(USAFeatures) Former President Donald Trump met with Republican leaders in Bedminster, N.J. on Thursday to plot the party’s path forward in the hopes of retaking control of at least the House during next year’s midterms.
Republican Study Committee chair Rep. Jim Banks, R-Ind., and members of the caucus’s leadership discussed strategy and other relevant topics with an eye toward Democrat’s thin majority in the House, along with an evenly-divided Senate.
“We talked for most of the time about the work that the Republican Study Committee is doing to define the agenda for the future course of the Republican Party, which is fighting for the Trump agenda,” Banks the New York Post.
“We talked about our election integrity bill, The Save Democracy Act, which he was very supportive of and we talked about what we’ve done to define immigration moving forward,” Banks added.
“We spent nearly two hours with the President with President Trump who’s in great spirits,” Banks noted further, adding that the focus was on reviving the former president’s policy agenda.
“We believe we take back the majority by focusing on the Trump agenda, and President Trump plays a big role in that,” Banks continued. “He’s obviously planning to go out and hit the road and campaign for candidates who share our vision, and we were excited to talk to him about that.”
“I can say that members of our group are very encouraging and if not encouraging him to run in 2024, encouraging him to continue to communicate with American people and engage with the American people,” said the Indiana Republican.
Trump has yet to say whether he’ll try for a second term in 2024, but most GOP strategists and analysts believe if he did throw his hat into the ring, he would easily pick up the party’s nomination.
The Post reported that Trump referred to Banks as “the new type of leader we need in the party.”
Banks told Breitbart News in February that what he is trying to do with the RSC is “build a new conservative agenda.”
“What do I mean by that? A consensus conservative agenda that Republicans can rally around to refocus us again on the issues,” Banks told Breitbart News in February, in defining how he sought to change the RSC.
“At the same [time], we have to recognize we are at a new moment in American politics where the traditional conservative platform of the Republican Party is shifting. It’s changing,” he continued. “So it’s a recognition of the moment that the traditional Reagan-era platform of the Republican Party has to adapt to what we’ve learned in the Trump era.”