Why the GOP Should Be Very Worried About Trump’s RNC Purge

A capricious, self-centered GOP president decides he wants to dump the national party chair and install an even more reliable loyalist.

It sounds a lot like former President Donald J. Trump’s ouster of Ronna McDaniel as chair of the Republican National Committee.

But it’s also a rough approximation of President Richard Nixon’s RNC housecleaning more than a half-century ago.

In February 1969, Nixon accepted the resignation of Ray Bliss as Republican National Chair, and not long after replaced him with Maryland Rep. Rogers Morton, a Nixon loyalist willing to defer to the president’s wishes.

Bliss was different from McDaniel in one important way. His devotion was to party only, unlike McDaniel, a MAGA loyalist who had been handpicked by Trump after his 2016 victory. But both Trump and Nixon were motivated by the same desire — to remove anything resembling a guardrail and establish absolute and total dominion over the GOP infrastructure and its purse strings.

In Nixon’s case, it was a purge that ended up with disastrous consequences for the Republican Party — so ruinous and far-reaching that they’re worth remembering today.

His decision to oust Bliss, widely regarded as one of the best RNC chairs in history, shocked the political establishment at the time. Bliss was a master of nuts-and-bolts politics — strengthening the party organization, raising money and getting out the vote. He was a political innovator, pioneering the successful use of television advertising and opinion polling in campaigns.

He distinguished himself with his honesty and fierce independence, putting the Republican Party above loyalty to any candidate. Bliss had elected mayors in Akron, Ohio, his hometown and home of the Democrat-friendly United Rubber Workers, and governors in Ohio, in those days a Republican-leaning, but intensely contested battleground state.

After Nixon’s narrow loss to Democrat John F. Kennedy in the 1960 presidential election, Bliss, then Ohio GOP chair, put together the RNC’s Big City Report, which looked into how Republicans could improve their efforts in urban America. It found that a better showing in big cities could have made Nixon the winner, and included ideas for appealing to ethnic and minority voters as well as union and working-class voters.

“I would like to stress that it’s not necessary for us to carry the big cities,” said Bliss. “We just need to reduce the Democratic margin in the big cities; then our out-state and suburban strength, under normal circumstances, should enable us to carry the state.”

After Bliss became national chair in 1965, he helped mend the bitter intraparty divisions left over from conservative Barry Goldwater’s losing 1964 presidential campaign against Democratic President Lyndon B. Johnson. And he applied the Big Cities report effectively in the 1966 congressional and 1968 presidential campaigns.

Unlike with Trump’s ouster of McDaniel, who stepped down from her post March 8, Nixon’s plan to replace Bliss set off a firestorm of protest across the country among rank-and-file Republicans. They considered Bliss a political savior for putting the GOP back together after it had been all but given for dead in the wake of Goldwater’s landslide loss.

Typical was the response from Wisconsin GOP chair Ody Fish, head of the GOP’s state chairs’ association. Fish was described as “almost beside himself with anger.” Don Ross, the Nebraska national committee member who helped engineer Bliss’ election as national chair in 1965, declared that Nixon “can’t be serious.”

But Nixon’s priority was installing a loyalist at the RNC — as well as settling an old score with Bliss. While Bliss had been hard at work fixing the shattered party, Nixon began rebuilding his own political prospects. To help build support for a presidential campaign in 1968, Nixon campaigned for Republican congressional candidates across the country in 1966.

Nixon wanted the RNC to help pay for an airplane he used for campaigning. Bliss said no. That wouldn’t be fair to other Republicans seeking the 1968 presidential nomination, Bliss said.

Thomas Roeser, a Republican political operative, later recalled Nixon’s reaction to this rejection: “He expressed the thought that if he ever, ever got near the presidential nomination much less the presidency, Ray Bliss would be hiking his ass back to Ohio.”

Despite the longstanding friction over money for the campaign airplane, Bliss put the RNC to work for Nixon in the 1968 general election. Still, a little more than a week after his victory, reports began circulating that Nixon wanted to dump him as RNC chair. By April 1969, Bliss was out the door.

Republican fortunes declined immediately after Bliss’ departure. In the 1970 congressional elections, Democrats held the Senate and gained 12 seats in the House.

Although Nixon handily won reelection in 1972, his Committee to Re-elect the President (CREEP) produced the Watergate scandal. Nixon was forced to resign in 1974 and the Republicans lost 49 House and four Senate seats in the election that followed. In 1976, Nixon’s successor, Gerald Ford, was defeated in his bid for a full term, amid additional congressional losses.

Some Bliss allies believed that if Nixon had kept Bliss as RNC chair, that Watergate never would have happened. “He would have blown the whistle the first day,” said Ralph Regula, an 18-term Republican House member from Ohio who died at 92 in 2017.

That may have been wishful thinking, as Bliss himself suggested. But the events surrounding his ouster as party chair offer a few lessons that the party would do well to heed today.

The episode represented a big step toward the development of candidate-centered politics, of which Trump is a reigning master. In candidate-centered politics, one service that party chairs can’t — or won’t — easily provide is a check on the excesses of ambitious office holders.

With his record of winning races, Bliss, who died in 1981, would have stewed over the GOP’s losing efforts during McDaniel’s long tenure — most notably the loss of the House in 2018, the Senate in 2020, and the disappointing results of 2022. He would have understood McDaniel’s limited ability to rein in Trump in recent years but would have disapproved of the deference she showed him while he and the party were out of power.

In his view, party organizations should be independent of candidates and respect the diversity of opinion among rank-and-file Republicans. Ideally, the party would also serve as an independent check on office holders as well — something he hoped to do with Nixon — but at the very least it could serve as a neutral incubator for future candidates when it did not hold the White House.

All of this would have put him at odds with Trump. If there were any questions about whose interest the new RNC leaders will serve, Lara Trump, Trump’s daughter-in-law and an RNC co-chair along with North Carolina GOP chair Michael Whatley, put them to rest.

“Every single penny will go to the No. 1 and the only job of the RNC — that is electing Donald J. Trump as president of the United States and saving this country,” she told Newsmax in February. This prospect may not be music to the ears of congressional, state and local Republicans.

One test of the new leadership’s intent will come soon enough. Trump’s team has said it will not use the RNC to pay his mounting personal legal bills, which are estimated to be in the millions, as it did when he was president. But with a family member and other Trump lieutenants now controlling the party’s fundraising machinery, the gravitational pull toward supporting Trump by any measure possible will be strong.

There is, however, one area where Bliss and Trump might have found common ground. There had been reports in 1960 that in Chicago voting totals had been manipulated to favor Democrat John F. Kennedy over Nixon. In the 1968 campaign, Bliss focused on what he called “ballot security” and worked to put Republican observers at every precinct in the Windy City.

But he never denied the 1960 result.