Donald Trump has long detested Barack Obama and sought to present himself as the opposite of his presidential predecessor in every way. But in his takeover of the Republican National Committee, he risks echoing one of Obama’s biggest political mistakes.
Last night, Trump’s handpicked leadership of the RNC took charge and conducted a purge. The new regime, led by the new chair, Michael Whatley; the vice chair, Lara Trump; and the chief of staff, Chris LaCivita, fired about 60 employees—about a quarter of the staff—as part of “streamlining.” The “bloodbath” includes members of the communications, data, and political departments. Insiders told Politico they anticipate that existing contracts with vendors will be voided.
When the new leaders were announced last month, I suggested that the GOP was ceasing to function as a political party, and becoming another subsidiary of Trump Inc. But there is another way to view it. For years now, the RNC has struggled. Republicans might have lost the 2016 presidential election if not for the emergence of Trump, who shook up the party’s longtime platform and forged a new coalition, turning out voters no other recent candidate had. Since then, however, Republicans have continued to lag, even with Trump juicing turnout. Republicans got slammed in the 2018 midterms, lost the 2020 presidential race, and missed expectations in 2022. Special elections have been a Democratic playground. The RNC is entering the 2024 election with a third of the Democratic National Committee’s reserves.
From this perspective, it’s about time that Trump took charge and cleared out the deadwood. Allies such as Charlie Kirk and Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene were jubilant at the overhaul. Although Trump’s appointments of his daughter-in-law and a top campaign aide are unusual, nominees typically take over the campaign apparatus ahead of a presidential election, the better to align aims.
Truth be told, Trump can’t really distance himself from the recent mismanagement. The deposed chair, Ronna McDaniel, was Trump’s pick in 2017, and his main complaint about her is that she was insufficiently compliant. If Trump just wants more of the same, that’s bad news for the party. Trump critics within the GOP also fear that he intends to use the party coffers as a personal defense fund, underwriting his substantial legal bills. Last week, the committee pointedly rejected a proposal by an old-line member to prevent that.
Let’s take the best-case scenario for Republicans, though. In the past, the RNC seemed like the professionals compared with the chaotic, amateurish Trump campaigns of 2016 and 2020. (There’s a reason Trump resorted to appointing RNC Chair Reince Priebus as his first White House chief of staff, despite Priebus representing the establishment Trump hated.) This year, however, the Trump campaign has seemed organized and disciplined, and LaCivita is reportedly a big part of that. National committees tend to be bloated and old-fashioned. A more focused, streamlined operation could fix what ails the GOP.
The problem is that Trump sees his own success and the success of the Republican Party as bound up together. But some things that are good for Trump are not good for the Republican Party over the long run. This is where Obama offers a cautionary tale.
When he won the Democratic presidential nomination in 2008, Obama was an insurgent; the DNC had long been dominated by allies of Hillary Clinton, whom he defeated in the primary. He wasn’t as deeply embedded in the old way of doing things. Obama viewed the Democratic Party as essentially a national organization, with the goal of supporting his political goals and his reelection. Upon winning the presidency, he moved key DNC functions to Chicago, his hometown and political base, despite the protests of party insiders who worried that downballot efforts would be overshadowed by Obama’s reelection campaign. He also created a group outside the DNC, Organizing for America, to support his political movement.
The result was a badly weakened DNC. The national focus led to a neglect of other elections. After Senator Ted Kennedy died, Democrats managed to lose a 2010 special election for his seat in Massachusetts, of all places—a failure that some Democrats blamed on the national party. The loss delayed the passage of the Affordable Care Act and required congressional Democrats to water it down to pass it.
The Bay State special was a harbinger. As Matt Yglesias calculated in 2017, the Obama years saw Democrats lose 11 Senate seats, 62 House seats, and 12 governorships. The damage was especially bad at the state level. Democrats lost nearly 1,000 seats in state legislatures, the worst loss since Herbert Hoover dragged down the GOP. Republicans captured 29 separate chambers and gained 10 new trifectas—control of both chambers of the legislature and the governor’s mansion. All of this happened at the same time that Democratic presidential candidates won the national popular vote in the 2008, 2012, and 2016 presidential elections (as they would again in 2020).
Democrats, including Obama, suffered for their missteps. As the Obamacare experience shows, it’s harder to push a policy agenda when you lose elections. Losing control of the Senate makes it difficult to confirm judges, especially to crucial spots such as the Supreme Court—just ask Justice Merrick Garland. And implementing policy is challenging if governors and state Houses are working against you.
