Inside Ronna McDaniel’s Six-Figure Severance From the RNC

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As former Republican National Committee chair Ronna McDaniel fights for full payment on her unfulfilled six-figure NBC contract, she at least has a nice financial cushion from the RNC to fall back on.

On March 6, two days before Donald Trump’s RNC takeover deposed his handpicked former chair, McDaniel received a payment of $118,769.99, according to disclosures just recently filed with the Federal Election Commission. Those records show that the sum is the single largest payment to McDaniel that the committee has ever reported, amounting to nearly half of her combined regular payroll earnings last year.

A person with knowledge of the RNC told The Daily Beast that in addition to potentially contracted or negotiated severance pay, typical exit packages include payout for accrued vacation time and expense reimbursements, along with other untapped benefits.

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Over her seven years leading the RNC, McDaniel received regular biweekly payments ranging from about $5,000 to about $12,000, though as criticism of her salary mounted over the last year, those amounts dwindled to just under $8,900 in recent months. She also frequently received year-end or fundraising bonuses that the RNC’s budget committee voted to approve after a data analysis, the person with knowledge said, with her largest single paycheck being the nearly $43,000 she was awarded amid her first internal chair battle in January 2023.

That unsuccessful insurgency could have something to do with the steady declines in McDaniel’s take-home pay ever since, which may reflect spending reforms the RNC promised after McDaniel fended off a right-wing challenge.

Following disappointing election performances in 2020 and the 2022 midterms, her salary was among the RNC budget hotspots that came under fire from insiders—not always in good faith—hopeful for a change in leadership.

However, when that change eventually came this year, a salary cut was apparently a non-starter for McDaniel’s successor.

As fate would have it, that successor—former North Carolina GOP chair and beltway lobbyist Michael D. Whatley—personally argued against reducing the chair salary shortly before he took over, a person familiar with the negotiations told The Daily Beast.

Whatley made that argument when the issue arose during an RNC budget committee confab in Las Vegas earlier this year. The budget committee’s consensus was to cut the salary for whomever the RNC elected as its next chair, with McDaniel excusing herself from the discussion because of a potential conflict of interest, the source said. Whatley, however, was one of the lone voices in the meeting pushing against a salary reduction, according to the person familiar—a position that immediate developments quickly cast in a new light.

The following Sunday, for the first time, Trump personally implied that McDaniel should resign. McDaniel made a pilgrimage to Mar-a-Lago the next day, but the jig was up—that week, The New York Times reported that she was heeding the call and stepping aside. By that weekend, party insiders were already putting Whatley’s name at the top of the list of successors.

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Whatley collected his first RNC paycheck on March 29, in the amount of $19,920.07, more than McDaniel’s $17,799.98 regular monthly pay this year. A person with knowledge of the RNC’s payroll practices told The Daily Beast that Whatley’s first payment likely represented about three weeks’ of pro-rated salary, though net take-home pay also reflects individual choices, such as how much is rolled into a retirement account or paid into other benefit options.

Lara Trump—Trump’s daughter-in-law who took over as RNC co-chair last month—got her first payroll check of more than $10,700 on the same day. But the name of former Trump adviser Chris LaCivita, the RNC’s new chief of operations, hasn’t yet appeared on the payroll. Nor has that of Christina Bobb, the Trump adviser who was recently named head of the RNC’s election integrity unit. (Bobb was criminally indicted in Arizona this week in connection to her alleged role in the state’s fake elector scheme.)

While the new RNC leadership has centered its messaging on a combination of Trump-centric fundraising and budgetary cuts, the latest filings don’t yet reflect significant changes on either end.

On the spending side, the latest filings show that the RNC’s operating budget actually increased by nearly $1.2 million over the previous month. Standout costs included a battalion of outside consultants, along with a $250,000 down payment to the Four Seasons Palm Beach, the first of several expected outlays connected to a planned May gala. The Four Seasons down payment is larger than the $239,750 that the RNC transferred to state GOP committees over the same period.

The Daily Beast sent the RNC detailed questions for this article, including about Whatley’s salary argument. In response, RNC spokesperson Karoline Leavitt provided a statement emphasizing the positives in fundraising data, specifically “the support of [Trump’s] loyal small dollar and major donors,” who have contributed “more than $120 million” to Trump-RNC joint efforts since Trump claimed the nomination last month.

“Team Trump will continue to raise the resources necessary to beat Crooked Joe Biden on November 5th,” Leavitt said in the statement. The statement did not address Whatley.

An RNC official also pointed to grassroots strength, claiming an average online donation of approximately $27, though it wasn’t immediately clear which committees were included in that data, or what time frame was considered in the average. (A Wall Street Journal analysis this week showed that Biden has actually overtaken Trump in small-dollar support.)

Still, Trump’s first criminal trial appears to be a donor boon, the official said, with the former president’s authorized committees raising, on average, $1 million a day so far during the proceeding, which is, ironically enough, predicated on illegal campaign payments.

But a closer look at the RNC’s own filings reveals some persistent hidden weaknesses. The party reported a marked increase in receipts and cash on hand over the last month, pulling in approximately $20.6 million thanks in large part to the joint fundraising potential unlocked after Trump became the presumptive nominee. Much of that cash, however, came from megadonors, not small-dollar support. And because of federal contribution limits, only $1.3 million of those ballyhooed joint fundraising transfers went to the RNC’s election account, with nearly $9 million going to auxiliary accounts that nominally can’t be used for political activity.

Regardless, McDaniel’s payout will help tide her over between roles.

Soon after stepping down from her post, McDaniel joined NBC News as a political analyst, part of the division’s effort to include diverse viewpoints. She did exactly one interview—a contentious sit-down with Meet the Press host Kristin Welker—which turbocharged criticism about NBC’s decision to hire an elections analyst who was complicit in Trumpworld’s lies about the 2020 election results.

Her critics included on-air talent who shared their qualms with viewers, including Welker’s predecessor Chuck Todd, who observed in one segment that McDaniel “has credibility issues that she still has to deal with.”

“You wouldn’t hire a pickpocket to work as a TSA screener,” primetime host Rachel Maddow said. “And so, I find the decision to put her on the payroll inexplicable.”

Within a week, McDaniel was out once again, with the chairman of NBCUniversal News Group telling staff in a memo that she wouldn’t remain a contributor after all. But her brief tenure may earn her a pretty penny. According to reporting from multipleoutlets, McDaniel still expects to be paid out for her full contract—$300,000 a year for two years—and is reportedly considering legal action to make sure she gets it.

Read more at The Daily Beast.

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