteer organizing.” And even if and when they get their shit together it’s all about the swing states at the expense of Congressional races in places like New York and California. Worse still, the Orange God Emperor is the one squashing all the “traditional voter turnout activities” in favor of “election integrity,” as a “GOP insider” tells the Dispatch that Donald has been “clear about that – for the last six months: ‘I’m not worried about turning out the vote, I just want to catch the cheaters.’ So in a lot of ways, this aligns with his vision.”
On Saturday the Associated Press reports that the party/campaign’s minority outreach efforts need more actual effort than just Trump saying Black voters love him because he’s a criminal. The state of the non-effort is nicely summarized with the plain statement that the famously failed “minority community outreach centers” have all been shuttered and some of them “replaced by businesses that include a check-cashing store, an ice cream shop, and a sex-toy store,” per the AP. A Detroit-area Michigan GOP official says she’s seen essentially jack shit from the Trump RNC. “It’s me setting up events, or people just reaching out to me,” said state vice chair of outreach Rola Makki. Black MAGAchurch Pastor Darrell Scott, a longtime Trump ally, also says he’s pretty much on his own, for lack of “a cohesive engagement plan for Black communities. What it has are conservatives in communities of color who have taken it upon themselves to head our own initiatives.”
Not much to really say in summary here, the connective tissue is obvious enough. If nothing really changes in the normal voter turnout efforts and Trump’s just going to rely on earned media and his “election integrity” brownshirts terrorizing people at the polls in swing state cities to carry himself to victory then well that would be very much on-brand for him. The actual nuts and bolts of that non-strategy aside, all of this taken together is about as plain a statement that the Orange Caesar’s survival is paramount above any and everyone else in the party. He wins or he dies in prison.