Trump set to finalise RNC takeover, installing a key ally and his daughter-in-law as leaders

Houston: Donald Trump is set to complete his takeover of the Republican National Committee on Friday when GOP officials vote to install the former president’s hand-picked leadership team including his daughter-in-law Lara Trump.

Michael Whatley, a North Carolina Republican who has echoed Trump’s false theories of voter fraud, is set to be elected the party’s new national chairman in a vote Friday morning in Houston. Lara Trump will become the co-chair.

Trump’s team is promising not to use the RNC to pay his mounting personal legal bills. But once the leadership changes are finalised, Trump and his lieutenants will have firm control of the party’s political and fundraising machinery with limited, if any, internal pushback. Whatley will carry the top title, replacing longtime chair Ronna McDaniel after she fell out of favour with key figures in the former president’s “Make America Great Again” movement. But he will be surrounded by people closer to Trump. Lara Trump is expected to focus largely on fundraising and media appearances. The functional head of the RNC will be Chris LaCivita, who will assume the committee’s chief of staff role while maintaining his job as one of the Trump campaign’s top two advisers.

With Trump’s blessing, LaCivita is promising to enact sweeping changes and staffing moves at every level of the RNC to ensure it runs seamlessly as an extension of the Trump campaign.

In an interview Thursday, he sought to tamp down concerns from some RNC members that the already cash-strapped committee would help pay Trump’s legal bills. Trump faces four criminal indictments and a total of 91 counts as well as a USD 355 million civil fraud judgment, which he is appealing. His affiliated Save America political action committee has spent USD 76 million over the last two years

on lawyers.