Trump's New RNC Isn’t Sending Its Best
Plus: With 229 days to go, how to stay motivated without going crazy?
A spot of good news this morning: The latest tentative government-funding bill, text of which was released yesterday, would authorize 12,000 additional special immigrant visas for Afghans who helped the U.S. as translators or in other ways during America’s war in Afghanistan. As we wrote earlier this month, the program was in danger of hitting its statutory cap of visas issued as early as this summer; this increase will provide some breathing room on that front.
Happy Thursday.
Party in the Front, Business in the Back
How will the new-look, post-purge Trump Superfriends RNC help the Trump campaign through its intense cash crunch? The party’s two recent polar-opposite legal hires—Charlie Spies and Christina Bobb—provide a clue.
Spies, who is coming aboard as the RNC’s chief counsel, would seem a bizarre pickup for a party that just remade itself to be more deeply Trumpy than ever. A normie Republican campaign finance lawyer par excellence, Spies’s resume is lousy with near-presidents: He was chief counsel for Mitt Romney’s 2008 campaign, then counseled Romney’s super PAC in 2012, Jeb Bush’s in 2016, and Ron DeSantis’s last year.
That Trump’s RNC would bring Spies aboard—despite his resume, despite Trump’s stated fatwa on hiring ex-DeSantis staffers, despite the fact Spies even pushed back publicly against Donald Trump’s stolen-election lies in 2021—is an admission of grave need. Trump and the RNC are in a deep and unusual financial hole, trailing far behind Biden and the Democrats financially and with the additional burden of Trump’s large and growing legal fees. Spies, who practically wrote the book on modern candidates getting the most out of their super PACs without running afoul of election law, will be uniquely suited to help the GOP and its allied groups push money around.
But how to raise that money in the first place? That’s where the second lawyer comes in: Christina Bobb, the RNC’s new “senior counsel for election integrity.”
If you’ve followed the news in recent years around Trump’s many attempts to avoid the consequences of his own actions, from losing the 2020 election to fighting his criminal indictments, you’ve probably brushed past Bobb’s name a time or two. As an anchor for One America News Network after the 2020 election, Bobb slung enough lunatic conspiracy theories around that Dominion Voting Systems singled her out as a named defendant in its defamation lawsuit against the network.
Not content merely to evangelize for Trump’s attempt to steal the election, Bobb also quietly lent her talents to Rudy Giuliani’s work to recruit slates of fake electors in seven “contested” states. According to Dominion’s lawsuit, Bobb spent January 6th holed up at the Team Trump “War Room” with Giuliani, John Eastman, Steve Bannon, and others involved with the last-ditch effort to pressure Mike Pence to refuse to certify the election results. Later, she became heavily involved with dead-end “audit” efforts that vainly tried to uncover election fraud in Arizona.
In 2023, she resurfaced in West Palm Beach as an attorney representing Trump in his classified documents case, where she signed a letter attesting—incorrectly, it turned out—that a “diligent search” of Mar-a-Lago had been conducted and no classified documents remained on-site. (She later told investigators she had not conducted the search herself; showing admirable foresight, she had inserted several caveats into the letter to specify that she was only certifying “based upon the information that has been provided to me.”)
The new RNC is working hard to make its new “election integrity” division a core brand component: Party co-chair Lara Trump has been hitting the cable circuit since her takeover to trumpet the “massive resources” the party is devoting to “fight fire with dynamite.” It’s an attempt to reassure the base that the RNC “establishment” is all-in on the MAGA movement—which will hopefully get the small-dollar donations to the cash-strapped party flowing again.
And who better to be the public face of that division than a TV-friendly stop-the-steal lawyer who’s already shown she’s fanatically loyal to Trump?
—Andrew Egger
Man Plans and God Laughs
In this space a month ago, I suggested that we Americans could use a dash of the spirit, a dose of the determination, captured by the closing lines of the poem ‘Invictus:’
“I am the master of my fate;
I am the captain of my soul.”
Some readers seemed to agree. I even received a Taylor Swift-esque friendship bracelet with INVICTUS spelled out on its beads.
I appreciated the gift, though I’ll acknowledge I haven’t been wearing it every day. My handlers here at The Bulwark were worried the friendship bracelet might not quite “work” for me, as they say in the fashion business.
But I’m tempted—in the spirit of Invictus—to overrule them. If I want to wear a friendship bracelet—hey, I am the master of my fate, I am the captain of my soul!
On the other hand . . . maybe not.
After all, Invictus isn’t perhaps the whole truth. As we look ahead, we can’t be at Invictus levels of determination and resolution every hour of every day.
What to do?
Well, while British schoolboys were reciting Invictus as they prepared to assume the responsibilities of self-government, not to say of empire, the Jews of Eastern Europe, who were trying mostly to survive and in many cases to get out, were wryly remarking to each other, “Der Mensch Tracht, Un Gott Lacht.” “Man plans, and God laughs.”
We need some of that spirit too, if we’re going to make it through the next 229 days: A wry sense of humor, a healthy kind of fatalism, an acceptance of the limits of what we can control.
Because God’s been having a good laugh at our expense recently, and I’m not sure he’s finished.
A few years ago he elevated—or allowed us to elevate—a shameless con man, a vulgar demagogue, to the presidency. America, the nation that has led the forces of freedom in the world for almost a century, was to be led by a nasty clown. But, as Charlie Sykes likes to say, a clown with a flamethrower. So a dangerous clown.
