The Republican National Committee will consider a draft resolution during its annual winter meeting from RNC committeeman David Bossie declaring former President Donald Trump the “presumptive 2024 nominee,” the Dispatch reports.
Many RNC members contacted by NR on Thursday interpret this draft resolution as an attempt by Bossie, a close Trump ally, and other resolution cosponsors to put intense pressure on RNC chairwoman Ronna McDaniel to rally behind Trump and explicitly call for his lone rival, former U.N. ambassador Nikki Haley, to drop out of the presidential race. During a Fox News interview on Tuesday, McDaniel said that she does not see “the math and the path going forward” for Haley, who is staying in the race after losing to Trump in Iowa and the New Hampshire.
“Who cares what the RNC says? We’ll let millions of Republican voters across the country decide who should be our party’s nominee, not a bunch of Washington insiders,” a Haley spokeswoman told NR. “If Ronna McDaniel wants to be helpful she can organize a debate in South Carolina, unless she’s also worried that Trump can’t handle being on the stage for 90 minutes with Nikki Haley.”
Bossie and an RNC spokeswoman did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
Other RNC members say the move is an effort to circumvent Rule 11, a national party rule that bars the RNC from contributing “money or in-kind aid to any candidate for any public or party office of that state,” unless the candidate in question is unopposed, without unanimous support from every RNC member.
As David Drucker reports in the Dispatch:
Under current RNC rules, Trump still has to win the requisite number of nominating convention delegates—1,215—to become the party’s unchallenged presumptive nominee. After the Iowa caucuses and the New Hampshire primary, Trump leads Haley in the race for delegates 32 to 17.
But passage of this resolution, possibly next week at the RNC winter meeting in Las Vegas, could begin a preemptive process of the national party working with the former president as if he had already done so. And under RNC rules, that is permissible. This resolution, even in draft form, also functions as another sign that the GOP establishment is anxious to coalesce behind Trump and put an end to a presidential primary that, after his victories in Iowa and New Hampshire, the former president looks poised to win.
The move came as a surprise to some RNC committee members, many of whom told National Review that they plan to vote against the draft resolution should it formally come up for consideration next week at the GOP’s Las Vegas meeting.
“It’s an awful idea and precedent,” Mississippi’s RNC committeeman Henry Barbour told NR. “Voters should decide and not RNC insiders.”
“I believe that the RNC is obligated to be neutral arbiters and honest brokers when it comes to running a primary and convention,” said Tennessee’s RNC committeeman Oscar Brock. “We can’t take sides with candidates, when only 3 percent of the Republican primary voters have voted.”