Lara Trump Is All About Meritocracy

Lara Trump speaks at the NCGOP state convention in front of former US President Donald Trump on June 5, 2021 in Greenville, North Carolina.Melissa Sue Gerrits/Stringer/Getty

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.Before she married Eric and became a Trump, Lara Trump was a dabbler. She’d interned at North Carolina TV stations after college, gone to culinary school, and started selling custom cakes. She rescued some animals and became a personal trainer. But then, after six years of dating, in 2014, she married the former president’s younger son. The union launched her into the world of Fox News, political campaigns, and on Friday, the top post at the Republican National Committee.
In a speech at the party’s spring meeting, West Virginia Committeewoman Beth Bloch formally nominated Trump for the post, saying, “In a world where qualifications are often measured by titles and years of experience, we’re reminded of a powerful truth: God does not call the qualified, he qualifies the called. Lara Trump is the embodiment of this truth.” Given her new job, and her recent CPAC speech, where she insisted that in the United States, people succeed on “merit and merit alone,” we thought it might be a good time to revisit Trump’s qualifications for the top RNC post.

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Lara Trump became a popular surrogate for candidate Trump during the 2016 campaign. In 2020, she helped conduct outreach to LGBT and other minority groups to try to counter the perception that the former president was hostile to them. Lara embraced the job, and the woman who once baked “boob” cakes now says her young children recite the Pledge of Allegiance before going to bed—with her encouragement, of course. Her elevation came after months of pressure from the MAGA grassroots for former Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel to step down. The simmering discontent with McDaniel’s leadership over reports of the committee’s lavish spending and lackluster performance galvanized during a November debate when GOP presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy called for her to resign. “We’ve become a party of losers at the end of the day,” Ramaswamy said. “Since Ronna McDaniel took over as chairwoman of the RNC in 2017, we have lost 2018, 2020, 2022, no red wave, that never came.”
Last month, former President Trump decided it was time for McDaniel to go. He announced his desire to put his co-campaign manager, Chris LaCivita, in charge of day-to-day operations at the RNC “so it will become a fighting machine for 2024.” And to replace McDaniel? He endorsed his own daughter-in-law. “Lara is an extremely talented communicator and is dedicated to all that MAGA stands for,” he said. “She has told me she wants to accept this challenge and would be GREAT!”