'Lose the Romney': Inside Ronna McDaniel's Long Fall
How Mitt Romney's niece got trapped in MAGA — even as she hatched her escape plan years ago
Michael Wolff is the author of three books about the Trump administration: Fire and Fury, Siege, and Landslide.
After the 2016 presidential election, Reince Priebus, the chair of the RNC whom Trump had just selected to be his chief of staff, suggested Ronna Romney McDaniel, the chair of the Michigan Republican Party, as his RNC replacement. Her virtue, in addition to her party administrative experience, was her bloodline: She is the niece of Mitt Romney, the 2012 Republican presidential nominee, and the granddaughter of George Romney, a former governor of Michigan and presidential aspirant in 1968. Priebus understood that an early order of business for both the RNC and the new White House was to help the old Republican party get comfortable with the new Trump Republican party. The Romney name, which McDaniel used proudly, would be a good bridge.
In their first substantive conversation — in effect an interview for the RNC job — a skeptical Trump (complaining to others about both her weight and her inartful makeup) heard out McDaniel’s avowals of early support and MAGA loyalty. Quite uninterested in the past, or, for that matter, the Republican party, Trump reluctantly told her, yeah, she could have the job, but she would have to “lose the Romney.” McDaniel immediately disappeared the name from her official biography, with aides counseling reporters that it was now “just Ronna McDaniel.”
Thus commenced eight years of water-carrying and servility to Trump — and back-of-the-hand abuse from him — in her efforts to keep the RNC job.
It is unclear what McDaniel hoped her ultimate reward for her various humiliations would be, but a network talking-head contract had to be one possibility. A Fox gig would have been the best, preserving her political career options. But, with Trump actively briefing against her both before and after her ouster last month from the RNC, replacing her with his daughter-in-law, Lara Trump and Republican lawyer Michael Whatley, a mainstream media job was second best: a nice paycheck and some easy-lifting on-air blah blah.
NBC: A Different Kind of Servile Role
She’d be among those long-suffering-seeming Republicans recruited to sit on panels and be the straw man for the network liberals. It is just the first irony of the storm kicked up by the NBC brass’s hiring of McDaniel: Her presence, along with the network’s other woe-begotten Republicans — from Nicolle Wallace to Michael Steele — was precisely to defuse controversy and confirm that the general liberal view was the obviously sound one.
NBC personalities — immediately and with considerable breast-beating — objected to McDaniel, fairly seeing her as a Trump lackey and facilitator, who had abjectly bowed to Trump’s election lies. Indeed, she’d been caught on tape conspiring with Trump to replace the legitimate electors in Michigan with Trump stooges (her actions not so different from the actions of various players in Georgia who have now been indicted).
For network bosses Cesar Conde and Rebecca Blumenstein, from a programming standpoint, hiring McDaniel must have made intuitive sense. Here was a big Trumper, who, kicked out by Trump and thus precluded from going to Fox, that they could hire, and whom the liberals could subtly dress down. A little tension amid the otherwise predictable and bland proceedings.
At the same time, Trump revulsion and horror has become a necessary attribute of mainstream news personalities. How could they even sit beside a true Trump facilitator? On-screen nausea!
Still, in the irony department, there were few who had so much cause to feel the true revulsion and horror of being close to Trump as McDaniel herself. You might even argue that in McDaniel, the network had captured a prime specimen of that Republican creature forced by Trumpian reality to eat shit and ensure endless degradation — and do it again day after day and year after year.
McDaniel: Avatar of the No-Exit MAGA Trap
There might be no better representative than McDaniel of the no-exit dilemma of the Republican party: hating Trump and yet being wholly dependent on him. Quite a coup for a news network to have her talk — that is, if she would talk.
Curiously, she might have. McDaniel, like many Republicans after January 6 and then with Trump’s exile back to Mar-a-Lago, seemed to believe that it was a wide-open Republican Party, that new, electable figures would emerge, and Trump would fade. In that circumstance, the RNC, looking forward to a post-Trump politics, could return to its true function as facilitator of a fair nominating contest in the best interests of the party. This seemed more imperative by the Trump-led disaster of the 2022 midterm elections.
Yet by the spring of 2023, it was clear to anyone who was looking that no post-Trump world was emerging. That the party, and the RNC, would continue to have to march behind him.
Indeed, the party did. But not the RNC. McDaniel led a secret and willful resistance (as did, with futility and not in secret, her uncle Mitt Romney). Trump wanted her to cancel the debates and she ignored him. Whatever Nikki Haley represented, whether meaningful resistance in the party or just a thorn in Trump’s side, was only possible because McDaniel, in spite of Trump’s ire, let the debates go on.
Then, as it became obvious that nothing would interrupt the Trump march, McDaniel herself seemed to go on administrative strike. The RNC’s fundraising efforts, one of its key functions, providing another money spigot for the general election, seemed to dry up. McDaniel blamed it on the constant call for money to pay Trump’s legal bills, leaving nothing left over. But, in truth, the RNC, under McDaniel — who had assembled a national committee of Trump foot-draggers — stopped working. Passive resistance. Finally, Trump fired her — though in typical Trump disorganization, this probably came too late with the fundraising hole too deep to make up.
McDaniel may have actually wounded him.
Of course, there is no reason to believe that on-screen McDaniel would have done anything else but play the part NBC hired her to play, the stoic Trump defender among the liberals. Likewise, NBC personalities would play the part in which they’re cast, righteous resisters, so they needed to object to the arrival of McDaniel in their midst.
NBC had a great story in its hands, if its leaders and talent could only see it, and if McDaniel would only tell it: the personal torture of Republican life in close proximity to Donald Trump.
Getty Images credits from top image: Brendan McDermid; Joe Raedle; Alberto E. Rodriguez/for Time; Nathan Congleton/for NBC; Background image: Joseph Prezioso/AFP
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She supported the overturning of our democracy. Why would you hire her? Or listen to anything has to say? There is no news in a traitor's lies. This looks like a PR rehab attempt quite frankly.
What Julie says. :) No comparison between McDaniel and Wallace and Steele…