The Republican National Committee has seen a spate of departures in
recent months related to its embrace of Donald Trump, whom some former
staffers felt uncomfortable supporting.
In recent months, deputy press secretary James Hewitt, spokesman Fred
Brown, director of Hispanic media Ruth Guerra, and research analysts
Lars Trautman and Colin Spence have all left the RNC with Trump as one
of the reasons for their resignations, according to sources familiar
with their decisions. At least three other staff members have also left
the RNC with opposition to Trump as a contributing factor, according to
multiple sources.
In total, at least 11 staffers have left the RNC since March, although not all of the departures were related to Trump.
Spence, who joined the RNC in June 2015 as a research analyst on the
investigations team, left this June for a “variety of factors” but said
he wasn’t “overjoyed with how the primary season went.”
“Personally I wasn’t comfortable working to elect him,” he said of Trump.
In interviews, others cited familiar reasons for their resistance to
the nominee – that they couldn’t work to help elect a man they thought
was not qualified to be president; that Trump’s insensitive statements
turned them against him; that he wasn’t conservative enough. Some also
said they worried about the stain that working to elect Trump could have
on their resume.
“I didn’t want to be associated with the Trump campaign,” said one,
calling the Trump nomination a “deal breaker” for him. “I don’t agree
with what he has to say ... He’s not a person I feel comfortable working
for. It’s just that simple.”
RNC chief strategist and communications director Sean Spicer
acknowledged that some staffers may have left in part because of Trump,
but termed them a relative “handful of people” in an organization of
around 250 staffers on the RNC’s payroll and 460 more in the field.
“What you’re telling me is very possible,” he said when asked about
staff departures related to Trump, but “in a couple of those cases I
know that they were getting significantly more money and they couldn’t
be matched.”
He added that, “if you look at a massive organization, any
organization ... you can find some people that aren’t happy ... that’s
the nature of a big organization.”
The RNC’s turnover is still relatively modest compared to that of the
Democratic National Committee, where chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz
resigned last month, followed by several key staffers. But the DNC
resignations did not reflect dissatisfaction with nominee Hillary
Clinton; they came in response to a WikiLeaks release of internal emails
suggesting that staffers were overly supportive of Clinton and
dismissive of her primary rival Bernie Sanders.
Meanwhile, the RNC has shifted from its primary-season role as
neutral arbiter among 17 contenders to perhaps the prime vehicle for
electing Trump as president. The national party is playing a
proportionally larger role in assisting Trump than other recent
presidential nominees, since Trump has a smaller campaign staff of his
own and less capacity to target voters and get them to the polls.
But multiple former staff members, speaking on condition of
anonymity, say there are significant misgivings among RNC staff, many of
whom feel deeply loyal to the Republican brand and see Trump as
something of an interloper.
Meanwhile, some Republican consultants who are not currently working
for Trump say they’ve received resumes from RNC staffers eager to
distance themselves from the nominee.
“At the start of the cycle nobody thought Donald Trump would be the
Republican nominee so a lot of operatives find themselves in a position
they never expected which is trying to help elect Donald Trump president
of the United States,” said Alex Conant, who served as press secretary
for the RNC from 2008 to 2009 and more recently worked for Marco Rubio’s
presidential campaign.
Among Republican consultants, anti-Trump sentiment outweighs the
unwritten prohibition against party staffers job-hopping so close to a
presidential election, as some firms and conservative political
organizations expressed a willingness to welcome RNC refugees. Those who
left in part because of Trump have gone to work on
Capitol Hill, at the American Action Network, and the Republican Jewish Coalition, among other destination
One prominent GOP consultant with ties to the RNC said that some
staffers feel that their superiors, including Spicer and RNC Chair
Reince Priebus, didn’t “have to be so far out there in the bag for Trump
... It’s embarrassing to the building.”
(Spicer said the notion that he and Priebus are overly enthusiastic
reflects “a complete misunderstanding of why we do what we do.”)
The GOP consultant added that said some within the organization have
debated whether to leave or stay to steer resources to down-ballot
Republicans: “There’s a feeling that if they leave, who ends up taking
over?” the consultant said. “There’s gonna come a time when if Trump is
just tanking, then they make a decision that they’re going to do what
they gotta do to protect down ballot races and use the infrastructure to
do that.”
The sense of a letdown has been particularly sharp for millennial
staffers who expected in 2016 to work to help elect a Republican
president and then go to work in the White House afterwards. Some of
those in their mid-20s are despairing of Trump’s chances against Hillary
Clinton and some are doubtful of whether they’ll fit into a Trump
administration even if he does prevail in November.
“It sucks to wake up every morning and go into the office and do
things to help Donald Trump become president. They don’t like that. It’s
bad for morale,” said another prominent GOP consultant. “All these
senior people went on board and saluted and said ‘I’m with you Donald
Trump.’ It’s been the most shocking thing of this cycle for me, even
more shocking than the fact that he won.
Asked about the mood in the RNC, Spicer depicted it differently: "Everyone is excited to win."
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