February 4, 2019: The Ridgefield Democratic Town Committee (DTC) calls upon John Frey, Ridgefield’s State Representative for the 111th District (composed of Ridgefield, south of George Washington Highway/Canterbury Lane) to disclose his participation in the Republican National Committee’s (RNC) unanimous vote to provide “undivided support” to Donald Trump in a pre-emptive attempt to block any and all potential 2020 Republican presidential primary challengers and to merge the RNC into Trump’s 2020 campaign. Alternatively, the DTC invites Mr. Frey to publicly disavow those measures if he did not participate.
On Friday, January 25, 2019, RNC members, convening for their annual winter meetings in New Mexico, voted unanimously to pledge the party’s “undivided support” to Donald Trump as the party’s presidential candidate in 2020. The widely-read national political journal, The Hill, observed:
“[T]he RNC has historically refrained from expressing support for a candidate before he officially becomes the party’s nominee.
The vote on Friday signals how the Republican Party has come to fully embrace Trump, three years after many Republican officials and members dismissed him as a thorn in the GOP’s side.
The vote isn’t the only sign of the party’s deepening ties to Trump. The president’s campaign committee is expected to merge its field and fundraising operations with the RNC for the reelection bid, creating a single entity intended to streamline campaign efforts.
The unanimous vote came mere hours after the FBI’s arrest of Roger Stone, Donald Trump’s long-time personal adviser and confidante, on multiple federal charges, and a few hours before Mr. Trump abruptly ended the longest-running government shutdown in US history by accepting the same bi-partisan terms he was offered, but recklessly rejected, before the shutdown.
In a statement, the DTC said, “By these actions, the Republican National Committee (RNC) is transforming the Republican Party into an extension of Trumpism and the Trump personality cult. John Frey has been a member of the RNC — the elite national leadership of that party and its primary fundraising and policy-making organ — for several years, one of just 168 members nationwide and one of just three from Connecticut. Mr. Frey’s prominence in the national Republican Party is due entirely to his multiple elections as Ridgefield’s State Representative. Thus, his constituents — all of whom are Ridgefield residents — have a right to know if he is using his national Republican leadership position to advance an individual and agenda entirely contrary to the vast majority of voters in the community he was elected to serve.”