Inside Trump Tower: Facing grim reality
Three weeks until early voting, the campaign scrambles to pick a path and stay on it.By ALEX ISENSTADT 09/01/16 05:38 PM EDT Updated 09/01/16 06:25 PM EDT
The plan to get to 270 electoral votes remains unclear. The battleground state deployment plan is a work in progress. Money from big donors is slowing to a trickle. And aides are confused about who’s calling the shots.
Donald Trump’s campaign is teetering, threatening to collapse under the weight of a candidate whose personality outweighs his political skill. And now, with 22 days until the start of early voting, the GOP nominee is running short on his most precious commodity: time.
Late last week, with Labor Day and the final stretch of the 2016 campaign approaching, Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, met with Republican National Committee brass — including chief of staff Katie Walsh and political director Chris Carr — in New York City. Kushner, who has in many respects assumed the role of campaign manager, asked a series of direct questions to the GOP officials — all surrounding the troubles the party was having in deploying field staffers, opening up swing-state headquarters, and establishing field offices in battlegrounds that will decide the election.
Those present for the meeting, and those briefed on it, insisted there were no fireworks, no drag-out fights. But they said Kushner’s questions reflected a growing realization within Trump’s team that for all the party’s talk about implementing a major swing-state deployment plan, it hasn’t yet materialized.
For weeks, Republican officials and operatives have groused about a dearth of campaign infrastructure in battlegrounds across the country — a state of affairs that could have an impact on GOP candidates up and down the ballot. But like many aspects of the Trump campaign, the deployment plan has been wracked by confusion, false starts and a lack of quick decision-making. On Aug. 18, Paul Manafort, Trump’s former campaign chairman, came to Trump’s Alexandria, Virginia, headquarters for a day of meetings. He left ready to finalize a series of decisions.
But the next morning, Manafort, under withering scrutiny surrounding his work overseas, abruptly quit. His departure created a chain reaction, delaying the talks for days on end. By late August, finger-pointing had begun: In interviews, a Trump aide accused the RNC of slow-walking the process, while RNC officials blamed the lag on dysfunction within the campaign.
Trump’s son Eric, who has expressed impatience to party officials about progress being made in battleground states, on Monday made a pilgrimage to RNC headquarters in hopes of expediting the delayed field programs.
The RNC shrugged off any talk of tension with the Trump campaign. “The RNC and the Trump campaign have a good working relationship,” said Lindsay Walters, a committee spokeswoman. “We are coordinating on all fronts as we work towards victory in November.”
The absence of a clear plan has spread to something even more fundamental — the campaign’s path to 270 electoral votes.
In mid-August, Trump’s campaign team gathered with RNC officials at the candidate’s Washington, D.C.-area office to discuss the swing-state map and a deployment plan that would make their difficult Electoral College math work.
According to three people present, Trump’s chief pollster, Tony Fabrizio, laid out a path that required the team to divide states into four tiers — with Florida, Ohio and Pennsylvania sitting in Tier One. In the next were Arizona and North Carolina, which Mitt Romney carried but where Democrats are hoping to compete this time around. There were also Nevada and Iowa, which Democrats won in 2012 but where Trump is running competitively.
The third tier included traditionally conservative states — Georgia, Missouri and Indiana — that Trump would need to keep an eye on. In the final tier were a half-dozen states, including Michigan, Virginia and New Hampshire, that President Barack Obama won four years ago. Whether to invest resources into those states would depend on costs, the strength of Trump’s campaign in each of those states and an autumn assessment of the potential for a win.
To those present, the plan was persuasive — and seemed to offer a coherent blueprint for the campaign to allocate resources. Yet, two weeks later and 20 days from the start of early voting, it’s not clear the plan is being implemented. In recent days, Trump has campaigned in Mississippi and Washington state — neither of which are seen as remotely competitive.
Making matters tough for Trump has been the ongoing reluctance of the party’s biggest contributors to open their wallets. In some cases, they are expressing profound misgivings about the Republican nominee. Last month, during a gathering of House Speaker Paul Ryan’s donor network in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, Annie Dickerson, a Republican giver who also serves as top adviser to GOP megadonor and Trump critic Paul Singer, spoke up. During one panel discussion, discussion turned to an often-asked question in Republican circles: Whether not backing Trump would ultimately lead to the election of Hillary Clinton — and regret.
That’s when Dickerson chimed in: Trump, she said, has to be more accountable for himself. For Trump to blame everyone from the media to major donors to the establishment meant that he wasn’t placing the right amount of responsibility on himself, she said.
