Donald Trump began making the calls Thursday afternoon, working through a list supplied to him by Bob Paduchik. | Getty Trump calls Ohio Republicans in effort to oust state GOP chairman The president-elect gets some payback against an ally of John Kasich.

Donald Trump called roughly a dozen Ohio Republicans Thursday in an attempt to oust the state GOP chairman, a highly unusual exercise in political score-settling against a party leader who’s been accused of being disloyal to the president-elect.

According to multiple sources familiar with the calls, Trump urged Ohio Republican Party Central Committee members to unseat Matt Borges, the state’s current GOP leader, in Friday’s election for the party post and conveyed his support for Jane Timken, a prominent Ohio Republican who raised money for his campaign.


The president’s personal intervention — which came on a day in which Trump spent several hours sitting for a sworn, videotaped deposition in Trump Tower — has roiled the low-profile party contest, will be decided by Ohio’s 66 central committee members.

A Trump transition aide said the president-elect had phoned around a dozen committee members.

Trump, the sources said, began making the calls Thursday afternoon, working through a list supplied to him by Bob Paduchik, Trump’s former Ohio director and a fierce Borges critic. The president-elect called back those whom he didn’t initially connect with, rather than leave a voicemail.

Among the members who received calls, one of the sources said, were Alex Triantafilou, the Hamilton County GOP chair, Steve Austria, a former GOP congressman, and Stanley Aronoff, a former state Senate president.

Reached on Thursday, Aronoff confirmed that he spoke with Trump but declined to detail their conversation.

“I would prefer to talk after the vote tomorrow,” he said.

News of the calls were first reported by the Cincinnati Enquirer.

The contest has emerged as a proxy battle of sorts, pitting Timken, a steadfast Trump supporter during the campaign, against Borges, a loyalist of Gov. John Kasich who at times publicly urged Trump to tone down his rhetoric.

In October, after Trump surrogates — and Trump himself — ripped Republican office-holders who sought to get distance from Trump after his Access Hollywood remarks, Borges sent an email to the other 167 members of the Republican National Committee calling for a halt to the hostilities.

“Those candidates and officeholders deserve the leeway to follow their conscience without fear of retribution from the party,” he wrote. “And the criticism of these folks from our nominee, his campaign, and others within the party needs to stop immediately.”

The tensions between Borges and Trump became so intense during the closing weeks of the campaign that the Trump campaign took the extraordinary step of publicly declaring that it no longer had a relationship with the state party chair.

Last month, Trump announced that Paduchik was his choice to serve as Republican National Committee co-chair. In recent weeks, Paduchik has emerged as an outspoken Timken supporter and has told senior Ohio Republicans that she had the full support of the president-elect.

“Ohio’s victory was made unnecessarily more difficult because of Chairman Borges failure to support and defend our nominee,” he wrote in a December letter to state central committee members. “At times, Chairman Borges’ comments to the press were hostile and played into the narrative of the Clinton campaign’s message.”

