The Republican National Committee will audit Donald Trump's role in the GOP's lackluster 2022 election results.
Henry Barbour, an RNC committeeman from Mississippi, said the examination would dive "into the weeds" on a variety of topics, including the former president's involvement, to determine why the party lost so many critical races in an election cycle they were expected to gain substantial congressional majorities, reported NBC News.
"Looking at President Trump, what has he gotten right, and what has he gotten wrong, and how do we learn from that to win elections going forward?" Barbour said. "So I think we’re going to work our way through all of those various issues and dynamics to hopefully lay out our recommendations that will put the party in a much stronger position to win going forward."
RNC chairwoman Ronna McDaniel tasked Barbour, the nephew of former Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour, and Harmeet Dhillon, a Trump attorney and RNC committeewoman from California, to co-author the post-election autopsy report, as Barbour also did after Mitt Romney's loss in the 2012 presidential election.
"We're just getting started," Barbour said, "that's the reality of it."
So far, he noted, candidates, consultants and campaign managers have complained about candidate quality and GOP miscalculations about the response to the U.S. Supreme Court ruling that overturned Roe v. Wade, while Trump himself recently blamed Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) for the party's midterm failures.
"It wasn’t my fault that the Republicans didn’t live up to expectations in the MidTerms," Trump said on his Truth Social website. "I was 233-20! It was the 'abortion issue,' poorly handled by many Republicans, especially those that firmly insisted on No Exceptions, even in the case of Rape, Incest, or Life of the Mother, that lost large numbers of Voters."
