Trump’s 2020 Campaign: A Traditional Operation With a Wild-Card Candidate

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/29/us/politics/trump-2020.html

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WASHINGTON — On a former trading floor in an office tower in Rosslyn, Va., with sweeping views of the Potomac River, the Trump 2020 campaign is settling in. It has about 40 staff members and counting, reported $19.2 million in cash on hand in its last report and has spent $4.5 million on online ads since December.

It is a long way from Mr. Trump’s first presidential race, which came together in the summer of 2015 and was run as a taped-together operation, with a few desks strewn across an unfinished floor of Trump Tower.

But one thing is missing from the high-powered but traditional campaign operation underway in Rosslyn: a candidate who abides by tradition.

In a speech to a conservative group this month, as Mr. Trump described what he had in mind, he made a point of recounting “how I got elected, by being off script,” adding, “If we don’t go off script, our country is in big trouble, folks.” And at a rally in Grand Rapids, Mich., on Thursday, Mr. Trump illustrated what he meant, delivering an 80-minute stemwinder in which he lashed out at familiar targets who fostered “the collusion delusion” and offered the in-depth rehash of his 2016 victory that is a staple of his rally speeches.

“We won a lot,” he said, after explaining where “Crooked” Hillary Clinton went wrong. “We won 306 to 223.” (Mrs. Clinton’s total was actually 232.)

Mr. Trump has made it clear that he wants to run on the same anti-immigration, anti-Islam, fear-mongering tropes that lifted him to victory in 2016, denouncing old enemies like Mrs. Clinton and adding new ones, even as his aides try to emphasize his accomplishments in office like the economy and the rout of the Islamic State. Advisers say privately that he has been distracted by the Mueller report, which he regards as a clear political victory, and has not focused on message for the coming months.

As the campaign tries to build a traditional re-election operation, which officials often compare to President George W. Bush’s 2004 race, the tension may build between campaign officials and Mr. Trump, who trusts his gut above all else.

“President Trump has always had his finger on the pulse of the nation and he understands what it is that the American people want, and that is why he won in 2016 and that has not changed,” said David Bossie, a former campaign adviser who, alongside the former campaign manager Corey Lewandowski, attended the rally with Mr. Trump on Thursday night. “He is his best political barometer.”

Incumbent presidents running for re-election always come with built-in advantages: money, time, the stature of the office and the opportunity to define the terms of the race, while an inchoate field of opponents fight among one another.

The Trump campaign is building an organization aimed at capitalizing on all of those advantages, crafting a conventional structure around a candidate whose nature is to buck against it. “There are lots of differences between being part of a bruising primary versus being the incumbent,” said Tim Murtaugh, the campaign communications director. “One of the differences is time. We have a big advantage on the Democrat field in that, and we intend to use it.”

But the wild card is Mr. Trump himself.

“It’s easy to build a beautiful operation,” said Robby Mook, the campaign manager for Hillary Clinton’s 2016 race. “The message becomes the gas in the tank.”

For now, the Trump campaign is focused on giving its candidate the infrastructure for success and, as the race is in its early stages, giving him the room he craves to dictate his own script.

Mr. Trump is focused on vengeance after the end of the investigation led by the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, and his campaign aides are indulging him, attacking the Democrats who have sought to investigate him and the reporters who have written about it. Mr. Trump, whom critics have repeatedly described as “corrupt,” has tried to affix both terms to the news media.

Privately, some Trump advisers acknowledge those attacks may have a shelf life, and that they are deploying them in part to blunt questions about Mr. Trump’s own credibility.

But aides say that Mr. Trump always needs a foil, and without the Mueller investigation to swing at and no clear Democratic challenger likely to emerge for months, the press is his stand-in.

In addition to the challenges posed by Mr. Trump’s preference for fights and distractions, the campaign faces headwinds that he did not as a first-time candidate. Democrats and Republicans see an electoral map that will be far more challenging for Mr. Trump, whose support in three key states has sagged, and who faced an invigorated and organic level of Democratic turnout.

To staff the campaign, advisers have brought in a mix of new hires and veterans of the 2016 effort. Brad Parscale, Mr. Trump’s campaign manager who speaks frequently with the president, has consulted extensively with veterans of past presidential runs, relying increasingly on Karl Rove, the architect of Mr. Bush’s re-election effort.

The polling team is expected to look similar to the one from 2016. It is likely to be led by Tony Fabrizio, a veteran Republican pollster who worked on Mr. Trump’s first race. Others such as John McLaughlin and the Polling Company, a firm formerly owned by the White House adviser Kellyanne Conway, will be involved as well. The president’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, meanwhile, is planning to play a large managerial role overseeing the campaign from the West Wing and speaks to Mr. Parscale multiple times a day.

Former senior White House officials like Bill Stepien, who left recently as political director, and Justin Clark, who headed up the White House’s Office of Intergovernmental Affairs, have joined the campaign. Other former campaign aides are expected to join the re-election effort in the coming weeks. And Mr. Murtaugh has been over to the White House to meet with Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the press secretary, and others speak frequently with Mr. Stepien’s replacement, Brian Jack, and Tim Pataki, who took over for Mr. Clark.

The campaign has also been hosting orientation days at its headquarters to train regional political directors and a group it has branded Trump Neighborhood Team Leaders. Next week, it plans to start a program called the Trump Victory State Director College, which campaign officials described as a competitive training program, complete with written exams, snap assignments and surprise simulations, in which there will be people competing for a limited number of slots.

Mr. Stepien, meanwhile, has been focused on the delegate selection process and state chairman races in places like Massachusetts, Florida and Maine, to ensure that the Republican National Convention next year will be an uninterrupted celebration of the president. Mr. Trump’s experience at the 2016 convention, when a group of “Never Trump” Republicans that included high-profile delegates like Ginni Thomas, the wife of Justice Clarence Thomas, was a searing experience for him, aides say, and his team is looking to avoid a repeat.

The spending rate has concerned some outside allies, who have raised questions about the extensive digital investment so early in the campaign. The billionaire Todd Ricketts has been named a finance chairman, reaching out with his team to the donors who were not supportive of Mr. Trump in 2016.

And the campaign has been focused on tying all of the potential Democratic 2020 nominees to the most progressive names in the party, branding them all as “socialists” whose views are too far to the left for general-election voters. Mr. Parscale has discussed with Mr. Trump the potential advantages of targeting the Green New Deal, the ambitious Democratic proposal to combat climate change.

In an interview with Sean Hannity, the Fox News host, on Wednesday night, Mr. Trump acknowledged that advice was setting in. “I don’t want to speak badly about the New Green Deal, Sean, because frankly I’m afraid that they’ll stop using it, because I really do want to, you know, campaign against it,” Mr. Trump said.

But when it comes to telling a compelling story to the public, Mr. Trump will be running his own show, and campaign aides acknowledge that they are only taking cues from the president.

There is also another factor at play, which is how much of his time Mr. Trump is willing to give them.

After two years in office, Mr. Trump, 72, is tired, aides said. The unstoppable campaigner, so far, will commit to participating in only one campaign event a day, and recently balked at a possible rally out West during a fund-raising swing. The rally may still happen, people familiar with the plans said, but only because campaign officials insisted on it.