An excessive focus on presidential races is also the danger of Trump’s RNC takeover. He and his aides have announced that, like Obama, they see the party committee as basically an instrument for the presidential election. “Our mission is straightforward: maximize the Republican Party’s resources to get President Trump elected,” LaCivita told The New York Times last month. Echoing Obama’s Chicago move, the RNC is reportedly already moving most of its operations to Palm Beach, Florida, near Trump’s Mar-a-Lago headquarters. All of this makes sense. Trump is a narcissist who can’t and won’t separate his self-interest from the party’s or the nation’s.
Slashing the national footprint of the RNC may weaken the party at lower levels. Several state parties are already a mess. The chair of the Florida GOP was recently ousted amid a sex scandal. Michigan’s GOP chair, a fervent Trump backer, was also deposed after a tumultuous stint, and the state party is reportedly broke. The Arizona GOP also recently lost its chair and has been racked by feuds. But more MAGA is unlikely to be the solution to these problems, because infighting and obsession with Trump’s election denial have been at the center of several blowups. The most effective wing of the GOP apparatus right now, the National Republican Senatorial Committee, has succeeded by managing to create some insulation from Trump, allowing it to select strong candidates. In 2020, Republican congressional candidates mostly ran ahead of Trump.
And even if Trump’s theory of the RNC works out in 2024, what happens next? Trump will not always be the president or the nominee. Someday, Republicans will need to choose a new leader, and they may be left with only a shell of a party committee, gutted and stretched to be part of Trump’s personal election apparatus. It’s a hard and long road to rebuilding from there. Just ask a Democrat.
JAY, Maine—Services at the New Life Baptist Church had just wrapped up, and in the parking lot outside its tiny chapel, Paul LePage was standing behind me with his arm wrapped around my head. He held a cellphone inches from my face, as if he were filming an extreme close-up. The former and perhaps future governor of Maine had insisted on reenacting an incident that had occurred a few weeks earlier, when he’d threatened “to deck” a Democratic operative tracking his campaign. “If you come into my space,” LePage had warned the young man, “you’re going down.”
I had asked LePage about the flap because it represented exactly the kind of uncivil confrontation for which the pugnacious Republican has become known. For more than a year, he had studiously been trying to avoid such encounters—and had largely succeeded. LePage, who as governor once challenged a Democratic legislator to a duel, famously bragged that he was “Donald Trump before Donald Trump.” After two tumultuous terms, he left office four years ago with an approval rating of just 39 percent. Now 73, LePage is attempting a comeback, bidding to oust the Democrat who replaced him, Janet Mills. With Trump eyeing a revival of his own in 2024, the gubernatorial race this fall could serve as a test of Maine voters’ appetite for the return of a Trumpian leader after four years of somewhat calmer Democratic governance.
A changed man LePage is not. But he is trying at least to sand down his rough edges, perhaps recognizing that the bombastic style he pioneered is no longer a winning formula in a state that shifted left in 2018 and decisively rejected Trump two years later. The governor who labeled people of color as “the enemy” of the nation’s whitest state has joined the parade of candidates denouncing the vitriol and even occasional violence that have infected American politics. “There’s an awful lot of hate in the hearts of many people, and it’s sad,” LePage told the parishioners inside the church, during a service on the 21st anniversary of 9/11. “We have to pray it away,” he said. “We have to come together as one nation.” Quoting Abraham Lincoln’s warning that a house divided cannot stand, LePage bemoaned the deep fissures between Republicans and Democrats. “It’s becoming vile and horrible.”
Was LePage trying to present a kinder, gentler version of himself this election? I asked the ex-governor that exact question outside the church. “No,” he replied. “What I’m saying is life is a journey. And along the way you learn and you get better, and hope that every day, the rest of my life, I’m a better man.”
An admirable sentiment. But did LePage think that during his time in office he had contributed to the hate he now recognizes in this country? He replied in a way that suggested he had some practice answering this query. “Am I perfect? No,” LePage said. “Did I make mistakes? Yes. Did I defend my family? Yes. Will I continue to defend my family? Yes.”
LePage likes to respond to inquiries with questions of his own. When asked about his critics’ pointing out how often he had promised to change his ways only to fall back into confrontations and insults, he responded by asking if I had seen such a lapse during this campaign. I replied that personally I had not. But of course, there was that pesky matter of the run-in with the Democratic operative. Clearly, LePage did not count that as one of his mistakes.
