Ya gotta laugh.
Over there at The New York Times is this headline:
Trump’s Choice Makes a Joke of ‘Election Integrity’
The article, designed as yet another Trump attack by his hometown paper that can’t abide him, was penned by editorial board member Jesse Wegman. Who showcases a vivid ignorance of the Republican National Committee.
Full disclosure, in my tenure as a Reagan White House associate political director, I was a White House liaison to the RNC. This entailed regular attendance at RNC meetings and working closely with its officers on political issues of the day. And oh yes: the co-chair of the RNC was one Maureen Reagan — daughter of President Reagan.
With this in mind, it was hard not to laugh at the Times article. Wegman begins by saying this:
Most of the headlines about Donald Trump’s takeover of the Republican National Committee this week focused on the Qaddafi-like installation of his daughter-in-law, Lara Trump, as a co-chair and the purge of more than 60 committee staff workers who presumably failed to bow low enough before the emperor.
The “Qaddafi-like installation of his daughter-in-law, Lara Trump”? Hello? Anyone with knowledge of the RNC would know that well aside from the fact that Lara Trump, a seriously good politician, is now the RNC co-chair, her appointment follows, as mentioned, in the steps of … President Reagan’s appointment of his own decidedly politically savvy daughter Maureen.
Not to mention that history records when a president or party leader of either the Republican or Democratic parties takes the reins as nominee or president, he appoints his friends and allies to the RNC or DNC.
Let’s take the DNC. Is Wegman truly unaware of James Farley? Farley was a New Yorker and prominent friend of New Yorker Democrat President Franklin D. Roosevelt. Farley served simultaneously — say again simultaneously — as chairman of the DNC, the New York Democratic Party, and in FDR’s Cabinet as postmaster general.
Then there was Larry O’Brien. A member of President John F. Kennedy’s famous “Irish Mafia” White House staff, he carried on for Kennedy successor Lyndon Johnson as postmaster general and also DNC Chairman.
In short, over and over again in both parties the party leader of either party staffs the national party committee with his friends and allies. Donald Trump is well within tradition to install daughter-in-law Lara Trump, as Reagan installed daughter Maureen Reagan as party co-chair.
The precisely same principle applies to staffing the rest of the party national committee. Wegman takes a shot at the appointment of Trump lawyer Christina Bobb as the “senior counsel for election integrity” — and by inference Trump aide Chris LaCivita, the new RNC chief of staff.
Airily dismissing the notion of voter fraud, Wegman ignores the repeated problems of voter fraud in elections. As I long ago noted in this space, just in my home state of Pennsylvania alone, there has been one example after another of voter fraud. As I noted:
In the 2016, 2015, 2014, 2012, and 2008 elections, not to mention back there in the dinosaur age of 1994, there were repeated examples of voter fraud in Pennsylvania. All seriously documented.
In the case of that 1994 special election for a Philadelphia state Senate election, I linked to this story in, yes, the New York Times. In that front-page story, a federal judge was quoted as saying “Philadelphia’s election system had collapsed under ‘a massive scheme’ by Democrats to steal a State Senate election.”
I ended by saying that:
In Pennsylvania, voter fraud — which is genuine voter suppression — is as common as winter snow in Erie.
Preventing it in 2024 and ensuring election integrity is a serious task for the RNC.
Laughably, Wegman also says this:
The real reason Trump chose Bobb is that he has learned from his mistakes. No more public servants who dare to put the country’s interests ahead of his own. He now surrounds himself with only true believers.
Hello?
Time after time after time, the left-leaning political bias that runs rampant through the federal bureaucracy and establishment Washington has been documented. Back there in 2016, the Hill headlined this:
Government workers shun Trump, give big money to Clinton
The story reported:
Federal government employees are opening their wallets to help Hillary Clinton beat Donald Trump on Nov. 8.
Of the roughly $2 million that federal workers from 14 agencies spent on presidential politics by the end of September, about $1.9 million, or 95 percent, went to the Democratic nominee’s campaign, according to an analysis by The Hill.
Employees at all the agencies analyzed, without exception, are sending their campaign contributions overwhelmingly to Clinton over her Republican counterpart. Several agencies, such as the State Department, which Clinton once led, saw more than 99 percent of contributions going to Clinton.
In other words, in stark contrast to Wegman’s fantasy that the federal government is filled with “public servants who dare to put the country’s interests ahead of his own” (Trump’s), the hard reality — and I worked in DC on the Hill, in the White House, and a Cabinet Department — is that those public servants lean seriously left and have total disregard when their real boss — the American people — elect a Republican president. In particular, that applies to when Trump was elected.
And not to put too fine a point on it, from FDR’s New Dealers to Truman’s Missouri Gang, JFK’s Irish Mafia, Nixon’s California Mafia, and Jimmy Carter’s Georgians, for a president to surround himself with friends and allies is hardly unusual. It is, in fact, standard operating procedure.
In short?
In short, former President Trump, soon to be the nominee of the Republican Party, is following exactly in the steps of his predecessors of both party in remaking the party’s national committee — the RNC in this case — as he wishes to see it.
Choosing Lara Trump, North Carolina chair Michael Whatley, and other Trump allies like Christina Bobb and Chris LaCivita, (the new chief of staff) to run and staff the RNC is not only exactly the right thing to do, it has long and serious precedence.
So good for the RNC and its new, highly qualified staff.
And on we go.
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