Karoline Leavitt, a spokesperson for former President Donald Trump, told ABC News recently that in vetting people to work with the RNC in battleground states, part of the interview includes gaining an understanding of a candidate’s beliefs about whether the 2020 election was rigged or stolen.
The question is asked presumably to favor those candidates subscribing to the debunked theory that the election was fraudulent, which many MAGA influencers, including Trump, continue to promote.
Though Leavitt says a potential employee’s beliefs about the integrity of the 2020 election are “not a litmus test,” she goes on to say that the Trump team is seeking “critical thinkers” — evidently including election deniers in that category.
Asking if the election was stolen will not reveal "critical thinking." People who say "no" are simply sane, people who say "yes" are nuts. No critical thinking required. https://t.co/WdoKZHJbhI
— Marc E. Elias (@marceelias) March 29, 2024
Democratic attorney and election law specialist Marc Elias, who has defended most of the cases that Trump and other plaintiffs have brought to try to prove the election was corrupt, sharply criticized the Republican vetting process that Leavitt describes.
[NOTE: Elias has prevailed against more than 50 election cases, with no court having found that significant election fraud occurred.]
“Asking if the election was stolen will not reveal ‘critical thinking’,” Elias writes. “People who say ‘no’ are simply sane, people who say ‘yes’ are nuts. No critical thinking required.”
The issue takes on added significance as a potential second Trump term would be built on a codified plan being organized by The Heritage Foundation, a conservative Washington, D.C. think tank, that proposes a large-scale purge of what the GOP’s MAGA adherents commonly call the “deep state” — or the establishment — coupled with a broad expansion of presidential powers.
Called Project 2025, the transition plan delineated by Heritage — with input from dozens of other conservative organizations — includes plans to reclassify thousands of nonpartisan, unappointed government jobs as positions to be filled by the administration, with partisan loyalty ranking above merit and expertise — critics say — in a revamped job qualifications formula.
This is insane even for a Trumpian RNC. It means that everyone in the place — every researcher, lawyer, fundraiser, receptionist — is an avowed election denier. How does the Committee ever recover from this?
— Marc E. Elias (@marceelias) March 27, 2024
Maybe the answer is it shouldn't.https://t.co/qiQeguUh6a
[NOTE: Leavitt has also been actively talking up another of the campaign’s priorities in pursuit of so-called “election integrity,” which the Republican National Committee, she says, plans to ensure by “putting soldiers” at polling places.]
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