RNC

"Sorry, super busy,” replies someone from Lara Trump’s media team, after I texted to ask for an interview. "I’m working on her music stuff.” The Trumps love to multitask and, in the President’s first 100 days, King Donald’s favorite (that is, only) daughter-in-law has been showing off how hard she can work. Since the inauguration, and now free from the burdens of campaign politics, Lara has released a song called “No Days Off” with the rapper French Montana; a Saturday night show on Fox News; and an activewear collection in the color “MAGA red,” alongside her already established podcast, The Right View. Unfortunately, she has a different press person to dodge questions over each venture.

Welcome, DC Diary readers, to the last edition of this newsletter before Tuesday night’s election. Most polls still have the presidential race at a dead heat between Vice President Kamala Harris and former president Donald Trump. Pennsylvania remains the lynchpin, as the paths for the respective candidates appears to be the Rust Belt and Pennsylvania for Harris, and the Sun Belt and Pennsylvania for Trump. Each campaign is pointing to data that they think gives them an advantage tomorrow.Trump’s team published a memo Monday, for example, pointing out that early vote numbers suggest turnout among urban voters and women is down significantly in the seven swing states compared to 2020.

The Republican National Committee’s memorable four-day convention came to an end in Milwaukee last night. With an unusual performance from Kid Rock, a shirt-ripping Hulk Hogan and dozens of Trump-humanizing speeches, the RNC managed to throw a party that drew some attention, some laughs and certainly some tears — from worried Democratic strategists and enamored Trump-fans alike.It was, as The Spectator’s James Heale put it, “the first convention in twenty years where polls suggest the Republicans are on course to win the White House, producing an air of expectation and excitement.

It is day three of the Republican convention in Milwaukee and tonight Trump’s vice presidential pick J.D. Vance will take the stage. The reaction was muted in the arena when Trump anointed Vance on Monday, likely due to a combination of low name identification and concerns from the establishment that he is not helping Trump’s electability. This will therefore be an important moment for Vance to introduce himself to the broader Republican electorate. Outside of the security perimeter this morning, a Trump supporter was holding court with the following sign: “Advance America, vote Trump and Vance.

Welcome to Thunderdome. So I want to open with a caveat: Fox News is my employer, and anything I say that is critical of their pollsters should be understood as distinct to their pollsters, and not to the network as a whole. That said, their pollsters have occasionally been... very wrong. Who can forget the ludicrous Indiana Senate poll from 2018 that envisioned a dead heat between the candidates in a race the Republican won by seven points? So the point is, everyone can be off on occasion. But right now, the Fox prognosticators are out with a poll that shows Joe Biden up, and the opinions about the economy up as well. It’s been a shift that is notable over the past month. For Republicans, this may come as a shock, or they might dismiss it.

Former president Donald Trump’s defense team chose to rest in the so-called “hush-money” trial in Manhattan on Tuesday, moving the case forward to closing arguments next week and then jury deliberations. Trump did not end up testifying in his own defense, which he had suggested earlier in the trial he might do. Instead, the defense called only one significant witness: Robert Costello, an attorney and former advisor to Michael Cohen and Rudy Giuliani. Costello testified that Cohen told him previously that he had nothing incriminating to offer prosecutors about Trump and that he told him “numerous times” Trump did not know anything about payments to adult film star Stormy Daniels.

Welcome to Thunderdome. It’s obvious that when it comes to 2024, Donald Trump doesn’t want the race to be about the culture war issues that he views as a major drag from the past few years of elections, with abortion at the top of the list. He’d rather it be a race about immigration, the economy, and oddly enough, his own persecution by the Deep State (which motivates his core supporters, but not many others). What’s clear is that in the aftermath of his statement on abortion, Republicans aren’t taking up Trump’s call.

Last night’s elections saw several narrow wins for candidates endorsed by Donald Trump, along with deep divisions in the Democratic Party over a race to helm one of the highest-profile state’s attorneys offices in the nation.One of the weirdest races of the cycle came to an end fairly quickly last night, with Bernie Moreno, the preferred choice of Donald Trump and much of MAGA world, carrying every county to win just above 50 percent in the Ohio Senate primary. The final days of the election were marred by a bizarre allegation from the Associated Press that Moreno had a male-seeking account on AdultFriendFinder, a website used mostly for casual hookups. Moreno is married to a woman and has children.

House Republicans successfully impeached Department of Homeland Security secretary Alejandro Mayorkas by a 214-213 vote on Tuesday after an initial failed attempt last week. Mayorkas is the first cabinet official to be impeached since 1876. Speaker Mike Johnson said Mayorkas “deserves to be impeached,” arguing that Mayorkas lied to Congress, refused to comply with federal immigration law and violated his oath of office. Impeachment articles accused Mayorkas of a “willful and systemic refusal to comply with the law.”To say it is extremely unlikely that Mayorkas would be convicted by the Democrat-controlled Senate is an understatement. This serves as more of a symbolic measure for Republicans.

As the Republican National Committee launches its annual Winter Meeting in Las Vegas, Trump allies are once again calling for the GOP to oust Ronna McDaniel as its chairwoman. Their preferred replacement? Scott Presler. Presler, for those unfamiliar, first rose to social media and political fame by organizing a clean-up in Baltimore after the former president Donald Trump called the Maryland city a “disgusting, rat- and rodent-infested mess.” Since then, the activist better known on X as “#ThePersistence” launched a Republican voter registration effort and, subsequently, Early Vote Action, a political action committee aimed at getting Republicans to cast their votes before Election Day. Prior to all this, Presler was a co-founder of Gays for Trump during the 2016 election.

A new report from the Dispatch claimed that David Bossie, a Republican National Committee member and former advisor to the Trump campaign, had drafted a resolution that would effectively end the primary and put the RNC symbolically behind former president Donald Trump. The draft resolution was immediately met with concerns that only two states had voted in the GOP primary and that the RNC should preside over a fair process, although it would not have ended the primary nor changed how state parties ran their elections.

Welcome to Thunderdome, fresh from New Hampshire, tired as all get-out and ready to rumble on to South Carolina and its welcoming warmth and palmetto-framed cobblestone streets, as opposed to the watery coffee and stained fingers of the Northeast. The strangest thing seems to be happening, though: with Nikki Haley’s insistence on staying in the race, and the apparent flood of donations she’s received since overperforming against Donald Trump, the people around the former president are taking on a newly aggressive tone — even to the point of trying to anoint him the nominee before anyone else votes!

Republican National Committee chairwoman Ronna McDaniel was seething in her chair at the Miami performing arts center that housed the third GOP presidential candidates’ debate in November. Vivek Ramaswamy, the tech entrepreneur running an anti-establishment campaign, had just used his opening statement to publicly call on McDaniel to resign. “I think there’s something deeper going on in the Republican Party here and I am upset about what happened last night. We’ve become a party of losers at the end of the day,” Ramaswamy said. “Ronna, if you want to come on stage tonight, you want to look the GOP voters in the eye and tell them you resign, I will yield my time to you.