Republican National Committee

The Republican National Committee (RNC) is the official governing body of the Republican Party, and in the 2020 presidential election cycle it becomes the institutional shadow behind the novel's central political conspiracy. Though the committee itself never acts as a visible character, its name is repeatedly invoked as the suspected origin of the plot to destroy First Son Alexander Gabriel Claremont-Diaz, and the eventual revelation that the scheme came directly from Senator Jeffrey Richards's campaign transforms the RNC from a mere party apparatus into a symbol of how institutional power can be weaponized for personal political gain.

The RNC in the 2020 Campaign Context

The RNC enters the story during the final weeks before the Democratic National Convention, when the Richards campaign leaks that it has tapped an Independent senator for its prospective cabinet. The old bastard Stanley Connor flatly denies every request for an endorsement, and by the end, Rafael Luna privately tells Alex that they were lucky Connor didn't try to primary them. Nothing is official, but everyone knows Connor is the one joining Richards's ticket. The RNC's presence is felt as the institutional machinery that would formalize such an alliance, even as the committee itself remains in the background of the maneuvering.

The Suspected Role in the Waterloo Letters Scandal

When the Daily Mail publishes the stolen emails between Alex and Prince Henry on September 27, 2020, the White House goes silent, and the First Family shuts itself away with no official statement from the First Son. White House Press Secretary Davis Sutherland issues a brief prepared statement asking for patience and understanding from the American people as they handle this very private matter. The full email transcripts are uploaded to WikiLeaks under the moniker "The Waterloo Letters," seemingly named for a reference to the Waterloo Vase in the Buckingham Palace Gardens in one email composed by Prince Henry. The correspondence continues regularly up to Sunday night and appears to have been lifted from a private email server used by residents of the White House. As security experts within the FBI and the Claremont administration scramble to find the sources that provided the British tabloid with evidence of the affair, the suspicion initially falls on the RNC. Alex's mother, President Ellen Claremont, tells him that they suspected maybe the RNC had somehow been involved with some of what happened, and that she had people looking into it.

The Revelation of the Richards Campaign Conspiracy

The suspicion against the RNC is ultimately redirected when Nora Holleran presents the evidence she has assembled. She reveals that Richards outed Alex, explaining that as soon as he left the campaign, Richards hired a firm that hired the hackers who got the surveillance tapes from the Beekman. The evidence includes a blurry, out-of-focus photo of Alex caught on a long-range lens, barely recognizable, with the elegant ivory curtains of Henry's bedroom at the edge of the frame. The photo is attached to an email between two people, with a message reading "Negative. Nilsen says that's not nearly clear enough. You need to tell the P we're not paying for Bigfoot sightings." Nilsen is Richards's campaign manager. Nora explains that there are pay stubs and invoices and requests of service, all through back channels and go-between firms and fake names, but there is a digital paper trail for everything, enough for a federal investigation which could subpoena the financial stuff. Richards hired a firm that hired the photographers who followed Alex and the hackers who breached the server, and then he hired another third party to buy everything and resell it to the Daily Mail. The scheme involved having private contractors surveil a member of the First Family and infiltrate White House security to try to induce a sex scandal to win a presidential race.

The RNC's Narrative Significance

The RNC functions in the novel as a metonym for the corrupting fusion of party machinery and personal ambition. The committee is never shown deliberating or acting; instead, it exists as a name invoked in suspicion, a placeholder for institutional guilt before the specific human actors are exposed. When the Washington Post breaks the story that emails, anonymously leaked and confirmed by an anonymous source on the Richards campaign, clearly show that Jeffrey Richards or at least high-ranking staffers at his campaign orchestrated the plan to have Alex stalked, surveilled, hacked, and outed by the Daily Mail, the RNC recedes into the background. The podcast host Oliver Westbrook summarizes the three big takeaways: the First Son of the United States didn't actually do anything wrong; Jeffrey Richards committed a hostile act of conspiracy against a sitting president; and Rafael Luna is perhaps the unlikeliest hero of the 2020 presidential race. The RNC's role, by contrast, is to show how a party's institutional authority can be borrowed to lend legitimacy to a conspiracy that ultimately serves only one man's ambition.