Donald Trump’s ascent to presumptive Republican presidential nominee doesn’t necessarily mean the Republican Party’s infighting is over and done. No, it could mean financial trouble for some of the consultants and vendors who worked to oppose Trump in the primary:
“The Never Trump vendors and supporters shouldn’t be in striking distance of the RNC, any of its committees or anyone working on behalf of Donald Trump,” said a Trump campaign official.
It’s not only consultants who worked on #NeverTrump. Those who were involved in some of the more significant hits against Trump by his primary opponents and their Super PACs could also face the wrath.
If Trump’s team makes good on the blacklist, it could elevate a whole new crop of vendors, while penalizing establishment operatives who attacked him, often in deeply personal terms. But it also could put Trump’s campaign at a competitive disadvantage as it scrambles to quickly beef up capabilities in highly technical campaign tactics that it largely eschewed in the primary, including voter data, direct mail and phone banking.
A key question is how much Trump’s campaign will scramble to become a real, 21st-century campaign, how much he’ll rely on the Republican National Committee to do the grunt work of campaigning, and—if the RNC is shouldering a lot of the work—if he’ll really have the pull to get the party to cut off vendors with whom it’s done millions of dollars of business over the years just because they opposed him in the primary.
One thing’s for sure: Trump not being able to use some of his party’s most experienced operatives to get elected president would pair nicely with the reluctance of many of his party’s top policy experts to serve in a Trump administration if he’s elected. But the divisions he’s opening up in the Republican Party are nothing compared with the divisions he’d like to create in the United States as a whole.