By Steve Peoples and Michelle L. Price -
The Associated Press
The Republican National Committee (RNC) voted Friday to install Donald Trump's hand-picked leadership team, completing his takeover of the national party as the former president moves closer to a third consecutive presidential nomination.
Michael Whatley, a North Carolina Republican who has echoed Trump's false theories about voter fraud, was elected the party's new national chairman in a vote held Friday morning in Houston.
Lara Trump, daughter-in-law of the former president, was voted co-president.
Trump's team vows not to use the committee to pay his mounting personal legal bills.
But Trump and his associates will have firm control of the party's political and fundraising machinery, with limited or almost no internal resistance.
"The RNC is going to be the vanguard of a movement that will work tirelessly every day to elect our candidate, Donald J. Trump, as the 47th President of the United States," Whatley told committee members in a speech after being elected.
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Whatley will take the top job, replacing longtime president Ronna McDaniel after falling out of favor with key figures in the
former president's Make America Great Again
movement .
But he will be surrounded by people closest to Trump.
Lara Trump is expected to focus primarily on fundraising and media appearances.
She emphasized this shortly after being elected, dedicating part of her inauguration speech as co-president to showing a check for $100,000 that, she said, had been contributed that same day to the party.
When a journalist asked her who made her contribution, she refused to identify the donor.
The RNC's chief operating officer will be Chris LaCivita, who will take over as the committee's chief of staff while remaining one of two top advisers to the Trump campaign.
McDaniel was tapped by Trump to lead the committee seven years ago, but was forced to leave after Trump's MAGA movement increasingly blamed her for defeats in recent years.
She alluded to that in her farewell speech on Friday, telling members that what worries her most is "internal cohesion" heading into the elections.
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"We have to stop attacking other Republicans," he said.
"If we spend our time attacking each other, we guarantee that the Democrats are going to win."
He also said the party needs to appeal to independent and undecided voters, and warned: “We won't win if we just talk to each other.”
Although McDaniel was applauded upon her farewell, the new management enthusiastically welcomed the change, and Lara Trump, accompanied by her husband, Eric Trump, was greeted like a celebrity, with members lining up to take photos with her.
With Trump's blessing, LaCivita promises to implement sweeping changes and personnel moves at all levels of the RNC to ensure it functions seamlessly as an extension of the Trump campaign.
In an interview Thursday, LaCivita sought to allay concerns among some RNC members that the already cash-strapped committee would help pay Trump's legal bills.
The former president faces four criminal indictments and a total of 91 charges, as well as a $355 million civil judgment for fraud, which he is appealing.
Its affiliated political action committee Save America has spent $76 million over the past two years on lawyers.
People who profit from the RNC by paying legal bills, LaCivita said, do so "solely on the basis of trying to harm donors."
Instead, Trump's legal bills are being largely covered by Save America, a separate political entity.
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"The fact is that not a cent of RNC money or, for that matter, campaign money has gone or will go toward paying legal fees," he said.