Lara Trump says efforts of “historic” proportions are needed to ensure that Republicans, including her father-in-law, former President Donald Trump, win the Nov. 5 election.
Ms. Trump says she is ready to take on that challenge if she becomes co-chair of the Republican National Committee (RNC), as President Trump has recommended.
In an exclusive interview with The Epoch Times before a Feb. 21 campaign stop, Ms. Trump declared: “We need to have the biggest legal ballot harvesting operation this country has ever seen.”
Ballot harvesting, which is legal in many states, allows people to deliver other voters’ absentee or mail-in ballots to election officials. Some fear this practice facilitates election fraud. Republicans have long frowned upon it; Democrats have taken advantage of it. “Whether or not they [Democrats] do it legally, that’s up for discussion,” Ms. Trump said.
In any case, Ms. Trump says it’s time for Republicans to start “attacking the game differently.”
Ms. Trump’s remarks to The Epoch Times, and later, to supporters, provided new insights about her vision for a revamped and reinvigorated RNC.
“It feels, for a long time, like the Democrats have been playing chess and we’ve been playing checkers,” she said. Her goal is for the Republican Party “to be the opposite, to be steps ahead of them, and on our toes, and ahead of the game, and facing forward the whole time.”
Ms. Trump, the wife of President Trump’s son, Eric, also advocates two other efforts that she says would be unprecedented.
Republicans need to be urged to vote early, not just on election day, as they typically have preferred, she said. She also wants to see the RNC’s program for training poll watchers expanded nationwide.
“They don’t just stand in the background and kind of keep an eye out and look around for things,” Ms. Trump said. “They physically can count how many ballots are coming in, and how many ballots are going out.”
Such measures are needed “to reassure people in a time like we’re in right now, where they really feel like there wasn’t something quite right about the 2020 election, and people still have a lot of unanswered questions,” she said.
Ms. Trump said that the RNC, which is suffering from depleted coffers and anemic fundraising, must restore trust among Republican donors.
“I’ve had family members of mine call me and say, ‘Hey, I just clicked on this to donate to the president … [and] I think it goes to the RNC, I don’t know if I trust that,’” she said. “That’s a problem.”
Especially since economic conditions are tough for many people right now, “whenever they donate, they think their money is going to support Donald Trump and support other ‘America First’ candidates for House and Senate, and that’s exactly what should happen,” she said.
Ms. Trump said that if she is elected RNC co-chair that would be her biggest role: to ensure that “their money is going to the things that they want to support.”
“Oftentimes,” she said, those donors “want to ensure that Donald Trump is reelected to become the 47th president.”
Suggestions that the Trump family is attempting some type of RNC takeover are “ridiculous,” she said.
Her father-in-law has often found that “the people who he trusts the most, to do the best jobs for him, are people within our own family,” she said. “And it’s because sometimes, those are the only people you can really trust.”
President Trump’s announcement that he endorsed her for one of the top RNC positions “has nothing to do with any sort of a ’takeover’ of any variety,” Ms. Trump said. “This is really about reestablishing trust for the voters and the people who donate their money to the RNC.”
‘Army’ of Volunteers Sought
Besides donating money, the campaign is seeking people who can give of their time, Ms. Trump said, encouraging those interested to visit the former president’s website, DonaldJTrump.com.
“We need to have an incredible ground game this election cycle in order to come out victorious,” she said. The campaign needs “an army” of poll watchers, door-knockers, and ballot harvesters, she said. Ms. Trump also encouraged people to vote on the first day of early voting and then commit to driving more people to the polls every day afterward.
Based on primary election results and opinion polls thus far, President Trump appears poised to become the Republican nominee. That makes him “ahead of the Republican Party and the leader of this party,” Ms. Trump said.
“So this is an organization that should be 100 percent working for him,” she said. “I think there has to be a seamless bond between the [Trump] campaign and the RNC.”