“He came into my personal space,” LePage said. “Let me show you what he did.” Before I knew it, the former governor had swung around me and begun the demonstration he hoped would exonerate him. Once he had shown me his quick version of events, LePage returned to where he had been standing for our interview. “If somebody attacks me,” he said, wagging a finger, “I will defend myself.”
When I checkedthe video of LePage’s brief confrontation with the Democratic operative, the interaction looked nothing like the former governor’s reenactment. The operative had approached LePage as the two men were stepping over a puddle after a parade (LePage was holding a Tim Hortons doughnut), but the closest the man came to LePage appeared to be a couple of feet, not inches. Yet the reason Democrats were so keen on broadcasting the incident as widely as possible—and why LePage was so intent on defending his reaction—was that the whole thing seemed so familiar, so very LePage.
Long before Trump shocked (and, in many cases, enthralled) voters on the campaign trail and upended Washington with his unfiltered, impulsive, often downright mean governing style, LePage had been doing the same in Maine. When in 2016 LePage described himself as Trump before Trump, “he was 100 percent correct,” says Roger Katz, a former GOP state legislator in Maine who backed LePage’s first gubernatorial run in 2010 but is now endorsing Mills. “The same kinds of insulting behavior and lack of respect for people is how he governed.”
LePage’s blatantly racist comments about Hispanic immigrants and Black people often made national headlines, but the many stories about his impulsive governing and frequent tirades have become local legends in Maine. Almost everyone I spoke with who had worked with the governor had a tale to share. Katz recalled the time that, in a fit of rage at lawmakers, LePage vetoed every single bill at the end of a legislative session, including those that he himself had proposed. Jeff McCabe, a Democrat who served as majority leader of the Maine House of Representatives, told me about how LePage had abruptly ordered a state prison closed in the middle of a dispute with lawmakers, resulting in the hasty transfer of inmates during the dark of night. “People woke up and thought there had been a prison break,” McCabe said.
Drew Gattine, now the chairman of the Maine Democratic Party, was serving in the state legislature in 2016 when he criticized LePage for comments in which the governor claimed that virtually all of the drug dealers arrested in Maine were “Black and Hispanic people.” In response, LePage left Gattine a voicemail in which he called him “a little son-of-a-bitch, socialist cocksucker.” The governor went on: “I want you to record this and make it public, because I am after you.” LePage later apologized to Gattine, but not before he told reporters that he wished it was “1825,” so the two men could duel. “I would not put my gun in the air,” LePage said at the time. “I guarantee you, I would not be [Alexander] Hamilton. I would point it right between his eyes, because he is a snot-nosed little runt.”
Protesters upset with then-Governor Paul LePage hold a rally outside the governor’s mansion in Augusta, Maine, on August 30, 2016. (Yoon Byun / The New York Times / Redux)
When I asked 63-year-old Joanne Glidden, an amateur motorcyclist with the United Bikers of Maine, what she liked most about LePage, she replied with a wide grin, “He reminds me of Trump!” As with Trump, LePage’s combativeness and lack of a public filter endeared him to many Republican and independent voters, who form the base of his current support. Glidden was among a dozen or so people who lingered at a fairgrounds in Windsor, Maine, after LePage had spoken to the biker group. “He spoke his mind, and I liked that,” Dan Adams, a 57-year-old crane operator, told me. “He don’t pull no punches.” The owner of a day-care center, Penny Nava, 56, told me she didn’t want to see LePage change his approach. “You need to be who you are,” she said. “You let that go, and you lose yourself.”
Maine is not as deeply blue a state as the most recent presidential election might suggest. In 2016, Hillary Clinton’s three-point margin of victory in Maine came closer than all but one other state (Nevada) to matching her slim advantage in the national popular vote. The state backed Biden by nine points in 2020, but Maine voters split their ballots and reelected Republican Senator Susan Collins by nearly the same margin, shocking Democrats who had spent nearly $100 million to defeat her. In both years, Trump won an electoral vote by carrying Maine’s rural Second Congressional District, where LePage yard signs have become ubiquitous.
Unlike Trump, LePage grew up in poverty, not wealth and privilege. The eldest of 18 children, he ran away from home to escape an abusive, alcoholic father and was homeless for a time, working odd jobs to survive. He eventually graduated from college, started a business, and then worked for many years as the general manager of a discount chain store before launching his career in politics. LePage ran for governor after two terms as mayor of Waterville, a Democratic-leaning city that is home to Colby College.
