Donald Trump’s top brass gathered reporters in West Palm Beach, Fla., this month to showcase the inner workings of the former president’s campaign and exude a we-have-it-under-control confidence.
As PowerPoints flashed on a screen, they laid out their 90-day plan — the 11 percent of the U.S. population they had identified as “target persuadables,” a ground strategy that would motivate Republicans and discourage Democrats and the five-word frame to dismantle his new rival, Vice President Kamala Harris, as “failed, weak and dangerously liberal.”
The only thing missing was the candidate, who sat a few miles away at his Mar-a-Lago estate with his own plans for blowing up the news cycle.
Hours after the Aug. 8 briefing ended, Trump appeared on cable news networks for a news conference filled with false or unsupported claims unrelated to the campaign’s plan to defeat Harris — his crowd sizes, the “unconstitutional” elevation of Harris as the nominee, a near-helicopter crash with former San Francisco mayor Willie Brown that Brown says never happened. Trump decided to hold a news conference because he heard his team was holding the briefing, but he wanted to talk, according to people familiar with the situation who like others spoke on the condition of anonymity to reveal internal discussions. The reporters who had come to South Florida for a campaign briefing suddenly found themselves with a more pressing story.
Most presidential candidates rely on their campaign teams to advise them on what to say, where to say it and how to shift course when trouble arises. But Trump’s 2024 campaign operation, much like his 2016 and 2020 operations, runs on the opposite assumption: The candidate follows his instincts, while the campaign tries to keep up — offering suggestions along the way and adapting on the fly.
That dynamic has challenged his team as it seeks to regain momentum after Harris replaced President Joe Biden in the race, with the addition this past week of new advisers to his team and a broadening network of people kibitzing in his ear. Trump campaign officials are barreling forward with their plan, focused on Harris and her record while well aware that there are limits to their control.
Advisers and donors are trying to keep Trump focused. At a high-end fundraiser in Aspen last weekend, hotelier Steve Wynn encouraged the former president to stick to the issues at a private roundtable, according to people who attended. His team was mingling with donors at the fundraiser. Trump had gotten frustrated earlier that day after his airplane malfunctioned.
At times, Trump has taken pride in having a disciplined operation without the infighting and drama of some previous efforts. But the former president has also mocked the “disciplined” line he often hears in the news media about his campaign.
Campaign spokesman Steven Cheung described Trump as the “best” candidate in recent history, adding that he had overcome significant obstacles — including legal prosecutions and an attempted assassination — while keeping up a steady travel schedule.
“President Trump has continued to speak about sky-high inflation that has crushed American families, an out-of-control border that threatens every community and rampant crime while Kamala Harris continues to hide from the press,” Cheung said in a statement.
For his part, Trump announced Thursday that he is sticking with his campaign’s senior leadership of Susie Wiles and Chris LaCivita — unlike in 2016 and 2020, which saw shake-ups at the top of his operation. He has expressed confidence in the campaign’s strategy, making a point of attempting to focus his appearances this past week — such as standing in front of a display of groceries meant to highlight recent inflation — on driving the message prepared by his advisers.
“We want to close it out,” Trump said in Bedminister, N.J., when asked about the new hires to his campaign. “We have great people. Susie is fantastic, as you know. And Chris is fantastic. They are leading it.”
Yet hours later, he kicked off another controversy by downplaying the importance of the Medal of Honor awarded to wounded or dead soldiers while praising a top donor.
Trump is spending part of this weekend beginning to prepare for a scheduled Sept. 10 debate with Harris and expressing confidence to allies that he would still win. He was at his New Jersey club, advisers said, with Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner, his daughter and son-in-law.
The new hires this past week include Corey Lewandowski, a campaign manager from Trump’s 2016 campaign who had been pushed from the former president orbit after he was accused of assaulting a donor in Las Vegas. Taylor Budowich, a former Trump adviser who has been working for an allied super PAC, is returning to the campaign as an adviser who is expected to travel with Trump.
The campaign has recently grown its rapid response and social media teams. It also brought back Tim Murtaugh, a press secretary from the 2020 campaign, and brought in Alex Bruesewitz, a Trump-aligned social media consultant who has worked with the former president’s son, Donald Trump Jr. Dan Boyle has been added to do opposition research.
Trump described Lewandowski as “a personal envoy,” though his exact role remains unclear given his history as a senior adviser. His first public action was to give a quote to Puck News repeating an attack on LaCivita for consulting fees paid by the campaign — including payments for advertising that LaCivita’s firm bought, a normal practice for media strategists used in past campaigns.
