Michael Whatley Is In, Lara Trump Is Out

 

GOP Party Chair Michael Whatley has announced his candidacy for Thom Tillis's US Senate seat. That means, of course, that Lara Trump ain't running. In the not very distant past, Whatley had been chair of the NCGOP. When Trump forced Ronna McDaniel out as chair of the national Republican Party, he put Whatley in (along with Lara as co-chair). 

Whatley is the round-faced people-pleaser who's previously been most aligned with the country club Republican "establishment" and who, according to Brant Clifton at The Daily Haymaker, plays at being a Trumpist lickspittle while really secretly harboring fear bordering on resistance. "[Whatley] loves to talk about Donald Trump and post pictures of himself with Trump’s plane. But much of what he does and says aligns much more with Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger — the two former 'Republican' congressmen who colluded with Democrats on the farcical so-called 'January 6 committee'.”

In other words, Whatley is more in the mold of Thom Tillis, and MAGA doesn't entirely trust him. He's not going to ignite enthusiasm, which he's going to need in extra measure against Roy Cooper.

After taking over the NCGOP in 2019, Whatley oversaw Trump’s win here in 2020, two U.S. Senate victories in 2020 and 2022, recapturing a supermajority in the state Senate and flipping control of the N.C. Supreme Court from 6-1 Democrats to 5-2 Republicans. Despite that sparkling career in North Carolina (Wikipedia sez he's a native of Watauga County), and despite Whatley's signature affability, the most MAGA wing of the Party ran John Kane for party chair against him in 2023. John Kane was and is the number one son of an elder John Kane, a renown Raleigh mega-developer who was actually honored as Tar Heel of the Year in 2016. The elder Kane is also renown for raising big money for Republicans. The younger John Kane emphasized his MAGA bona fides, hitting especially "election integrity," because (check!) the election of 2020 was stolen from Trump. The conservatives who don't trust Whatley remember that he went weak after the "Stop the Steal" tourist romp at the Capitol, and condemned it all as a riot. Like a lot of other Republicans back on January 7th who later developed a twitch and then couldn't remember, Whatley never said another negative word in public about insurrection. Conservatives hate weakness, especially in their servants and allies.

Whatley easily won reelection to the NC chairmanship in 2023, with the endorsement of Trump, incidentally. "Mr. Trump likes Mr. Whatley for one overwhelming reason, according to people who have discussed him with the former president: He is a 'stop the steal guy,' as one of the people described him. He endorses Mr. Trump’s false claims about mass voter fraud and Mr. Trump believes he did a good job delivering North Carolina, a 2020 swing state, to him." [Zachary Roth]