He won each of his two gubernatorial races in three-way contests that allowed him to capitalize on a divided opposition. In neither election did he capture a majority of the vote, winning with just 37.6 percent in 2010 and 48.2 percent in 2014. He spent eight years governing conservatively, reducing taxes and fighting for lower spending. After Maine voters approved a referendum to expand Medicaid, LePage blocked its implementation. His elections galvanized the movement in Maine toward ranked-choice voting, as advocates argued that the system would favor more-moderate candidates and would ensure that the winner ultimately secured votes from at least 50 percent of the electorate. Maine became the first state to adopt ranked-choice balloting and used the system in 2018 and 2020. But in a twist, a judge ruled that the system could go forward only in federal elections—for president and Congress—and not in state races. So it will not be in place for the Mills-LePage matchup this fall, although the lack of a serious independent candidate likely means that the change will have little effect.
Mills has held a small but consistent lead in the limited public polling so far, and Democrats expect the race to be close. They worry that the passage of time will have caused voters to forget what they disliked about LePage’s leadership style, so they’ve taken it upon themselves to remind them about his most memorable outbursts and dispute assertions that he’s changed. The strategy could be a preview of a national campaign against Trump should he run again in 2024. Across the country, this fall’s ballots feature plenty of Trump allies, acolytes, and would-be clones, most notably the gubernatorial candidates Kari Lake in Arizona and Doug Mastriano in Pennsylvania. But Maine voters had already experienced eight years of Trump-style chaos before they turned in the other direction, and now they face the unique question of whether they want to go back. LePage “has never lost an election,” Mark Brewer, a political-science professor at the University of Maine, told me. “So betting against him historically has been a losing bet.”
Donald Trump shakes hands with Maine Governor Paul LePage as he is introduced at a rally in Merrill Auditorium on Thursday, August 4, 2016. (Derek Davis / Portland Press Herald / Getty)
If LePage is a stand-in for Trump this November, Janet Mills is a Biden-esque figure in Maine. At 74, she hails from a prominent political family and has served in public office with only a few years’ interruption since the ’70s. Mills’s parents were friends of the longtime Republican Senator Margaret Chase Smith, and one of her brothers twice ran for governor as a Republican. After decades as a prosecutor and state legislator, Mills won election as Maine’s attorney general in 2008 and again in 2012. From that perch, she battled frequently with LePage, who at one point sued her for refusing to represent his administration when it sided with then-President Trump over his executive order restricting travel from Muslim-majority countries. (The state supreme court ruled in favor of Mills.)
Mills became Maine’s first woman governor after earning 51 percent of the vote in 2018—a higher share than LePage won in either of his victories. She acted immediately to implement the voter-approved Medicaid expansion and has increased spending on education, on infrastructure, and in the fight against climate change. Like Biden, she has occasionally worked with Republicans, most recently drawing bipartisan support to send $850 relief checks to citizens as a way to reduce the effects of inflation. Mills has also occasionally tangled with progressives, vetoing some bills passed by the Democratic-controlled legislature.
Mostly, Mills seems to have lowered the temperature of state politics. She’s warm and unassuming; when I saw her greeting patrons at a small farmers’ market, she drew little attention to herself and seemed to blend in with the crowd. On a recent Saturday morning, Mills spoke briefly to mark the tenth anniversary of the opening of a local grain mill. She read her remarks off an iPhone while a dancing toddler competed for the audience’s attention nearby.
If Democrats find fault with Mills, it’s that she is perhaps too low-key. “I don’t think she’s brought in a lot of people,” Nancy Baxter, a 65-year-old health administrator for the federal government, told me at the market. “I don’t see her having excited the state as much as we’d hoped.”
I met Mills outside the Margaret Chase Smith Library in Skowhegan, where the governor had worked for many years as a lawyer before entering politics. During a 30-minute interview, she touted her administration’s handling of and emergence from the pandemic. Like its neighbors in New England, Maine has a relatively high vaccination rate and low death rate, especially considering its population is one of the oldest in the country. Mills boasted about the state’s migration rate, which she said was the country’s seventh highest. “We’re turning the corner, and people are coming here,” she said. “We’ve become branded as a safe and welcoming state, and I like that.”
Mills brushed off LePage’s frequent attacks on her. “I can’t judge who he is today, but the people of Maine know who he was before,” she said. Mills sounded a bit like a candidate who believes she’s ahead in the polls. She noted that LePage had appeared in the state with Trump during the height of the pandemic, in 2020, when the former president called her “a dictator.” “I thought, This is ridiculous,” Mills recalled, dismissively. “For the better part of my career, I’ve listened to weak men talk tough. Loud men talk tough to hide their weaknesses.”
