Donald Trump is hoping to be our country’s first dictator—and last, if he can find a cutting-edge gene-editing tool that confers immortality while also allowing one to eat unlimited Hot Pockets. So he kind of has to line up the members of his brain trust now, lest they all find better opportunities hosing viscera off slaughterhouse walls or fighting seagulls for egg salad sandwiches.
That’s why Trump wants his daughter-in-law Lara to take over as Republican National Committee co-chair. She’s proven her loyalty, and then some, by staying married to his son Eric, and she also has zero shame when it comes to propping up Donald’s wobbly corpus as often as it takes. Also, Donald hates to play favorites, and since his son-in-law Jared got $2 billion for allegedly befriending a vicious murderer, it’s only fair that Lara get a top GOP gig for standing around looking goofy.
And she’s doing that—but she’s also talking. Which Trump may not have anticipated when he decided she should get the job.
On Wednesday, Lara was asked if RNC money should go toward Donald Trump’s mounting legal bills. Her answer? Oh, you know already. Don’t be coy.
REPORTER 1: “Do you think that the RNC should be paying Trump’s legal bills?”
LARA TRUMP: “You know, I’ve gotten this question already, and I don’t really know what the statutes are that guide that because I’m not officially there yet, but I would have to get back to you on that.”
REPORTER 2: “… Forget the statute, but just generally, do you think paying for President [sic] Trump’s legal bills is something that is of interest to Republican voters?”
TRUMP: “Absolutely, that’s why you’ve seen a GoFundMe get started, that’s why people are furious right now. When they see the attacks against him, they feel like it’s an attack not just on Donald Trump but on this country. You can’t have a country and call it the United States of America that goes out of its way to target political opponents and try to bankrupt them and take down their companies, take down their families. I think that is a big interest to people, absolutely.”
Oh, right, the GoFundMe. Let’s see how that’s going.
Nope. Still nowhere close to $355 million. Come on, MAGA! Dig deep! Put your money where your mouth spittle is!
But while Trump’s campaign quickly contradicted Lara—“Absolutely none” of the RNC’s cash will go toward Trump’s legal bills, a senior campaign adviser told ABC News—it would make perfect sense for Trump to get all the RNC money, since he’s already swallowed the GOP whole. And judging by the way she’s talking, Lara knows this as well as anyone.
The Associated Press:
She told reporters on Wednesday that GOP voters will feel more trust in the RNC by having a Trump family member installed in leadership.
“Having someone like me in there I think will go a long way for people. I can assure you that my loyalty is to my father-in-law and I will make sure that every penny is used properly,” she said. “It should be going to fight for Nov. 5 for the causes that we care about.”
Those causes were electing Trump president in November, growing the Republican majority in the House with “patriots, America first candidates” and winning back control of the Senate, she said.
Of course, Trump’s electoral prospects will be a lot sunnier in November if he’s not in the slammer. And we all know that prison Zoom debates are notoriously hard to follow. So it’s important that all those donations get funneled to the fatally flawed candidate ASAP so he can promptly lose the White House and all of Congress for a second time.
But you don’t have to be one of Trump’s relatives to be his faithful sycophant. Just ask most of Congress. They can’t even get a bipartisan border bill passed because chaos agent Trump needs chaos in order to function. Without the border issue, Trump will have little to campaign on other than Biden’s booming economy—because there’s likely a limit to how much his Al Capone shtick will appeal to swing voters. At some point, general election voters may start to warm up to the idea that being criminally indicted in four separate cases is actually a bad thing.
But while Lara may want “every penny” from the RNC to go to Trump (no, really, she said that; see below), she failed to mention that those pennies are now few(er) and far(ther) between. Maybe because normal people don’t want to send their paychecks down a sinkhole in a vain bid to keep an (alleged!) serial offender out of stir.
CNN:
The Democratic National Committee outraised its GOP counterpart in January, bringing in $17.4 million and ended the month with $24 million in available cash. That far surpasses the $8.7 million in available cash for the RNC, which marked a slight uptick from the $8 million it reported having in reserves at the end of last year, but still represents its lowest total in about a decade.
[…]
The RNC’s low cash reserves have been a major source of concern for the party and contributed to the exit of outgoing chair Ronna McDaniel, who is planning on stepping down from her role later this month – part of sweeping changes coming to the RNC with Trump poised to reshape the party infrastructure.
At $8.7 million, the RNC’s cash reserves remain the lowest it has reported since early 2015, and down significantly from a peak of more than $90 million as recently as 2021.
No worries. Lara Trump is on the job, and she’s promising that all future RNC donations will go to a likely felon. That will turn everything around. And if it doesn’t? Well, at least she’s not Jared Kushner. Or Kimberly Guilfoyle, for that matter.
Check out Aldous J. Pennyfarthing’s four-volume Trump-trashing compendiumincluding the finale, Goodbye, Asshat: 101 Farewell Letters to Donald Trumpat this link.