God laughed (I presume). We survived.
But now God has brought him back—or allowed us to bring him back—for another turn in the center ring. Even after January 6th, after the consequences of indulging this man and his movement, he’s now the presidential nominee for the third straight time of one of our two major parties, with a decent chance to become president again.
Obviously, dealing with this threat requires Invictus-like determination and hard work to see to it that this doesn’t happen.
But that probably needs to be tempered, for the sake of our sanity, with an acceptance and appreciation of God’s sense of humor.
Though I am tempted to say, as they said in the old country: Enough already.
—William Kristol
Catching up . . .
Lev Parnas, ex-Giuliani associate, testified allegations against Bidens are false and ‘spread by the Kremlin’: NBC News
Biden expands his fundraising advantage over Trump: Politico
U.S. has submitted draft UN resolution demanding “immediate ceasefire” in Gaza in exchange for release of hostages, Blinken says: Axios
Biden cancels nearly $6 billion in student debt for 78,000 public service workers: NBC News
Trump eyes Sen. Marco Rubio as a potential VP pick: NBC News
Bankruptcy is one way out of Trump’s financial jam. He doesn’t want to take it: Washington Post
Quick Hits
1. Toward Trumpo-Reaganism?
Two former mid-level Trump NatSec guys, Matthew Kroenig and Dan Negrea, have a new book out, We Win, You Lose, arguing for what they call a “Trump-Reagan fusion” in foreign affairs. On the site today, Gabriel Schoenfeld breaks it down and picks it apart:
THE CENTERPIECE of Kroenig and Negrea’s treatise is devising a strategy for “winning the New Cold War with communist China,” the “most powerful adversary the United States has ever faced.” They assert that “one of Trump’s greatest accomplishments was making the tough decision to confront China after decades of a failed U.S. engagement policy.” And it is true that Trump did confront China in some arenas, slapping on tariffs in an effort to shift the trade imbalance between our two countries. But to draw a parallel, as the authors do, between this limited effort and Reagan’s comprehensive approach to the Soviet danger, is a bald misrepresentation.
At the heart of Reagan’s approach was the recognition that the Soviet Union was an “evil empire,” a regime that perpetrated aggression abroad and smothered human liberty at home. Reagan never for a moment refrained from engaging in an ideological struggle with the Kremlin, pitting America’s vision of freedom against Soviet totalitarian control. He was a president who spoke of “man’s instinctive desire for freedom and self-determination” and the “grim reminders of how brutally the [Communist] police state attempts to snuff out this quest for self-rule.”
Could there be a greater contrast between Reagan’s frontal challenge to the Kremlin and Trump’s groveling approach to China and its leader, Xi Jinping? “Look, I want China to do great, I do. And I like President Xi a lot, he was a very good friend of mine during my term,” said Trump on one recent occasion. “We love each other,” he said on another. And on yet another occasion, he poured praise on Xi for being “an exceptionally brilliant individual who governs 1.4 billion people with an iron fist.” According to Bolton, in a summit meeting Trump went so far as to tell Xi that he was “right” to detain China’s ethnic minority, the Uighurs, and “building the camps . . . was exactly the right thing to do.” Could there be anything less Reaganesque than this shameful endorsement of Communist repression?
2. Miranda’s Last Gift
Friend of The Bulwark David Frum shared terrible news a few weeks ago: His daughter Miranda died last month at the age of 32. His latest piece in the Atlantic is a tribute to her, a mini-memoir of their last years together, and a meditation on grief. It’s also an account of his complicated relationship with her dog. It begins:
I was at the kitchen counter making coffee when my daughter Miranda’s dog approached. Ringo stands about 10 inches high at the shoulder, but he carries himself with supreme confidence. He fixed his lustrous black eyes on mine. Staring straight at me, he lifted his leg and urinated on the oven door.
After the mess was cleaned up, I complained to Miranda, “I don’t think Ringo likes me.”
Miranda replied, “Ringo loves you. He just doesn’t respect you.”
Theoretically, Ringo is a Cavalier King Charles spaniel. You may have seen depictions of the breed peeking at you from portraits of monarchs and aristocrats. But the spaniels in the paintings are almost always the cinnamon-and-white variety known as a Blenheim spaniel. My wife, Danielle, has a Blenheim. The Blenheim Cavalier is a true lapdog: easygoing, obedient, insinuating. Ringo is very different. He is exactly the color of a cup of espresso, mostly black-haired with a little brownish tinge at his extremities. He’s commonly mistaken for a miniature Rottweiler. That confusion is less absurd than it sounds. If an unwelcome stranger steps in his way, 18-pound Ringo will stiffen and growl, murder in his eyes.
It’s a powerful and beautiful piece. Go read the whole thing.
Cheap Shots
That Cheap Shot was a crackup! When Biden tells it, he should say that the guy came up to him “with tears in his eyes”.
CNBC is reporting a fall off in small donor donations to Trump. Has he mortally wounded his flock of Golden Geese?
Comer had a meltdown yesterday as one of his (former) star witnesses dished on Trump cronies like Giuliani in the impeachment hearing. As Jamie Raskin put it, they have more evidence for a 3rd Trump impeachment than they do for impeaching Biden.