Trump hasn’t come to Maine to campaign for LePage this year. During my swing through the state, the Trump-before-Trump himself was a tough man to find.
He’s running a decidedly low-profile statewide race—“a stealth campaign,” as Mills described it to me—having apparently determined that the easiest way to stay on his best behavior is to steer clear of situations that would test his discipline. After formally launching his gubernatorial campaign a year ago, LePage has held virtually no large rallies and given few press conferences or interviews (aside from appearances on conservative radio stations). Maine’s political press corps is not large, and LePage frequently evades reporters by publicizing his appearances only after they’ve occurred, usually by posting photos to his Twitter or Facebook pages.
LePage’s campaign ignored me entirely. My many calls and emails went unreturned, and when I stopped by his campaign headquarters early on a Friday afternoon after Labor Day, no one was there. (“Don’t take it personally,” Katz, the former GOP lawmaker and LePage critic, assured me, noting that LePage “had a terrible relationship with the press” when he was governor.) When I showed up at a local GOP fundraiser that Democrats said LePage would be addressing, the organizers told me he had never been on the schedule. They directed me instead to the charity event that the United Bikers of Maine was holding about an hour away. LePage had indeed spoken to the group, but he was long gone by the time I got there.
I finally found the former governor on the morning of September 11 in the rural town of Jay, about 30 miles northwest of Augusta, the state capital. The New Life Baptist Church is the size of a modest, one-story house, and LePage arrived with his wife, Ann; a campaign aide; and a trio of local Republican legislators. He had befriended the church’s pastor, Chris Grimbilas, during his second term as governor, and the two have stayed in close touch in the years since. Grimbilas told the approximately 30 parishioners gathered in the sanctuary that LePage was not there “to campaign,” although LePage sounded very much like a candidate on the stump during his brief remarks from the pulpit. The theme of the Sunday service was to honor first responders, and LePage began by comparing the state’s firing last year of police officers and firefighters who refused COVID-19 vaccinations to the horrors of 9/11. “It was the most vicious of attacks on first responders I’ve seen since the World Trade Center,” he said, pledging to reinstate those who lost their jobs in January if he becomes governor again.
LePage’s sparse public schedule might seem like a questionable campaign strategy, but it could prove effective. As a recent two-term governor, he does not need to introduce himself to voters, and he might be hoping that a midterm backlash against Democrats nationwide will return him to office.
As for Trump, LePage is happy to have the votes of Mainers who associate him positively with the former president. But he’s not emphasizing the connection. For some voters, the link between the two men seems to be thinner than it was when both were in office. Despite their similar personalities, LePage and Trump had very different upbringings, and they’ve diverged again during their (perhaps temporary) retirements.
Unlike Trump, LePage left office willingly when his term was up in 2019. He and his wife initially moved to Florida, but he returned to Maine and worked as a bartender at McSeagull’s Restaurant for two summers, in the coastal tourist town of Boothbay Harbor. The gig served as good publicity for both the bar and LePage, who was already talking about challenging Mills for governor. Although he struggled to keep up during busy times, LePage’s fellow bartenders told me he was a good colleague who took direction well. “He needs to keep his mouth shut,” Gigi Frost, 41, told me. But she added: “I really do like him personally.” Frost, an independent, said she hadn’t decided whether to vote for LePage or Mills. Yet she saw LePage as distinct from Trump. “I despise Trump,” she said. “I don’t think LePage is as bad.”
That assessment matched what I heard from some other Maine voters, including those who hadn’t spent a summer pouring beers with the former governor. Trump is in a whole other category now from LePage. “LePage is better than Trump,” Shirley Emery, a 74-year-old retiree, told me in Windsor. “He’s honest. He’s not a womanizer.”
LePage seems to be hearing those voices too, and his cautious, buttoned-up strategy suggests that he sees Trumpism waning in the upper reaches of New England. When I asked him whether he still aligned himself with Trump, the former governor clammed up. “I’m running for governor of the state of Maine,” he said, “and I’m not going to talk about national politics.” I tried again. Should Trump run again in 2024? “I’m running for governor of the state of Maine, all right? And that’s it.”
Perhaps Paul LePage is a transformed man after all. The conservative who ran on unvarnished, tell-it-like-it-is authenticity has finally discovered his filter and learned the coded deflection of the blue-state Republican. Distancing himself from the president he once claimed as a protégé, the straight-talking governor has, in pursuit of one more term in power, almost become a conventional politician.
