I would bet my right arm that the RNC's emails were rife with breathtaking racism and misogyny. This is a group of people who are well known for having wildly offensive beliefs that are only expressed in private.
So not just damaging to Trump, but damaging for the entire party.
Damaging the RNC and Republican establishment would have been helpful to Trump: his candidacy was (or at least was perceived as) an upstart insurgency against them. Assuming the RNC emails were actually packed with bigotry (I'm not so sure), the most anti-Trump read which would have emerged out of it might have been something like, "see, all these people like to pretend they're better than Trump but they say the same stuff behind closed doors!"
What there would not have been in the RNC emails was a bunch of discussion between party insiders and Trump surrogates/loyalists as to how to tilt the primary race in his favor. This is what made the DNC leaks damaging to Clinton's campaign.
You keep making the mistake of conflating the 2016 RNC's political fortunes and Trump's. Many Republican insiders probably didn't even want Trump to win the general election as it would mean they'd be frozen out of influence in the party. Remember that guy Paul Ryan?
After Trump was elected and showed himself to be an establishment wolf in populist sheep's clothing they've largely mended relations, and the few holdout never-Trumpers have left for other pastures (including the Democratic Party), but it was a very different picture in 2016.
> You keep making the mistake of conflating the 2016 RNC's political fortunes and Trump's.
You do realize they were on the same ticket, and Trump's fortunes on that ticket had direct, downticket nationwide consequences for the rest of the party?
You only need to look to the UK's Labour Party for an example where a certain faction of a party's insiders considered it better for themselves for their candidate to lose a general election. Winning is never the only consideration.
Hmm. Have you thought about the possibility that what you consider "breathtaking racism and misogyny" might not be seen as such my a sizable portion, maybe a majority of Americans?
Because every time you point out that something is unacceptable, and someone else doesn't agree with you, you've lost their vote- and they will now do anything to prevent people like you from deciding what's acceptable and what isn't.
> Have you thought about the possibility that what you consider "breathtaking racism and misogyny" might not be seen as such my[sic] a sizable portion, maybe a majority of Americans?
I did, and immediately discarded it as ridiculous. 63% of Americans support Black Lives Matter[1], for example. Furthermore, women have been a bigger proportion of the vote than men in every election in the past four decades[2].
So not just damaging to Trump, but damaging for the entire party.