Lewandowski dismissed the criticism, calling “innuendo,” “speculation” and “outright lies.” Two people involved in the response said LaCivita and Lewandowski spoke about how to respond to Puck before the statement was sent.
But it was immediately seen by some top Trump advisers as a breach of their team ethic, which has previously avoided giving oxygen to such attacks. Some campaign advisers are concerned that it is a sign of problems to come, given Trump’s own past practice of fostering tension between members of his senior team.
There are other unresolved internal tensions as well. In recent weeks, Trump has attacked a popular Republican Gov. Brian Kemp at a rally in Atlanta; falsely alleged that a photo enhanced with artificial intelligence inflated the crowd size at a Harris rally; and questioned Harris’s Black identity. Those last comments at the National Association of Black Journalists meeting raised particular concerns for his campaign advisers — who were not with him in Chicago that day, people familiar with the response said.
His comments about Kemp were not planned by the campaign, which hoped that the governor would be helpful this fall and that the two could be on good terms even if Trump still did not like him. After the comments made at a Georgia rally, the campaign was flooded with concerned calls, one of these people said.
None of those were moves that the campaign leadership sanctioned. During the Aug. 8 briefing of reporters in Florida, one campaign official made it clear that they are aware of the distraction such claims can cause.
“Instead of focusing on the issue differences that he wants to focus on, we look for the sensational,” one campaign official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to address the reporters, said in a way that echoed his view of what reporters wanted. “We understand that’s the world we live in. Everything’s all about getting the clicks. It is. We get it.”
A few hours later, Trump went into a long riff about how the crowd on Jan. 6, 2021 — the day rioters, inspired by him, stormed the U.S. Capitol — was larger than the audience for Martin Luther King Jr.’s historic “I Have a Dream” speech. “The biggest crowd I’ve ever spoken before was that day,” he said.
The following week in North Carolina, he joked about a speech on the economy.
“They say it’s the most important subject, but I’m not sure it is,” he said, giving a speech that he said his advisers wanted. He deemed it an “intellectual speech.”
Some Republicans outside the campaign have expressed concern about whether the former president will be able to deliver the message he needs.
“I feel between the border crisis and inflation and what you’ll likely see this fall with campus unrest, the record for Biden-Harris should be a huge millstone,” said Marc Short, an adviser to former vice president Mike Pence. “But I’m not sure that President Trump will prosecute the case in a way that’s convincing because he doesn’t seem as focused on the policy differences that should be highlighted.”
The campaign leadership wants the focus to be on Harris, making the case that Trump is the antidote to the problems Democratic governance has created. “Our basic tenet of the case is that when American voters know her, they will not support her,” explained a senior adviser, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe strategy. “And it is our job to have American voters know her.”
Trump put it more concisely in Bedminster: “People don’t know who she is.”
One challenge is that the former president has continued to use advisers who do not answer to his campaign and sometimes work at cross-purposes. Natalie Harp, a longtime personal adviser of Trump who frequently handles his social media posts and prints out documents for him to read, has so far resisted efforts to answer to the larger campaign operation, according to people familiar with the arrangement.
When he wants something posted immediately to his Truth Social site — such as a vow to hold a news conference on election fraud — she posts it. And she provides him reams of pages of material every day from the internet.
At one point, when top aides made suggestions to Harp, she responded that she did not report to the campaign, people briefed on the exchange said. “She has extraordinary power,” one person close to Trump said. Cheung described her as “a valued member of the team.”
Former 2016 campaign manager Kellyanne Conway, who is not working for Trump at the moment, has also caused concern within the campaign orbit, recently meeting with Trump in Bedminster to discuss her thoughts on the future of the campaign. She had been vocal in her criticism of Trump’s selection of Sen. JD Vance (Ohio) as his running mate but has begun telling others that Vance now needs the support of everyone because he is the pick.
One longtime Trump adviser said the 2024 campaign had been “drama-free, almost boring” until this summer. But this person said it was always inevitable that when Trump hit a rough patch, he was going to return to figures like Lewandowski.
In recent weeks, the former president spent his weekends and evenings complaining about the state of his campaign, this person said, while defending it publicly.
On one recent weekend, Trump dialed allies raising concerns and asking questions about the campaign’s direction and strategy, this person said.
But the following Monday, he again assured top advisers that their jobs were safe and that he did not know where speculation about their fate had come from, the person said.
“He is never going to take the blame himself,” this person said. “He’s not going to say, ‘Oh I shouldn’t have said this, or maybe we shouldn’t have done that.’ So there has to be a shake-up.”
Marianne LeVine contributed to this report.
