A petulant Charlie Kirk promises to purge GOP politicians ignoring the "grassroots"
Pro-Trump activist, Charlie Kirk, is pissed at the establishment GOP. The 29-year-old founder of Turning Point USA and Students for Trump has aimed fire at the Republican National Committee (RNC) for its supposed apostasy. He believes the group is an impediment to Republican victory in 2024. And he let them know his feelings in a scathing email (which seems an antique mode of communication — but perhaps that is how you get conservative attention)
As reported by the Washington Post,
In a Monday email to the 168 members of the Republican National Committee, he [Kirk] told them that donors and activists would desert the party unless it changed. The result, he said, would be a colossal failure in the 2024 presidential election.
“How do we plan to win in 2024 if you so boldly reject listening to the grassroots, our donors, and the biggest organizations and voices in the conservative movement?” he asked in the message, which was obtained by The Washington Post. “If ignored, we will have the most stunted and muted Republican Party in the history of the conservative movement, the likes of which we haven’t seen in generations.”
Kirk would have helped the lay observer if he had been more specific. Who are the grassroots in his calculus? Is it just the Trumpers? Or does it include dyed-in-the-wool conservatives looking to move on from the rotting status quo of the Trumpian years? Take Bob Vander Plaats, head of the Iowa-based social conservative group Family Leader. Is he still a member of the grassroots? Or has his dismissal of Trump 2024 disqualified him from Kirk's consideration?
“The former president presents our biggest risk of losing for 2024, and conservatives are tired of losing. Even the former president’s announcement [of a 2024 run] is being greeted like it never happened. There’s no buzz amongst my network at all.”
Whatever Kirk thinks, I bet the RNC is paying attention to Plaats and thousands more like him.
Kirk's lack of clarity continues. When he says “donors”, does he mean only those who currently donate to Trump? Or does he include the big names who have declared Trump is three-day-old fish? For example, Republican mega-donors Stephen Schwarzman and Thomas Peterffy, who will not be backing Trump’s 2024 bid?
“America does better when its leaders are rooted in today and tomorrow, not today and yesterday. It is time for the Republican Party to turn to a new generation of leaders and I intend to support one of them in the presidential primaries.” — Schwartzman
“We need a fresh face. The problem with Trump is he has so many negatives. He can’t get elected, period.” — Peterffy
I guarantee the RNC is listening to Schwartzman and Peterfyy — as well as Ronald Lauder and Ken Griffin, two more GOP megadonors who want nothing to do with Trump. There is also no reason to believe that the RNC has stopped listening to “the biggest organizations and voices in the conservative movement”. And there is no more important voice than Ruppert Murdoch and his conservative megaphone Fox News — who now firmly embrace the post-Trump GOP.
We should not be surprised at Kirk's self-serving spin. After every GOP electoral humiliation, the party ritual includes a bloody self-autopsy in which competing conservative factions desperately try to credit someone else for the GOP's failure. This time, after three consecutive election fiascos, the internecine struggle is particularly vicious.
The MAGA morons, of which Kirk is a paid-up member, blame an incipient never-Trump movement for diluting the 2016 magic. Meanwhile, the party traditionalists (who long for 2014) blame the dead-end cultism of the QAnon-addled who cling to a feet-of-clay figurehead long past his ‘use-by’ date.
Kirk´s criticism of the RNC, and by extension its three-time Chair Ronna McDaniel, as anti-Trump, is a symptom of the GOP´s shifting tides of loyalty. McDaniel was once so in the tank for Trump that she dropped her family name “Romney” (Mitt is her uncle) to get in better with the party's malevolent leader. But history counts for nothing. And she is now a convenient target for those lost to the cult.
McDaniel is looking for a fourth term as RNC chair. She is facing vocal opposition from Harmeet Dhillon, an attorney and RNC member from California, who has been a paid contributor to a Trump PAC. Kirk has promoted her candidacy. And at a recent TPUSA conference, AmericaFest, the organization conducted a straw poll among candidates for the RNC chair. Dhillon won with 58% of the votes.
McDaniel is not taking the threat to her reign lightly. She points out that for all his self-regard, Kirk is an empty suit in charge of a useless organization.
“They do great conferences. How many young voters did they register? How many youth voters turned out this cycle? How about the college kids in Arizona, where they are headquartered?”
Snap! If there is one state that exemplifies the emasculation of Trumpism, it is Arizona. Every state-wide Republican candidate hitched their wagon to Trump and the 2020 election denial. Every one of them lost.
I do not know what Kirk means by “stunted” party. But his claim that the GOP will be “muted” flies in the face of the constant and undiminished whining from the Greene, Gaetz, Boebert, Roy, Gosar wing of the asylum.
And his claim that “we will have the most stunted and muted Republican Party in the history of the conservative movement, the likes of which we haven’t seen in generations” is hyperbole ripped straight from the Trump style-book.
The GOP´s governing philosophy is identical to the WWE´s business model. So the political observer will be treated to the titanic, but ultimately vacuous struggles between the MAGA and post-MAGA warriors. While the undercard will feature the McCarthy establishmentarians vs the Freedom Caucus. The Senators vs. the Representatives. The national party vs. the state Republicans. And the corporatists vs the ideologues.
The only unity is that the vast majority of contestants will be white.