Donald Trump may have just cut off his nose to spite his face

| 9:09 am EST February 5, 2024
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No one would ever accuse Republican National Committee Chair Ronna McDaniel of being good at her job. She’s overseen one underperforming election cycle after another. And the RNC’s fundraising numbers keep getting uglier. But while she’s bad at her job, she’s not the real problem; Donald Trump is. He’s toxically unpopular, and he keeps forcing the Republican Party to go with candidates who are just as unpopular.

It’s always appeared that the RNC was only keeping Ronna McDaniel around because she was so cartoonishly loyal to Trump. In fact she recently tried to nudge Nikki Haley out of the race, even as Haley was finishing much stronger than expected in New Hampshire. But Trump has never hesitated to scapegoat his most loyal allies as needed. And with the RNC bottoming out financially, Trump is now publicly floating the idea of ousting McDaniel.

The problem for Trump is that he may be cutting off his nose to spite his face. He’s about to be convicted in criminal trials in March and April. Polling says that a huge chunk of current Trump-leaning voters will refuse to vote for him in 2024 if he’s a convicted felon. And he’ll be going into this summer’s Republican National Convention as a convicted felon.

So there’s every reason to expect that even if Trump wins the most delegates in primary voting, there will be a serious attempt at taking the nomination away from him at the convention. These things tend to be so chaotic as to be unpredictable, so it’s anyone’s guess as to whether it would work. But one thing that would surely benefit Trump in any floor fight would be to have the RNC Chair in his pocket. And yet now he’s talking about getting rid of his pet RNC Chair.

You can always count on Donald Trump to make self defeating decisions these days. But at this point he’s so boxed in, it’s not clear that there is a successful decision to be made here. If he sticks with the hapless Ronna McDaniel, RNC fundraising will continue to bottom out so badly that there won’t be much for him to stick into his own pocket. But if he ousts McDaniel, it could make it even more difficult to come out of the convention with the Republican nomination.