Kristina Karamo, an election-denying MAGA activist and chair of the Michigan Republican Party, is facing a mutiny from within the battleground state’s divided and debt-ridden GOP, the New York Times reported over the weekend. Among Karamo critics’ complaints is a scoring system adopted by the party to separate hard-core conservatives from RINOs—Republicans in name only—a favorite right-wing insult to hurl at “establishment” Republicans or anyone not sufficiently devoted to former President Donald Trump. The party also borrowed a cool $110,000 to cover the speaking fee of actor and religious-right culture warrior Jim Caviezel.
Eight of the 13 congressional district party chairs have asked Karamo to resign, according to the Times, but she is fighting back in a “pitched battle for control of the state party.” Two days before Christmas, Karamo released a letter denouncing “infighting” that she said threatened to “disrupt the determination of the Republican men and women who are working tirelessly to win the spiritual war being fought on a cultural battlefield.” Karamo’s politics-as-spiritual-warfare rhetoric is not surprising given that her 2022 secretary of state campaign was supported by Transformation Michigan, which is associated with the dominionist Oak Initiative and New Apostolic Reformation.
Karamo was chosen as party chair in February 2023 even though she lost her 2022 secretary of state bid by 14 points. During that campaign, which she called “a battle of good vs. evil,” she was criticized for promoting QAnon conspiracy theories, Christian nationalist ideology, and anti-LGBTQ rhetoric, along with false claims about the 2020 election. Trump publicly celebrated her selection as party chair, noting that the New York Times said it “cements the Party’s takeover by Trump loyalists.”
Right Wing Watch reported at the time, “After Karamo’s selection as state party chair, she appeared on Steve Bannon’s War Room show where she called Michigan ‘ground zero for the globalist takeover of the United States of America’ and denounced President Joe Biden as a ‘traitor’ and ‘illegitimate president’ who ‘needs to be impeached.’”
Last summer, a judge ordered Karamo and others to pay tens of thousands of dollars in legal fees “racked up by the Detroit clerk’s office as it fought a lawsuit filed by the party last year claiming — without evidence — that there was wrongdoing in Detroit’s election,” as TPM reported. Also last summer, she laughed off criticism of a Michigan GOP tweet invoking the Holocaust to oppose restrictions on gun ownership, a controversy she called “hilarious.”
Karamo is not the only evidence of extremism in the Michigan GOP. In November 2023, Right Wing Watch reported that freshman state Rep. Josh Schriver had seemingly used his appearance on a local news program to signal supporters of antisemitic white nationalist Nick Fuentes that he is one of them. The same day as that Right Wing Watch report, Fuentes fan and Arizona state Sen. Wendy Rogers encouraged her supporters to follow Schriver, calling him “Michigan’s voice for MAGA.”
There’s more than one Fuentes fan active in the Michigan GOP. In November 2022, a Fuentes listener donated $10 during a livestream so that his message would play during the show. “nick i wanted to say thanks… i ran for GOP chair and won. in the reddest of red counties in michigan i won. i promise progress. thanks for your inspiration, thanks for everything,” the message said. Right Wing Watch research pointed to St. Claire County precinct delegate Alex Roncelli as the likely donor.
Fuentes has openly promoted a strategy of getting his young supporters—who call themselves “groypers”—to infiltrate and embed themselves in local Republican Party operations. As Right Wing Watch noted in a January 2023 report, former White House adviser Steve Bannon has also urged “American First” activists to become GOP precinct delegates.
