Welcome to Tuesday’s edition of Washington Secrets. Today, we take a look at a political battle close to home. It is a contest to put MAGA at the heart of the D.C. Republican Party — or it’s a quest for ratings and sensationalist headlines, depending on how you see it.
Donald Trump has cleaned up Washington, D.C. Now one of his staunchest supporters in the city wants to clear out the local Republican Party, ridding it of what he sees as amateurs who spend too much time cozying up to Democrats.
John Fredericks, who broadcasts as “The Godzilla of Truth” to an audience of millions from his K Street studio, is backing a challenge to Patrick Mara, the three-term chair of the city’s Republican Party.
Christina Goodlander says she is running for the post in the January election to oust leaders who lack an agenda and have given up on winning.
Yet scratch the surface, and the city’s local political scene is riven by petty rivalries and personal insults. One side accuses the other of lacking ideas and energy, while the other says it is being attacked with sensationalist claims designed to drive ratings.
“This challenge represents the complete and total MAGA takeover of the D.C. GOP,” Fredericks, who is the party’s Ward 2 chair, told Secrets. “The days of compromise, capitulation, and managed defeat are over. We will unabashedly promote President Trump’s success in Washington, fight for the America First agenda, and build a Republican Party that actually fights to win.”
Republicans may control the White House, Senate, and House of Representatives, but the nation’s capital has long been a black hole for the local party.
No Republican has ever been elected mayor, and none have served on the city council since 2009.
Goodlander said local members were frustrated that their share of the vote was stuck below 10%. It would take time, she said, but her aim is to build a political operation that could make mayoral elections competitive within 12 years.
Her campaign is based on messaging, members, and money (or brains, bodies, and Benjamins if you want to be more crude, she joked).
“We’re never out in the press commenting on local political matters,” she said of the messaging piece. “We don’t talk to reporters. We don’t issue press releases.”
“We basically advise our candidates to dodge any difficult questions, and we really don’t stand anything apart from the occasional milquetoast statement about checks and balances.”
She pointed to the city’s 46 nonpartisan Neighborhood Association Commissions, where the party could be doing more to organize candidates.
“Last I checked, there were only two Republicans out of 345 of these seats, so we need to start running people for those,” she said.
For Fredericks, the campaign is personal. He claimed he had been targeted by local leadership for wanting a more aggressive approach.
As a result, he said he will attend the Republican midterm convention next month with Virginia’s delegation after he was refused a place with the D.C. delegation.
“I’ve done a lot, and I’m trying to get people engaged, and I want to win, and I want to build a coalition in Washington D.C. that is an alternative to what we’ve got going on right now, which is basically a communist uprising,” he said.
“And so, unfortunately, the chairman Patrick Mara kicked me and my wife Anne out because we held town halls, we asked questions, we worked.”
Nonsense, said Mara.
Earlier this year, he told the Washington Post he had been forced to remove Fredericks from a party post because members of the Republican National Committee complained about his behavior at their winter meeting in California. Organizers there barred him from meetings because of his media job.
And on Tuesday, Mara took time out from his family vacation to message Secrets to say that the D.C. GOP is stronger and better organized than at any time this century.
“It is good for the party to have people who are interested in leadership,” he said.
“It is also good to have critics like John,” Mara added. “He talks for a living and needs to create controversy to keep his audience. It wouldn’t surprise me if he airs a series of shows claiming that Lizard People control the party.”
Clarification of the day
The first line of the clarification is embarrassing enough.
“It has come to our attention that AI was used to condense a longer draft of this column prior to submission to the FT and our own editorial involvement,” reads the first line added to a Financial Times opinion piece on American tariffs. “The FT editorial code of conduct specifically prohibits the use of AI in the writing process.”
The final line is humiliating: “The writer is a professor at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government and director of the Harvard Growth Lab.”
The writer is, in fact, Ricardo Hausmann, Rafik Hariri Professor of the Practice of International Political Economy and a former Venezuelan government minister.
Secrets is pleased to report that AI is not used in this newsletter. Not even to condense things.
Lunchtime reading
Poll showing Bass leading Raman by double digits was bogus, company says: Secrets has seen a lot of dodgy polls. This is the first completely fake one we’ve seen. And it’s a reminder of just how easy it is to get misinformation out there.
To win in November, Republicans need to take a page from Obama’s playbook: Let us finish what we started, is the mantra. It worked for Obama’s reelection, but could it work for Trump’s Republican Party in November?
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