“People are really mad at you,” Trump warned McDaniel in one of their many phone calls, recounting both public and private criticism he said he heard about her. “They’re mad at you.”
At one point, McDaniel said the nominee deserves an RNC chair they trust and said she would resign if Trump became the nominee and wanted her out.
Trump — who personally liked McDaniel — did not immediately accept her offer. But the moment epitomized McDaniel’s long and tumultuous relationship with the former president, which began when she ran Trump’s successful 2016 effort in her home state of Michigan once he became the party’s nominee; solidified when he chose her as RNC chair in late 2016; and is now winding to a fraught conclusion as Trump seeks to retake the White House — this time with someone else at the party’s helm.
“She’s been kissing his butt for years,” said Bill Palatucci, a New Jersey committeeman. “But loyalty is a one-way street with Donald Trump.”
This account of McDaniel’s rise and fall at the RNC is based on interviews with 14 Republicans close to Trump and McDaniel.
McDaniel’s looming departure first emerged following an in-person meeting at Trump’s private Mar-a-Lago Club in Palm Beach, Fla., earlier this month. Then on Monday, Trump released a statement suggesting his daughter-in-law and two others as leaders of the RNC going forward.
McDaniel, the second woman ever to lead the RNC, prepares to end her tenure — the longest for a GOP leader — with some accomplishments. Advisers say she helped raise more than $1.5 billion for the organization, helped launch WinRed — a small-dollar fundraising platform for Republicans that now rivals the Democratic behemoth, ActBlue — and created a permanent department to fund election-related lawsuits.
Trump often praises her for helping him win Michigan in 2016. And she enjoyed wide support among the committee’s 168 members, winning a record four elections as chair.
But despite spending much of her time working to placate the former president — a tempestuous and nearly implacable personality — she regularly sparked the ire of Trump, a boss who demands loyalty from his subordinates but rarely returns it. Meanwhile, the Republican Party has repeatedly lost or underperformed in national and state elections in recent years, is dealing with turmoil in a number of state parties key to 2024, and has far less money than the Democratic National Committee.
McDaniel also encountered deep skepticism and hostility from the hard-right, grassroots wing of the party, who viewed her — the niece of Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah) and granddaughter of the late Michigan Gov. George Romney — as establishment royalty to be overthrown. Mitt Romney, for his part, warned McDaniel about continuing to stay in the role after Trump left office, a person familiar with his outreach said. He declined to comment.
People close to Trump described McDaniel’s departure as being driven by a confluence of factors that caught his attention, including the primary debates, a cash crunch, a stretch of negative news media attention, election defeats that he refused to take blame for and complaints from campaign allies and donors.
But the crux of Trump’s frustration with McDaniel, fairly or unfairly, hinged on fights over money and the 2020 election. During that race, the Trump campaign and the RNC regularly clashed, with the campaign believing that the RNC was not sufficiently supporting it financially and the RNC arguing it was doing as much as it could and that Trump’s operation was flawed.
Through a spokeswoman, McDaniel declined to comment for this…
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