Charlie Kirk delivers a warning to the RNC, and sparks a backlash

Charlie Kirk, the 29-year-old activist who leads Turning Point USA and a network of conservative affiliates, wrote with a warning.

In a Monday email to the 168 members of the Republican National Committee, he told them that donors and activists would desert the party unless it changed. The result, he said, would be colossal failure in the 2024 presidential election.

“How do we plan to win in 2024 if you so boldly reject listening to the grassroots, our donors, and the biggest organizations and voices in the conservative movement?” he asked in the message, which was obtained by The Washington Post. “If ignored, we will have the most stunted and muted Republican Party in the history of the conservative movement, the likes of which we haven’t seen in generations.”

The extraordinary message came in the midst of a bitter GOP leadership contest, with incumbent RNC Chair Ronna McDaniel seeking to beat back a challenge from Harmeet Dhillon, an attorney and committee member from California who has been paid for legal consulting by former president Donald Trump’s political action committee, among numerous clients. Kirk and his allies have vigorously promoted Dhillon, hosting her on various media platforms and staging a straw poll at a recent Turning Point summit in Phoenix.

The email also deepened an internal GOP feud over the party’s disappointing performance in last month’s midterms, with competing factions blaming one another for why Republicans in key races came up short.

Above all, the message showed how Kirk is squaring off with the GOP establishment. He is marshaling his well-resourced network of nonprofit groups, which gained popularity over the past six years with Trump’s backing but demonstrated mixed results in races last month. Many of Kirk’s endorsed candidates lost, foremost among them Kari Lake, the GOP nominee for governor in Arizona. Dhillon served as an attorney for Lake’s campaign, traveling to Phoenix for the election.

Kirk alerted the RNC members to a new initiative of his group’s political arm, Turning Point Action, that would seek to pick off RNC members deemed “disconnected with grassroot conservatives.”

He said the effort, called the Mount Vernon Project, will “recruit leaders to serve on the RNC and at the state level who wish to better represent the grassroots voice.”

The initiative, which was previously reported by Politico, is “funded graciously by donors who are vocally disenchanted” with the RNC’s members, Kirk wrote.

The project brings to the national stage a model of bare-knuckled politicking used by Turning Point in its home state of Arizona, where it has worked to purge GOP officials who stood in the way of Trump’s efforts to reverse the outcome of the 2020 election. Now, the focus is on the race for GOP chair, with Kirk saying at his group’s weekend summit in Phoenix: “Turning Point Action might remove members of the RNC if they vote incorrectly.”

In delivering his warning Monday to RNC members, Kirk laid particular emphasis on his ties to donors. “In my position, I interact with more large donors than almost anyone in the movement,” he wrote.

He advised the GOP members that donors would cut them off unless the party changed. “In recent weeks, I have spent countless hours on the phone with donors who have told me emphatically that they will not support the RNC in this presidential cycle if things do not change,” he wrote.

McDaniel rejected criticism of her stewardship of the party in a Wednesday interview with Fox News’s Brian Kilmeade, arguing, “This is Turning Point and Harmeet trying to take over the RNC.”

Of Turning Point, she acknowledged, “They do great conferences.” But she said the group’s broader impact is questionable. “How many young voters did they register? How many youth voters turned out this cycle? How about the college kids in Arizona, where they are headquartered?” she asked.

Kirk replied on Twitter, claiming that his group had logged more than 500,000 volunteer hours this past cycle and contacted more than 5 million voters, among other outreach.

Dhillon, for her part, criticized McDaniel’s decision to go after Kirk’s network.

“Turning Point USA is the leading conservative youth organization in America — exactly the kind of activists we rely on and need to motivate,” she said in a statement to The Post. “It’s a puzzling campaign choice for Ronna to go out of her way to attack a large segment of our current and future grassroots, volunteer and voting base.”

In a recent appearance with Dhillon, Kirk praised her for taking on GOP leadership, saying, “This is a club, it’s a cartel, it’s a smoke-filled room, you are not supposed to ask questions.”

Some RNC members were irked by Kirk’s approach, according to emails obtained by The Post.

José Cunningham, an RNC member from D.C., wrote a Wednesday email to other committee members in which he addressed Dhillon directly about Kirk’s remarks, asking: “Harmeet, you claim we’re your friends and colleagues. Are you really okay with someone accusing of us being a ‘cartel?’ Where are the ‘smoke-filled rooms,’ Harmeet? I’ve never seen them.”

Dhillon has made similar comments, saying on Fox News earlier this month that the RNC operated like a “corrupt driven machine inside the Beltway.”

Emma Vaughn, a spokeswoman for McDaniel, said the chairwoman’s decision to run for reelection reflected her backing within the party.

GOP members, Vaughn said, “rallied around the chairwoman because of her unprecedented investments in the grassroots, election integrity, and minority communities, and for taking on Big Tech and the biased Commission on Presidential Debates.” McDaniel “will continue speaking with each and every member about how the party can continue building upon our investments and make the necessary improvements to compete and win in 2024,” Vaughn added in her statement.

Turning Point Action’s intervention into RNC races is part of an effort to “respond to our people and donors — who gave [McDaniel] a resounding vote of no confidence in our straw poll — and work to restore the RNC to the grassroots,” Andrew Kolvet, a spokesman for the group, said in a statement. “Evidently that is troubling to many entrenched members of the committee who are comfortable losing.”

Ben Proto, a member from Connecticut, dismissed Turning Point’s initiative in an email to fellow RNC members. Without identifying Kirk’s group by name, he took aim at “Celebrities who claim to have the pulse of the voters, but who talk in an echo chamber to people who already agree with them.”

“And when I hear that some of these same ‘celebrities’ are going to start a PAC to take over state committees and county committees, and the national committee, I don’t know whether to laugh or cry, because it is clear they truly do not understand how elections, at any level, work and, more importantly, how they are won,” he wrote in a Wednesday email to other RNC members.

Dhillon, in response to the complaints, suggested they had been manufactured, saying in her statement to The Post that she is running an “insurgent campaign” without consultants “preparing astroturf emails and talking points.” Neither Cunningham nor Proto responded to requests for comment.

Yvonne Wingett Sanchez contributed to this report.