The billionaire industrialists Charles and David Koch also have refused to come around. After the Republican National Convention, the Kochs invited their friends and allies to a retreat in Colorado Springs, Colorado. There, Doug Deason, the son of Texas billionaire Darwin Deason, tried to persuade Charles Koch to have a meeting with the nominee. In an interview, Deason recalled telling Koch that he could influence Trump’s policies. But Koch was having none of it. His response: “I just don’t see the upside.”
The antipathy has had far-reaching consequences. More than a month after Trump was nominated in Cleveland, the committee tasked with funding the convention remains in debt, according to three sources briefed on its finances. Organizers struggled to raise cash from major contributors and companies, many of them leery of Trump’s candidacy. (In July, just days before the start of the convention, the committee sent a letter to Republican megadonor Sheldon Adelson pleading to him for a $6 million infusion.)
Some Republicans believe the party’s most prominent contributors have simply moved on and will focus their remaining giving on competitive House and Senate races.
“Overwhelmingly the donors that I talk to are focused on protecting the House and saving the majority in the Senate,” said Spencer Zwick, a Ryan political adviser who is one of the most prominent fundraisers in Republican politics.
Not all is lost. As the campaign enters its final months, some things have improved — perhaps most notably, Trump’s temperament and ability to stick to the script. During an August fundraising stop in Texas, Trump held forth before donors at a luncheon in Fort Worth, and vowed to stick with his new, more-on-message approach.
“He’s turned the corner. He’s sharpened the message and staying on message. He’s not attacking Republicans and minorities, and he’s letting the media focus on Clinton and her problems,” said Deason, who was present at the Texas fundraiser.
Recent swing state and national polling has shown Trump closing the gap with Clinton, who’s endured days of negative headlines surrounding her email practices and her family’s foundation.
“The campaign has made tremendous strides over the last several weeks,” said Jason Miller, a Trump spokesman. “Mr. Trump is working harder than ever, we’re seeing greater crowds than ever before. Crooked Hillary Clinton continues to be a walking ethics nightmare to the extent she bothers to show up on the campaign trail at all. Additionally, it has been 271 days since Hillary Clinton held a press conference.”
Other improvements are also in the works. Following a multitude of on-air slip-ups from Trump television surrogates that resulted in a series of embarrassing headlines, some advisers — which, according to one source included former House Speaker Newt Gingrich — urged the campaign to alter the process for determining who is allowed to represent the campaign on TV news programs. Greater control of surrogates, they concluded, was a must — and freelancing simply couldn’t happen anymore.
On Wednesday evening, Bryan Lanza, a Trump press aide who oversees the surrogate operation, sent an email to staff informing them that changes were coming.
“We are having too many issues of surrogates booking their media hits independently,” Lanza wrote, adding that surrogates now needed to contact him before going on air. “I will take care of all your booking needs. PLEASE DO NOT BOOK ON YOUR OWN ANYMORE.”
But with just over two months until the election, Trump’s campaign remains transitory and unstable. Staffers describe a confusing work environment, with a constant lack of clarity about who’s in charge. To some, its campaign manager Kellyanne Conway and CEO Steve Bannon. Others say its Kushner and other members of the Trump family. Others say that, in the end, it’s Trump himself who’s calling the shots.
Even keeping track of who’s working for the campaign at any given moment can be a challenge. In recent weeks, several aides who’d been advising Trump are no longer playing formal roles. They include Mike McSherry, a veteran party strategist who worked on the convention, and Doug Davenport, a longtime lobbyist who helped with the convention and Trump’s Pennsylvania primary effort. Rick Gates, who was Manafort’s top deputy, is also expected to soon depart, according to three sources familiar with his plans — even though on Aug. 19, the day Manafort resigned, the campaign announced that Gates would be serving as Trump’s liaison to the RNC. (Gates did not respond to requests for comment.)
Some say the campaign narrowly avoided an exodus last month. Following Manafort’s departure, he personally appealed to those he brought on not to leave and to give the new leadership team, led by Conway and Bannon, a chance.
Republicans say Trump still has time — but not much.
“It’s hard to see how the Trump campaign gets to 270 where they are today,” said Russ Schriefer, a veteran strategist of presidential campaigns who served as a senior adviser to Romney in 2012. “It’s not impossible, but it would take some external factor and some very lucky breaks for that to happen.”
“They have to reset the entire race and the entire dynamic,” he added. “They have a lot of things left to do and a very short amount of time left to do it.”
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