After the chaotic 2020 election, Lara Trump knew the Republican National Committee (RNC) needed to streamline its focus in 2024 to secure a victory, the RNC co-chair reflected in an interview released on Thursday with PragerU’s Marissa Streit.
With even higher stakes this election year, Lara Trump and chairman Michael Whatley focused on three key components: trimming the fat at the RNC, turning out early voters, and ensuring election integrity, she said.
“You really can’t have a country and call us the United States of America if people don’t trust it. So Michael Whatley and I, when we got in there, we said, ‘okay, there’s so much that the RNC tries to do. We try to be everything to everybody and everybody wants a piece of us, and we’re going to pare it back and we’re going to say no to everything except getting out the vote and protecting the ballot,'” she said. “That’s what we focused on, and obviously, we’re very proud of the results.”
When Streit asked Trump how she and Whatley helped “clean up the RNC” after they were elected in March, Trump said the process began with eliminating “a lot of unnecessary hires.” They then allowed existing employees to reapply for their jobs, and people were kept on a “case-by-case basis,” she said.
“When I’m going to go out and ask somebody to donate even $10 to Donald Trump’s campaign and to the RNC, I want be a good steward of that money,” she said. “I don’t want it wasted. I don’t want — for a second — people to think that we’re wasting money on a staffer who doesn’t ultimately need to be there.”
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“We felt like that ultimately gave us the best team possible,” she added. “I think that it was necessary, not just for the organization, but to start to reestablish some of that trust that the RNC really had kind of lost with a lot of Republicans across the country.”
Trump said from there, the organization focused on voter turnout and election integrity. All throughout Donald Trump’s campaign leading up to election day, Lara Trump and the RNC emphasized the importance of taking advantage of early voting, something she said was not always popular with her fellow Republicans.
“The truth is, if you have an election season, if you have weeks on end of early voting, and we’re not capitalizing on that as the Republican Party, we’re missing a whole swath of the electorate — and that seemed like it was a bad play in previous elections,” she said, noting that the RNC also target low-propensity Republican voters who do not come out every election cycle.
Republicans notably smashed early voting this year, coming close to Democrats’ number and dominating in states like Florida.
The importance of focusing on election integrity “really can’t be overstated,” Trump continued, adding that the job of the RNC was to “reassure people that ‘yes, it will be worth your time to come out and vote.'”
The RNC partnered with the Trump campaign to launch “the most extensive monumental election integrity program in the nation’s history” with five areas of “observation in the process,” that would “guarantee coverage, and aggressive attorneys will be engaged at all these stages to stop Democrat attempts to circumvent rules,” the RNC said in April. Those five ears included:
- Logic & Accuracy Machine Testing
- Early Voting
- Election Day Voting
- Mail Ballot Processing: Adjudication & Duplication
- Post-Election: Canvass, Audits, Recounts
The program also included poll watching and legal experts who offered “comprehensive training sessions” about election monitoring.
“We’re going to have to go to every single swing state, and we’re going to have to talk to local media because not everybody has cable news, and we’re going to have to make sure people know we’re watching every single vote that’s being cast and counted, and we’re going to recruit,” Trump reflected.
“We wanted to recruit a 100,000 people. We recruited 230,000 people to be poll watchers and poll workers. We wanted to have attorneys at every major polling location in the country, and we had 6,500 attorneys that we recruited, most of them volunteer,” she detailed. “Because we put this big operation in place, and because anyone who wanted to do anything nefarious knew we were watching, we caught 20,000 issues — we had to address 20,000 issues throughout the course of early voting and election day.”
“I think was really important to show people we were serious,” she added.
Lara Trump further noted that the first step in dealing with election integrity was to actual acknowledge the issue.
“You could be heavily criticized for even contemplating that there could be a problem in our voting process,” she recalled. “But if you have half the country, Marissa, thinking that their vote isn’t going to matter or that there’s some something nefarious going — That’s a big problem.”
“I think a lot of people felt like in 2022, those midterms, a lot of the problems should have been addressed, and maybe they weren’t — they weren’t even really discussed,” she continued. So we talked about it, and we weren’t shy in talking about it. In fact, we tried to talk about it all the time ad nauseam … I don’t think you can actually tackle a problem if you’re not willing to at least talk about it.”
Trump said ultimately, she is “so grateful” Americans turned out for Trump with so much force.
“So many came out though, that it was such a resounding win … I would’ve taken any win possible, but this win was so important with the popular vote, with 312 electoral votes, with all the swing states won by Donald Trump, the movement in states like California, New York, New Jersey, Virginia. That is really powerful,” she said. “And I think it speaks to the fact that the people want their country back. They want things set straight. They want it done the proper way, and they really believe Donald Trump will be the person to do it.”
Trump recently announced she will step down as RNC co-chair, amid speculation she could replace Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL), whom Donald Trump has nominated to be Secretary of State. Lara Trump did not confirm her next move but told Streit she is “open to whatever the future holds.”
“I put it in God’s hands — I really do,” she said.
Katherine Hamilton is a political reporter for Breitbart News. You can follow her on X @thekat_hamilton.
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