Long before Donald Trump publicly threatened to skip out on the first 2024 presidential primary debate, Republican National Committee officials knew he was going to be a problem.
Going back more than a year, the group charged with planning the GOP’s first primary debates since 2016 discussed the likelihood that the former president would skip the first one if Fox News ended up hosting, according to two RNC members familiar with the discussions.
At a more recent meeting, officials briefly entertained the idea of banning Trump from future debates if he didn’t show up in Milwaukee on Wednesday night.
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Yet on both occasions, the RNC officials decided the best response was to do nothing.
“Early in the debate process we talked about it,” one of the RNC members involved told The Daily Beast, requesting anonymity to discuss sensitive internal conversations.
After one of the members asked what the RNC should do if Trump wanted to pick and choose which debates to attend, the consensus in the room boiled down to “America is full of freedoms, and this is one of those,” the member said.
In response to inquiries from The Daily Beast, a spokesperson for the RNC disputed any discussions of banning Trump from future debates.
A year later, it’s clear Trump has certainly chosen to exercise his freedom—at the party’s expense.
While at least seven candidates polling in the teens and single digits slug it out on stage in Milwaukee, the party’s once and likely future nominee will take a pass, choosing instead to sit for an interview with Tucker Carlson and, generally, make a mockery of the primary debate process.
“I think this could be the biggest Republican shitshow we’ve seen in years,” the RNC member said.
The display, say some GOP insiders, reveals the organization at its weakest point of the entire Trump era—not exactly inspiring confidence it can manage a nasty and hugely consequential primary.
Some RNC members are not surprised it has found itself powerless in the face of Trump flouting their procedures.
“I think the thing to understand about the Republican Party is that it’s very much a bottom-up organization,” the second RNC member said, also requesting anonymity.
After years of Trump’s allies purging state and local party officials and replacing them with MAGA loyalists, the RNC has reached a point, as another member put it, where it’s become the “counter-cultural party.”
But after poor performances in the 2020 and 2022 elections, there is clear appetite within the party for Trump’s primary challengers to get an honest hearing—or for one of them to become the nominee and begin a new era.
Stuck trying to manage that potentially untenable balance is RNC Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel, very much a Trump-era figure who is nevertheless distrusted by the corners of the MAGA base.
An early test of the RNC’s ability to manage competing factions and ultimately pave the way to some kind of unity was their so-called “loyalty pledge.” McDaniel attempted to get candidates to promise to support the GOP nominee, whoever that may be, as a condition of appearing on the debate stage.
“If you’re going to stand on the Republican National Committee debate stage, you should be able to support the nominee and beat Biden,” McDaniel has said. But when pressed by CNN’s Chris Wallace over whether that would apply to Trump, the chair replied, “It’s across the board. The rules aren’t changing. We’ve been very vocal with them.”
The ensuing response from the GOP field encapsulated the RNC’s weakness. While Trump was always unlikely to sign it, his refusal to do so—and the party’s willingness to let him show up for the debate anyway—opened the door for other candidates to ignore it, too.
Former Rep. Will Hurd, who has yet to qualify, said Trump was “setting the example” by not signing it, while former Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson signed the pledge upon his self-proclaimed qualification for the debate stage, but not before adding the caveat that he does not expect Trump to be the nominee.
RNC National Press Secretary Emma Vaughn defended the party’s handling of the primary contest heading into Wednesday night’s debate.
“The RNC worked over two years to deliver a transparent and fair primary process that will put our eventual nominee in the best position to beat Biden,” Vaughn said in a statement to The Daily Beast. “The Republican Party prides itself on being powered by the grassroots and voters in real America, while the Democrats beholden themselves to D.C. elitists.”
Despite any misgivings about Trump within the RNC, Republican voters still like his well-worn act of antagonizing the “Swamp” of Beltway politicos. Appearing to be on the wrong side of the equation by taking any punitive action against the former president is an immediate no-go for party brass, the second member said.
With a base animated by culture war boycotts against the likes of Budweiser and Target—and now Fox News, with Steve Bannon declaring on his podcast that true Trump supporters should tune out from the debate and tank the ratings—the official Republican brand is coming perilously close to suffering the same treatment.
Some of Trump’s strongest applause lines at his rallies over the years, for instance, have been against Republicans he’s painted as out-of-touch elites, such as Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY).
“Trump has uniquely broken what it means to be the Republican National Committee because he's broken what it means to be a Republican,” a source close to the RNC told The Daily Beast.
“I don’t necessarily mean either of those things negatively,” they continued. “It’s just that, do you think a blue collar Trump supporter in the heartland cares one bit about the RNC’s role as some sort of ‘clearing house’ for who’s a legitimate, viable Republican presidential candidate? Of course not.”
Although many lawmakers and key figures in the party may feel held hostage by Trump supporters, some Republicans believe much of the former president’s post-indictment support is inflated in the form of a protest vote to pollsters.
Describing Trump’s electoral prospects as “toast” despite his healthy polling lead—now running more than 30 points ahead of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis in most polls—the second RNC member said the current surveys say more about the level of anger on the right than outright support for the former president.
“They’re registering anger toward the justice system, and toward the elites for how they’ve treated him since the very day he stepped down that escalator,” they said.
Still, for now, the broad consensus is that the official party is powerless to stop Trump from running the show.
“He’s gonna be the winner of the debate because he’s not there,” the first RNC member said with frustration, in spite—or because—of the fact he will be preparing to be arraigned in Atlanta the next day, where he faces criminal charges for trying to subvert the outcome of the 2020 election.
While Trump has publicly indicated that he will not participate in the “debates”—the second of which will be aired on Fox Business—not everyone is taking that declaration to the bank.
“At some point when he starts to fade in the polls, he'll have to scramble, and eventually come back,” the second RNC member said, which would only underscore Trump’s electoral weakness and prompt a further crisis of confidence.
Maybe then, the member wondered aloud, GOP voters will start to care if their nominee is electable. “All we need to do is unify behind somebody by October 2024.”
But accommodating Trump to this extent—before he faces the prospect of conviction from one of his now four criminal indictments—can’t lead to anything good, the member predicted.
They recalled when the RNC described the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol as “legitimate political discourse” in a vote to censure former Reps. Liz Cheney (R-WY) and Adam Kinzinger (R-IL)—the two lone Republicans on the House January 6 Select Committee—at its winter meeting in 2022.
Although the voice vote passed with “unanimous support,” the way it landed in the room at the time led straight to this week’s nightmare scenario, the member said.
Half the room stood and applauded the motion to whitewash the most shameful day in Trump’s presidency, while the other half remained still.
“Yes, there are people in the RNC who support Trump,” the member said. “Then there’s the rest of us, where we’re staying neutral and not necessarily supporting anyone else, but definitely not him.”
For now, those members are in for a lot more sitting still.
Zachary Petrizzo contributed to this report.
