RI GOP National Committeewoman Sue Cienki on Trump’s wins, the stakes for 2024, and what’s next for Rhode Island Republicans

Ian Donnis: Welcome back to The Public’s Radio. 

Sue Cienki: Thank you for having me. 

Ian Donnis: We’re going to talk about Donald Trump, the presidential race and the outlook for Rhode Island Republicans. But I want to start with some news from this week. The Rhode Island ethics commission dismissed a complaint filed by your successor as state GOP chairman, Joe Powers against Governor Dan McKee. This was the second recent time when the commission had dismissed a complaint filed by Powers against a powerful Rhode Island politician. Does this show that Chairman Powers needs to rethink his approach on filing ethics complaints? 

Sue Cienki: No. I think our job as the minority party in the state is to hold the Democrats accountable.

You know, we’re disappointed in the Ethics Commission, but not surprised. and quite frankly, when you go out to dinner with people and the check comes, everybody knows who pays for it. So, to say that it was a mistake or McKee didn’t know, I don’t buy his excuse, but, we’ll live with the decision. And you have to keep holding these Democrats accountable for everything that they do in the state. 

Ian Donnis: Is it holding Democrats accountable, though, if the commission in two high profile cases finds no probable cause? 

Sue Cienki: Well, you have to keep going, you know, and someday if they can find an off ramp, the ethics commission will Try to find the off ramp, but we’re just gonna keep going. You know, the Ethics Commission is a group of people that are appointed by the governor. So you have to have a very, very strong case for them to side with you.

Ian Donnis: Well, they’ve been appointed by a string of Governors over time. And you think they are not deciding the cases on their merits?

Sue Cienki: No, I think that, you know, they look at it and they look at the ethics code and maybe the ethics code has to be strengthened so that they can side with the people and constituents in the state. So that’s it. Not that they decide wrongly. That’s not what I’m saying. I’m saying probably the ethics code has to be a little bit stronger. 

Ian Donnis: Well, let’s shift gears to talk about Donald Trump’s win in the New Hampshire primary this week. He looks like he has a virtual lock on the GOP nomination, but Nikki Haley is still in the race. Are you supporting Donald Trump for president at this point?

Sue Cienki: You know, I’m not supporting anybody at this point. You know, as a person that’s a state party leadership. We have to stay neutral. We watch and see who will become the eventual nominee. I think that there are a couple of takeaways from New Hampshire. 50 percent of the Republicans voted for Donald Trump. That means 50 percent didn’t. And 47 percent of independents, because it is a primary where independents can vote, did not vote for him. So he’s got to learn how to appeal to the independents and the same thing with President Joe Biden. You cannot win a presidential race unless you are attracting independents to your side.

So how is he going to do that? You know, if you look back at the data in 2020, he lost a lot of suburban women. How do you gain those back? What are you going to say to gain them back? And from now until November, that’s a long time. Things can happen. You’ve got a 77 year old Republican running and you’ve got an 81 year old Democrat running. A lot can happen. things change in the country. So we’ll see what happens. 

Ian Donnis: You are a Republican through and through. You’re the former state Republican chairwoman. You’re now the national committeewoman. So you will certainly expect the, you will certainly support the Republican candidate for president, regardless of who it is. And that’ll probably be Donald Trump. What do you say to people who point to how Trump called political opponents in November “vermin” and said immigrant immigration is, “poisoning the blood of America?” He’s talked about suspending the Constitution, suggested that former Joint Chiefs of Staff General Mark Milley deserved to be executed. Is there anything that would lead you to consider Donald Trump to be unworthy of serving as president? 

Sue Cienki: You know, I think that he attracts a certain element in the country that likes to see a fighter, somebody that fights back. I think sometimes his rhetoric gets him into trouble. And again, and that speaks to what happened in 2020, where he lost people, where he lost voters. Because they don’t like that. They had the option of voting, you know, for, President Joe Biden. And maybe it wasn’t a vote for President Joe Biden, but it was a vote against Donald Trump, which is I think what happened in 2016 when people didn’t like Hillary Clinton. So maybe it wasn’t a vote for Donald Trump in 2016, but it was a vote against Hillary Clinton. So what happens in 2024 when people may not want that matchup of Biden versus Trump. They may not want it. So who is the beneficiary of that? Is it RFK Jr.? Is it Robert Kennedy that is going to start pulling away just like Ross Perot did in 1992, he’s going to pull some of those people away. So who gets elected? I’m not quite sure. 

Ian Donnis: Let’s talk a little more about Rhode Island. You served for a couple of years as state GOP chairwoman. Your strategy was to promote legislative candidates over consecutive cycles. And still we see how the GOP just has nine, excuse me, the GOP has just 14 of 113 seats in the legislature. What is your takeaway for, from about why it’s such a struggle to elect more Republicans to the legislature? 

