About
Ronna (Romney) McDaniel served as chair of the Republican National Committee (RNC) from 2017–24, when Trump forced her out after being the one to recommend her for the position seven years earlier.
Although she had been reelected to a fourth consecutive term in January 2023, McDaniel was forced to resign at the beginning of March 2024 amid renewed tension between Trump’s campaign and the RNC, and relentless pressure from the former president and his far-right allies, including former GOP presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy and Charlie Kirk, a conservative activist and a cofounder of Turning Point USA.
After Biden won the 2020 election, the RNC had dutifully backed Trump’s false claims of fraud and downplayed the impact of the insurrection. But for the past three years, the former president has often groused about McDaniel for various reasons, including that she was “not good on election integrity.” Steve Bannon, his former adviser, put it more bluntly when he said that “the burning heart” of her ouster was her lack of commitment to election denialism. “We saw the RNC not do anything beforehand and afterward,” he said of the 2020 election, echoing the false narrative that Biden lost. “This is a MAGA revolt to take over the Republican Party.”
Trump replaced McDaniel with his handpicked loyalists, North Carolina’s GOP Chair Michael Whatley as RNC chair and his daughter-in-law, Lara Trump, as co-chair.
McDaniel is the niece of Senator Mitt Romney (R-Utah) and the granddaughter of the late George W. Romney (1907–95), a former Republican governor of Michigan. In 2015, she was elected state chair of Michigan’s Republican Party and is credited with helping Trump win the state in 2016.
During her seven years leading the RNC — the longest tenure of any RNC chair — McDaniel helped raise more than $1.5 billion for the organization, launched WinRed (a small-donor platform for Republicans that mirrors and rivals the Democratic behemoth, ActBlue), and created a permanent department to fund election-related lawsuits, among other accomplishments.
Immediately after her ouster, McDaniel made headlines again when NBC reneged on its offer to hire her as a commentator due to immediate outcries from other key NBC news reporters and anchors objecting to the company showcasing a prominent election denier.
January 6, 2021
- McDaniel led efforts within the Republican Party to censure Representatives Adam Kinzinger (R-Ill.) and Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) for their willing participation in the House Select Committee investigating the attack on the Capitol.
- That same censure measure described the violent attack that disrupted the congressional proceedings underway that day as “legitimate political discourse.”
- In October 2022, McDaniel was still defending Trump’s behavior, rhetoric, tweets, and lack of intervention on January 6, saying that he “did not cause people to go commit violence.”
The Big Lie
- Under McDaniel’s leadership, the RNC helped promote the Big Lie, fought access to the ballot for all Americans, and contributed to the normalization of political violence.
- In June 2020, McDaniel shared a video promoting the conspiracy theory that the expected increase in the number of mail-in ballots during the pandemic would lead to massive voter fraud in the upcoming presidential election.
- After Biden won both the popular vote and the Electoral College count, McDaniel spread lies about large-scale voter fraud without any evidence to substantiate those claims.