Trump was once a Republican Party outsider. Now it’s his GOP and the MAGA faithful are in the lead

ATLANTA (AP) — Amy Kremer was an early tea party leader who supported Donald Trump for president in 2016. She ran for Congress from Georgia in 2017 and got less than 1% of the Republican primary vote.

In 2021, she organized the rally near the White House that took place hours before hundreds of Trump’s supporters stormed the U.S. Capitol to protest his loss to Democrat Joe Biden.

As voters Trump to power in 2024, Kremer unseated a conservative stalwart to become a Republican National Committee member. This week in Atlanta, she used that post to help elect a new party chairman, Joe Gruters of Florida. He’s another original Trump backer who has been described by the president as a “MAGA warrior”— a reference to the “Make America Great Again” movement.

“I never thought I’d be sitting here for something like this,” Kremer said. “It’s Donald Trump’s party now.”

Sitting presidents typically choose their national party leaders. But today’s RNC, with grassroots activists such as Kremer and a leader in Gruters, demonstrates how much the Republicans have changed from the establishment-controlled Grand Old Party and now reflect Trump and his populist nationalism.

Almost a dozen interviews with RNC members found an affinity for the president that they described as running deeper than for his predecessors. They insist Trump’s remaking of the economy, the federal government and America’s role in the world are overdue, and they are confident his political struggles will not doom the party in the 2026 midterm election.

They described a seamless relationship between the White House and the party machinery, and as better than during Trump’s first term. Perhaps most notably, they argued that Republicans’ “America First” and MAGA identity are not simply about Trump’s charismatic branding but rather evidence of a movement that predated his presidency and will last beyond.

“When you see the working-class people that bought into this, it was for real. It wasn’t a fly-by-night,” said the Nevada Republican chairman, Michael McDonald. “Donald Trump brought something that needed to wake up the party, and he did. And it’s never going back.”

Trump didn’t begin as a Republican Party man

Kremer took her RNC seat when the party convened at the 2024 convention in Milwaukee. She was one of nearly four dozen new members out of the 168 seats. Another 21 new members joined the committee in Atlanta.

“That’s all MAGA,” she said.

Nevada’s McDonald was elected in 2011 and is now the longest-serving Republican state party chair. He laughed when asked about party dynamics during Trump’s first campaign and presidency.

“We had people inside the Republican Party throwing marbles at our feet,” said McDonald, who was indicted as a fake elector after the 2020 election, accused of scheming to keep Trump in the White House even after he lost Nevada to Biden. A Nevada judge dismissed the case last year.

Trump’s second-term secretary of state, Marco Rubio, was a Florida senator and one of Trump’s primary rivals in 2016. In that campaign, Rubio had called the would-be president a “con artist.” At the GOP convention that year, another candidate, Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, flouted protocol by not explicitly endorsing Trump.

Trump’s initial breach with the party seemed a liability after he defeated Democrat Hillary Clinton. A Washington outsider, he had little choice but to build a West Wing and executive branch that included plenty of Republicans who were not true believers.

His first chief of staff, Reince Priebus, led the RNC while Trump ran for president and had dealt with GOP power players who wanted to block Trump’s nomination. Trump’s first RNC chair was Ronna Romney McDaniel, niece of 2012 GOP nominee Mitt Romney, who had warned publicly against Trump’s election.

In office, Trump leaned on his ability to control news cycles and narratives. He largely ignored party mechanics and was not intimately involved in the 2018 midterm campaign, when Democrats won back a U.S. House majority.

New Trump-friendly faces surfaced anyway

People around Trump laid long-term groundwork despite his seeming detachment from the party.

McDonald said loyalists Steven Bannon, David Bossie, Susie Wiles, who is the current White House chief of staff, and others helped build state-level infrastructure and recruit candidates for state party leadership, RNC seats and down-ballot offices.

Other newcomers emerged on their own, inspired by Trump.

“I speak for a whole generation who was frustrated by the status quo and being politically correct,” said John Wahl, the Alabama party chairman. In 2021, he became the youngest GOP chairman nationally at age 34.

Wahl succeeded Terry Lathan, who had been a loyal party soldier for nominees ranging from moderates like Arizona Sen. John McCain to party crashers like Trump. Yet in 2023, once she was out of office and free to choose a GOP presidential primary candidate, she backed Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis over Trump. Lathan did not attend Trump’s 2024 nominating convention in Milwaukee.

Bryan Miller, who was elected to head Wyoming’s Republican Party this year, supported Trump in the 2016 primaries, not long after Miller had retired from the Air Force and joined his county GOP committee leadership. He recalls watching his state’s most high-profile Republican, then U.S. Rep. Liz Cheney, helped lead the House committee that investigated the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol. She endorsed Democrat Kamala Harris over Trump in 2024.

Miller said he “wouldn’t have believed it” if he had been told a decade ago that he would be become state chairman and that Liz Cheney, daughter of a former Vice President Dick Cheney, would be unwelcome among Wyoming Republicans.

‘America First’ unity overrides any disa
greements

Fealty to Trump does not mean there’s complete harmony among Republicans.

Evan Power, chair of the Florida GOP and a onetime Rubio aide, agreed that some Republicans still prefer conservative orthodoxy on global trade and international alliances. But he said Trump speaks to voter anger over an uneven economy and that Trump’s confrontational approach toward other nations is no different from how the president conducts domestic politics.

“Now people know that his combative fighting style is what wins elections,” Power said.

Miller pointed to National Guard troops on the streets of the District of Columbia and acknowledged questions about using armed federal military power to police an American city.

“I’m OK with it — as long as we remain within the confines of the law, the way it’s set up” for military personnel to be “only in supporting roles,” he said.

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 opportunity cost. 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, Trump pushed out McDaniel from the RNC. He tapped daughter-in-law Lara Trump and Michael Whatley of North Carolina as party co-chairs. Now, Whatley is Trump’s pick for 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.”