Former Florida GOP chair Al Cardenas said it “breaks my heart” to see the MAGA takeover of the Republican National Committee.
“I’m talking like a funeral with you, you know? 1854, the birth of the Republican Party; 2024, the demise of the Republican Party,” Cardenas told MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough on Friday after Donald Trump loyalists seized control of the RNC, prompting mass layoffs. It also saw the installation of Trump’s daughter-in-law, Lara Trump, as co-chair.
Cardenas, who ran the Florida Republican Party from 1999 to 2003 and was the chair of the American Conservative Union for three years until 2014, explained how the RNC recruits candidates and works on voter registration, turnout and “all the basics that a presidential campaign doesn’t have the time, the resources, to get involved with.”
But now, with the RNC’s sole aim of propelling Trump back into the White House, Cardenas said GOP candidates in other races now “frankly” had no one to call.
The RNC is essentially “spending millions to perpetuate the fallacy that there was election fraud in 2020,” he said while appearing on “Morning Joe.” “That’s all. That’s all it is. But replacing the RNC and what it does, to me, I’ve given it 40 years of my life. It breaks my heart.”
“It takes away a major component of getting your communities involved in the political process,” he added. “And now it’s all going to be dictated from the top, and you wonder what our future will be down the ballot.”
Cardenas echoed those comments on Sunday when he predicted on X, formerly Twitter, that America “may well descend into a Constitutional crisis from day one of his regime” unless “we defeat DJTrump in November.”