(NewsNation) — The Republican National Committee on Friday picked Michael Whatley, who was endorsed by former President Donald Trump, as its new chairman.
“The RNC is going to be the vanguard of a movement that will work tirelessly every single day to elect our nominee, Donald J. Trump, as the 47th President of the United States,” Whatley, North Carolina’s Republican Party chair, told RNC members in a speech after being elected.
Lara Trump, the former president’s daughter-in-law, was unanimously voted in as co-chair.
The new leadership elections come after Ronna McDaniel announced last month she would step down after leading the national committee since 2017. In addition to McDaniel, RNC co-chair Drew McKissick said he would also leave.
Lara Trump is expected to focus largely on fundraising and media appearances. She emphasized that shortly after she was voted in, taking time in her inaugural speech as co-chair to hold up a check for $100,000 that she said had been contributed that day to the party. When asked by a reporter later, she declined to say who wrote the check.
The functional head of the RNC will be Chris LaCivita, who will assume the committee’s chief of staff role while maintaining his job as one of the Trump campaign’s top two advisers.
With Trump’s blessing, LaCivita is promising to enact sweeping changes and staffing moves at every level of the RNC to ensure it runs seamlessly as an extension of the Trump campaign.
McDaniel’s resignation comes as Trump looks to reshape the party’s national leadership ahead of the general election this fall.
The 50-year-old McDaniel was a strong advocate for the former president and helped reshape the GOP in his image. But, Trump’s “Make America Great Again” movement increasingly blamed McDaniel for the former president’s 2020 loss and the party’s failures to meet expectations in races the last two years.
McDaniel, the first woman to chair the RNC and the committee’s longest-serving leader since the Civil War, previously said she planned to step down after the South Carolina primary. The niece of Utah Sen. Mitt Romney and a former chair of the Michigan GOP, she was Trump’s hand-picked choice to lead the RNC shortly after the 2016 election. Her profile as a suburban mother was also considered especially helpful as the party struggled to appeal to suburban women in the Trump era.
Trump’s team is promising not to use the RNC to pay his mounting personal legal bills. But once the leadership changes are finalized, Trump and his lieutenants will have firm control of the party’s political and fundraising machinery with limited, if any, internal pushback.
In some ways, Trump’s GOP takeover represents a typical transition for major political parties when they shift from the primary to the general election phase of presidential elections. Candidates are typically given the keys to their national parties once they secure the presidential nomination. Biden, for example, effectively controls the Democratic National Committee.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
