The Michigan Republican Party was deep in debt when a longtime party donor who had given more than $1 million over the past decade asked for a meeting with its chairwoman.
Kristina Karamo turned down the donor. Her reasoning, according to two people familiar with the matter, was that he was a “Republican in Name Only," or a “RINO," an insult long used to denigrate members of the party seen as not conservative enough.
Today, the party's finances are so dire that Karamo has sued former party leaders so she can get permission to sell the organization's headquarters. And she's refusing to leave her post even as former President Donald Trump and national Republicans have installed a new ally in her place.
The cash crunch and power struggle within the Michigan GOP, long a bastion of traditional conservatism, is a case study in the party’s new phase nationally in the era of Trump, where no longer are the competing elements simply for or against him. Instead, pro-Trump factions in Michigan and elsewhere are fighting over how best to represent his “Make America Great Again” movement, with some openly alienating lifetime Republicans and undermining the party's work in key swing states.
