MSNBC
Donald Trump is a candidate without a campaign – and it’s becoming a serious problem.
Republicans working to elect Trump describe a bare-bones effort debilitated by infighting, a lack of staff to carry out basic functions, minimal coordination with allies and a message that’s prisoner to Trump’s momentary whims.
“Bottom line, you can hire all the top people in the world, but to what end? Trump does what he wants,” a source close to the campaign said.
In reporting on Trump’s operation, NBC News talked to three Trump aides and two sources working closely alongside the campaign, all of whom requested anonymity in order speak freely.
Veteran operatives are shocked by the campaign’s failure to fill key roles. There is no communications team to deal with the hundreds of media outlets covering the race, no rapid response director to quickly rebut attacks and launch new ones, and a limited cast of surrogates who lack a cohesive message.
“They don’t or can’t cover it all, and there are things that happen that need to be addressed immediately and don’t get addressed at all, and that hurts the candidate,” a source within the campaign groused last month.
The campaign is bringing on a new senior staffer Jim Murphy, as first reported by The New York Times, and a source said more communications hires are expected to follow. But they lag far behind the Clinton campaign, which has over a dozen senior staff dedicated to communications as well as teams devoted to modern data and analytics, an area where Trump is publicly skeptical of hiring. In addition, Clinton enjoys support from established super PACs like Correct The Record and American Bridge that respond to attacks and promote opposition research.
Aides appeared unprepared for the Trump University story last week, despite knowing in advance that unsealed court documents would reveal explosive allegations of fraud. Beyond a short video of former students praising the program that was posted online, the campaign offered scant pushback.
The absence of a response to the Trump U story left the candidate to fill the vacuum with a torrent of demagoguery against the federal judge overseeing the case, Gonzalo Curiel, who Trump said was biased by his “Mexican heritage” despite his Indiana birthplace.
Trump’s comments against the judge horrified many supporters, but the real estate mogul rebuffed efforts by campaign staff, donors and party officials to back off the incendiary claim this weekend, per sources, telling them he was unwilling to look like he had caved to pressure.
“These are things that will defeat [us],” a second source within the campaign lamented.
The Curiel story made Trump’s already difficult task of lining up surrogates even harder, as supporters like former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, Tennessee Sen. Bob Corker and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell distanced themselves from Trump’s remarks over the weekend.
The campaign source described the overall situation as “dysfunctional” and warned that if Trump failed to hire a full communications team by the convention, they would likely lose the election.
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To understand the risks of Trump’s minimalist approach, one needs to understand how a traditional campaign with a typical staff might handle the types of situations confronting him.
Clinton’s widely covered foreign policy speech, in which she attacked Trump’s qualifications and fitness to be president, was instructive. While the Republican National Committee sent out a research brief, press releases, and a statement from Chairman Reince Priebus ahead of the speech, conservatives eagerly anticipated a counterattack afterward from the Trump campaign questioning Clinton’s foreign policy record as secretary of state on Syria, Libya and Iran. Instead, Trump issued a tweet mocking her use of a teleprompter.
As the hours passed, reporters covering the event waited for a fuller statement rebutting the speech either from the Trump campaign or the RNC, but it never arrived.
The morning after Clinton’s speech, Trump tweeted that his opponent “made up things that I said or believe but have no basis in fact.”
This, too, is something a candidate’s staff is supposed to handle. Presidential campaigns typically have a war room that tracks opponent’s statements in real time and flags inaccuracies to push back on, attacks to counter or stumbles to exploit.
Trump’s staff never sent out materials challenging Clinton’s accuracy, however, while Clinton responded to Trump with a meticulously prepared list of citations for every quote she mentioned in her speech.
“A team with a robust rapid response operation would have been able to brief reporters to prebut the speech, blunt expected criticisms, and also plant negative research or negative narratives about Hillary Clinton with reporters,” Lis Smith, who served as rapid response director on Obama’s 2012 campaign, told NBC News. “They did not do that.”
Read more at MSNBC
CHRIS CILLIZZA, WASHINGTON POST
No one can dispute that Trump broke every rule in the Republican primary and won. But winning a primary and winning a general election are not even close to the same thing. (Think about it like being a star in college basketball and a star in the pros. Some people can do both but the skill set required is not the same.)
Consider this: Trump is likely to win the Republican primary race with somewhere in the neighborhood of 12.5 million votes. Mitt Romney got 60 million votes in 2012 while losing convincingly to President Obama. Trump needs to massively scale upward in terms of his voter pool to have a serious chance against Clinton. And the sort of voters he needs to appeal to are not the hardcore Republicans who are already for him. They are establishment GOP types, moderates and even some Reagan Democrats. They are, by and large, also not the sort of people who will respond well to Trump's Curiel comments.