AtlantaEarly tea party activist Amy Kremer backed Donald Trump for president in 2016. She received fewer than 1% of the Republican primary vote in her 2017 run for Congress from Georgia.
She coordinated the gathering outside the White House in 2021, just hours before hundreds of Trump fans flocked to the US Capitol to express their displeasure over his defeat by Democrat Joe Biden.
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Kremer defeated a conservative mainstay to join the Republican National Committee in 2024, when voters put Trump back in power. She used that position to assist in the election of Joe Gruters of Florida as the new party chairman this week in Atlanta.The president has referred to him as a “MAGA warrior,” a reference to the “Make America Great Again” movement, and he is another original Trump supporter.
Kremer remarked, “I never imagined I’d be sitting here for something like this.” Now, it’s Donald Trump’s party.
Leaders of national parties are usually chosen by sitting presidents. However, today’s RNC, which features grassroots activists like Kremer and a leader in Gruters, shows how the Republicans have evolved from the Grand Old Party, which was dominated by the elite, to now represent Trump and his populist nationalism.
Members of the RNC expressed a deeper attachment for the president than they did for his predecessors in over a dozen interviews. They are certain that Trump’s political troubles won’t endanger the party in the 2026 midterm election and that his reform of the economy, the federal government, and America’s place in the world is long needed.
They said the White House and the party apparatus had a smoother connection than it had during Trump’s first term. Most significantly, they contended that Republicans’ America First and MAGA identities are proof of a movement that existed before Trump’s presidency and will last beyond it, rather than just being about his charismatic branding.
It was real, as evidenced by the working-class individuals who supported it. According to Michael McDonald, the head of the Nevada Republican Party, it wasn’t a fly-by-night. The party needed a wake-up call, which Donald Trump delivered. And it will never return.
Trump wasn’t born into the Republican Party.
When the party met for the 2024 convention in Milwaukee, Kremer took her seat at the RNC. Out of the 168 seats, she was one of about four dozen new members. In Atlanta, 21 more people joined the committee.
“That’s MAGA,” she declared.
McDonald is now the Republican state party head with the longest tenure, having been elected in 2011. When questioned about the dynamics of the parties during Trump’s first campaign and presidency, he laughed.
McDonald, who was indicted as a fake elector following the 2020 election and accused of plotting to keep Trump in the White House even after he lost Nevada to Biden, claimed, “We had people inside the Republican Party throwing marbles at our feet.” Last year, a court in Nevada dismissed the case.
In 2016, Marco Rubio, a senator from Florida and Trump’s second-term secretary of state, was one of Trump’s main opponents. Rubio had referred to the prospective president as an acon artist during the campaign.Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas, another contender, broke custom at the GOP convention that year by not openly supporting Trump.
After defeating Democrat Hillary Clinton, Trump’s first betrayal of the party appeared to be a liability. As an outsider in Washington, he was forced to assemble an executive branch and West Wing full of non-religious Republicans.
Reince Priebus, his first chief of staff, oversaw the Republican National Committee (RNC) during Trump’s presidential campaign and had to contend with GOP elites who sought to thwart Trump’s candidacy. The 2012 GOP nominee Mitt Romney’s niece, Ronna Romney McDaniel, who had openly cautioned against Trump’s candidacy, served as Trump’s first RNC chair.
Trump relied on his abilities to steer news cycles and storylines while in office. He was not actively involved in the 2018 midterm campaign, when Democrats regained a majority in the U.S. House, and he mostly disregarded party mechanics.
Nevertheless, new Trump-friendly faces emerged.
Despite Trump’s seeming disengagement from the party, many around him created lasting foundations.
Steven Bannon, David Bossie, Susie Wiles, the current White House chief of staff, and other supporters, according to McDonald, assisted in the construction of state-level infrastructure and the recruitment of candidates for down-ballot positions, state party leadership, and RNC seats.
Trump served as an inspiration for other newcomers who came forward on their own.
John Wahl, the chairman of the Alabama party, stated, “I speak for a whole generation that was frustrated by the status quo and being politically correct.” At age 34, he was elected as the nation’s youngest Republican chairman in 2021.
Terry Lathan, who had been a devoted party supporter of candidates ranging from moderates like Arizona Senator John McCain to party crashers like Trump, was succeeded by Wahl. However, she supported Florida Governor Ron DeSantis over Trump in 2023 after she was out of service and free to select a GOP presidential primary candidate. Lathan did not go to the Milwaukee, Wisconsin, Trump nomination convention in 2024.
Shortly after retiring from the Air Force and taking on the role of chairman of his county GOP committee, Bryan Miller, who was elected this year to lead Wyoming’s Republican Party, backed Trump in the 2016 primaries. He remembers seeing the most well-known Republican in his state, Liz Cheney, who was then a U.S. Representative, serve as a member of the House committee that looked into the attack on the Capitol on January 6, 2021. In 2024, she supported Democratic candidate Kamala Harris against Trump.
Miller claimed that if he had been informed ten years prior that he would be appointed state chairman and that Liz Cheney, the daughter of former Vice President Dick Cheney, would not be popular with Wyoming Republicans, he would not have believed it.
America First solidarity transcends all differences.
Agreements
Among Republicans, loyalty to Trump does not equate to total unity.
Some Republicans still favor conservative orthodoxy on overseas alliances and global trade, according to Evan Power, the leader of the Florida GOP and a former Rubio aide. However, he claimed that Trump’s aggressive foreign policy is no different from the president’s domestic political tactics and that the president appeals to voters’ resentment over an unjust economy.
According to Power, people are now aware that his aggressive style of battling is what wins elections.
Miller pointed to National Guard troops on the streets of the District of Columbia and acknowledged questions about usingarmed federal military powerto police an American city.
He stated, “I’m fine with it as long as we stay within the legal parameters, the way it’s set up for military personnel to be only in supporting roles.”
Kremer, who once lambasted President Barack Obama’s health overhaul as a budget buster, said she knows the new tax breaks and spending cuts pushed by Trump are set to add trillions of dollars to the nation’s debt.
There s not another person that would deport the illegals and shut down the border, she said. It’s a loss of opportunity. You know he s going to spend more. I m not OK with it, but I know you can t have everything.
Trump himself has learned some of that same bottom-line pragmatism where the party is concerned.
During his 2024 campaign, Trumppushed out McDanielfrom the RNC. He tapped daughter-in-law Lara Trump and Michael Whatley of North Carolina as party co-chairs. Now, Whatley isTrump’s pickfor the U.S. Senate in North Carolina, and Gruters is leading the RNC.
Vice President JD Vance chairs the RNC’s finance operations in an unusually high-ranking link between the White House and the party’s fundraising apparatus.
And with nearly every new turnover across the party’s organizational chart, the scales tip further in Trump’s direction.
He sat in exile for four years and thought about what he could have done better, said Power, the Florida chair, and he s executing on all cylinders.