Sue Cienki: Yeah. So I think in my first two years, when I was state party chair, we had about 23 percent of the state seats in the general assembly where we had candidates running against these people. In the last cycle in 2022, we covered about 56%. So we had more people willing to run. When I got in, a lot of those people in the last cycle, it was the first time that they, that they ran. We had a candidate run against, in Warwick, Marie Hopkins, who only lost by, I think, three votes. So that was a close race. Some of these races were getting closer and closer. I think James Lathrop, who ran for treasurer. Very well qualified, and he made huge strides. But we’d love to see candidates like that come back and run again the second time. As we know, a lot of these candidates, it’s name recognition, getting out there first time. A lot of our candidates started late. We’re hoping that a lot of these candidates run again and then we attract more people and they start running almost immediately in March. You’ve got to start running and getting people to know, you know, what’s going on, what’s going on in the state. I think you have a heightened sensitivity with things about the infrastructure that’s going on in the state. In particular, the Washington Bridge. The East Bay has always been a particularly hard area for Republicans to win. Well, maybe we’ll be able to turn some of those seats because people feel as if nobody was paying attention to the infrastructure. So maybe we’ll have a few more wins. 

Ian Donnis: Rhode Islanders have not elected a Republican governor since 2006. Republicans have been locked out of other statewide offices for a longer time. We look back to the 1980s and see how Republican women like Claudine Schneider, Susan Farmer, and Arlene Violet were able to win statewide offices. What is the difference between why they were able to win back in the 80s and it’s such a struggle for Republican candidates to win statewide now?

Sue Cienki: Well, you’ve just got to find the right candidates, you know, the right candidates with the right message. most of those women that ran, very intelligent, very smart, very moderate in a lot of their views. You know, if we stick to issues that people care about and talk about them in a significant way, I think you’ll get more people to jump over the fence and, and vote for a Republican. 

Ian Donnis: Not everyone knows what you do as GOP National Committee woman. So how would you describe your role and your responsibilities? 

Sue Cienki: So my role and responsibilities is every four years when the presidential candidates come into Rhode Island. And they need to get ballot access. We give them the rules and regulations for the state, how they access the ballot. And really that’s our main role is to make sure that any Republican candidate that wants to run for president knows the rules. And if they ask for our help, we will help secure their place on the ballot. And that’s what happened this time. We had four candidates: Governor Chris Christie, Nikki Haley, President Donald Trump and, Ron DeSantis, Governor Ron DeSantis, asked us to help them get ballot access, and we did. We did not hear from Vivek Ramaswamy or Ryan Binkley. They didn’t ask for our help. We gave them the information, so we got four of those candidates on the ballot.

Ian Donnis: In 2022, Ashley Kalus was the Republican candidate for Governor in Rhode Island. She welcomed the fight. She had good communication skills, but she got into the race late. And I think she was handicapped by being a relatively recent transplant to Rhode Island. What is the GOP doing differently now to make a more effective case for governor in 2026?

Sue Cienki: Well, I think you have to look at who the current governor is, and point out where he has failed. You know, what has he done that hasn’t benefited the state of Rhode Island? I think he will probably have a Democratic primary. It seems as if Helena Foulkes is not going away and maybe Peter Neronha, who is term limited. Maybe he will have a contentious primary on his side. And the Republicans, you know, maybe Ashley will, will jump back in. She’s still around, she’s been kind of quiet, but she, you may see her pop up again and get more involved in what is going on currently within the state.

Ian Donnis: To come back to former President Donald Trump, former Republican official Liz Cheney is among those raising flags that he could be a real threat to the rule of law in America. Does that raise any concerns for you? 

Sue Cienki: Well, I’m not a big fan of Liz Cheney, and one of the reasons I’m not a big fan is for the secrecy, the state of silence in this country. What I worry about is one of the court cases that Donald Trump is involved in, and that happens to be the classified documents case in Mar a Lago. I’m worried about that because of the application of that statute, the Espionage Act. That was first put forth in 1917, and over the last 15 years, it hasn’t been handled even handedly. So, anything that comes out of that, and Liz Cheney, her father was a big promoter of that act. So I think that’s 

Ian Donnis: Let me ask you this though, but the thinking is that there were people in the administration when Trump was last president that helped to put some guardrails on him and that those people would not be present if he wins re-election and that the field is kind of sown with people who would be yes men or yes women for Trump. Is that a concern? 

Sue Cienki: No, I think that, you know, we have a constitution and I think that there will be enough people around him to say there are guardrails and there are things that you can and cannot do. I mean, if you look in 2016, one of the big talking points that he said was, you know, put her in jail, put Hillary Clinton in jail. Well, he had four years to do that and he didn’t do any of that. But yet when the Biden administration came in, they actually went after their political opponents. I really don’t believe he is going to go after Joe Biden or anybody in his administration. And there is a rule of law here. I think that we have courts that have said that, and I’m not that worried about that.

Ian Donnis: All right. We’ve got to leave it there, Sue Cienkii, thank you so much for joining me. 

Sue Cienki: Thank you. Thanks for having me.

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You could almost hear the groans across Rhode Island when state officials this week offered an update on the Washington Bridge. The most dramatic news was that demolishing the westbound part of the span is not being ruled out at this point, although officials say they need more time to assess the situation. For now, the bottleneck created by closing lanes on the Washington Bridge continues to cause traffic congestion in and around Providence. You can read more about that in my Friday TGIF column posting around 4 this afternoon on what used to be known as Twitter @IanDon and thepublicsradio.org.

That’s our show for this week. Our producer is James Baumgartner.

I’m Ian Donnis and I’ll see you on the radio.