Why Trump's alarming takeover of the RNC is backfiring

It’s been roughly a month since former President Donald Trump’s hand-picked allies took the reins of the Republican National Committee — the most tangible example of Trump’s ever-tightening grip on the GOP’s party apparatus. But the takeover isn’t going well.

The committee’s new chairman, Michael Whatley, and co-chair, Lara Trump, immediately ordered a purge of the organization after they assumed their positions. Dozens of RNC staffers were either laid off or asked to resign and reapply for jobs. In a harrowing development, as my colleague Hayes Brown has discussed, applicants were asked for their views on whether the 2020 election was rigged.

Now new reporting indicates that even the purge process has been a mess. In a sign of how haphazard the mass terminations were, most former staffers have reportedly been offered jobs again. That raises the question of why their jobs were terminated in the first place. The rehiring process is going poorly, as well. According to Axios, some rehired staffers are “unsure of what their roles are.”

The result is a critical brain drain from the RNC just as the general election is effectively getting underway. The Guardian reports that multiple sources familiar with the matter say that some staffers have declined to return: “The situation means the RNC has been left without people with deep knowledge of election operations at the Republican party’s central committee.”

https://www.yahoo.com/news/opinion-why-trump-alarming-takeover-120000163.html