2016 RNC suffers spate of Trump-related departures For some young staff members, the party's embrace of its nominee is a "deal breaker."

The Republican National Committee has seen a spate of departures in recent months related to its embrace of Donald Trump, whom some former staffers felt uncomfortable supporting.

In recent months, deputy press secretary James Hewitt, spokesman Fred Brown, director of Hispanic media Ruth Guerra, and research analysts Lars Trautman and Colin Spence have all left the RNC with Trump as one of the reasons for their resignations, according to sources familiar with their decisions. At least three other staff members have also left the RNC with opposition to Trump as a contributing factor, according to multiple sources.


In total, at least 11 staffers have left the RNC since March, although not all of the departures were related to Trump.

Spence, who joined the RNC in June 2015 as a research analyst on the investigations team, left this June for a “variety of factors” but said he wasn’t “overjoyed with how the primary season went.”

“Personally I wasn’t comfortable working to elect him,” he said of Trump.

In interviews, others cited familiar reasons for their resistance to the nominee – that they couldn’t work to help elect a man they thought was not qualified to be president; that Trump’s insensitive statements turned them against him; that he wasn’t conservative enough. Some also said they worried about the stain that working to elect Trump could have on their resume.

“I didn’t want to be associated with the Trump campaign,” said one, calling the Trump nomination a “deal breaker” for him. “I don’t agree with what he has to say ... He’s not a person I feel comfortable working for. It’s just that simple.”

RNC chief strategist and communications director Sean Spicer acknowledged that some staffers may have left in part because of Trump, but termed them a relative “handful of people” in an organization of around 250 staffers on the RNC’s payroll and 460 more in the field.

“What you’re telling me is very possible,” he said when asked about staff departures related to Trump, but “in a couple of those cases I know that they were getting significantly more money and they couldn’t be matched.”

He added that, “if you look at a massive organization, any organization ... you can find some people that aren’t happy ... that’s the nature of a big organization.”

The RNC’s turnover is still relatively modest compared to that of the Democratic National Committee, where chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz resigned last month, followed by several key staffers. But the DNC resignations did not reflect dissatisfaction with nominee Hillary Clinton; they came in response to a WikiLeaks release of internal emails suggesting that staffers were overly supportive of Clinton and dismissive of her primary rival Bernie Sanders.

Meanwhile, the RNC has shifted from its primary-season role as neutral arbiter among 17 contenders to perhaps the prime vehicle for electing Trump as president. The national party is playing a proportionally larger role in assisting Trump than other recent presidential nominees, since Trump has a smaller campaign staff of his own and less capacity to target voters and get them to the polls.

But multiple former staff members, speaking on condition of anonymity, say there are significant misgivings among RNC staff, many of whom feel deeply loyal to the Republican brand and see Trump as something of an interloper.

Meanwhile, some Republican consultants who are not currently working for Trump say they’ve received resumes from RNC staffers eager to distance themselves from the nominee.

“At the start of the cycle nobody thought Donald Trump would be the Republican nominee so a lot of operatives find themselves in a position they never expected which is trying to help elect Donald Trump president of the United States,” said Alex Conant, who served as press secretary for the RNC from 2008 to 2009 and more recently worked for Marco Rubio’s presidential campaign.

Among Republican consultants, anti-Trump sentiment outweighs the unwritten prohibition against party staffers job-hopping so close to a presidential election, as some firms and conservative political organizations expressed a willingness to welcome RNC refugees. Those who left in part because of Trump have gone to work on Capitol Hill, at the American Action Network, and the Republican Jewish Coalition, among other destinations.

One prominent GOP consultant with ties to the RNC said that some staffers feel that their superiors, including Spicer and RNC Chair Reince Priebus, didn’t “have to be so far out there in the bag for Trump ... It’s embarrassing to the building.”

(Spicer said the notion that he and Priebus are overly enthusiastic reflects “a complete misunderstanding of why we do what we do.”)

The GOP consultant added that said some within the organization have debated whether to leave or stay to steer resources to endangered Congressional Republicans: “There’s a feeling that if they leave, who ends up taking over?” the consultant said. “There’s gonna come a time when if Trump is just tanking, then they make a decision that they’re going to do what they gotta do to protect down-ballot races and use the infrastructure to do that.”

The sense of a letdown has been particularly sharp for millennial staffers who expected in 2016 to work to help elect a Republican president and then go to work in the White House afterwards. Some of those in their mid-20s are despairing of Trump’s chances against Hillary Clinton and some are doubtful of whether they’ll fit into a Trump administration even if he does prevail in November.

“It sucks to wake up every morning and go into the office and do things to help Donald Trump become president. They don’t like that. It’s bad for morale,” said another prominent GOP consultant. “All these senior people went on board and saluted and said ‘I’m with you Donald Trump.’ It’s been the most shocking thing of this cycle for me, even more shocking than the fact that he won.”

Asked about the mood in the RNC, Spicer depicted it differently: "Everyone is excited to win."

Ken Vogel contributed to this report.

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