Inside Trump HQ

In nine days’ time, President Trump touches down for his state visit. But back in Washington, his aides have a very different priority… winning a second term. Ben Riley-smith gets an exclusive tour of the Trump 2020 campaign.

Ben Riley-smith gets an exclusive tour around the Trump 2020 campaign offices and discovers the strategies the President believes will secure him a second term

At first glance, it could be any regular office. Banks of desks are pushed together in the middle of the floor, open-planned. Along the edge are private rooms for senior staff, with walls and doors made of glass. TV screens are dotted in corners; air-conditioning units hang overhead. The white and grey colour scheme is corporate chic. The staff, mainly aged under 40, chatter in corridors or tap away at laptops.

But after a while, the signs are obvious. Stuck to one office door is a cartoon of Donald Trump as a Second World War bomber pilot, goggles up. The caption reads ‘U.S. DEPT. OF WINNING’. Two more doors sport printouts of the New York Post front page on the Mueller Report, declaring ‘NO COLLUSION, NO OBSTRUCTION’.

Look at the cubicles and many have glass dividers stamped with, ‘Trump: Make America Great Again!’ Look at the pinboards and there are White House photographs or maps of the country coloured in blocks. Stacks of #Trumptrain stickers are piled on desks. There is even a colouring book in one room, propped up against a window. The cover shows the President standing hands on hips on a rooftop, the skyline behind him packed with Trumpbranded buildings. He is dressed as Superman.

Welcome to the Trump 2020 campaign headquarters. It is from this 14thfloor office on the edge of Washington,

DC, looking across the Potomac River on to the capital’s famous white monuments, that the president’s re-election bid is being plotted.

There may be 18 months until the country goes to the polls, but Mr Trump’s behemoth of a campaign is already up and running – as became clear to us when The Telegraph became the first British publication to look around inside.

The campaign is well funded, with more than $100 million banked since the last election. It is well organised, with a set-up that dwarfs his 2016 effort in scale and depth. And it is well drilled, delivering messages honed over years, which already secured one victory.

Between now and November 2020, the Democrats must whittle down two dozen candidates to a single nominee, find a message that resonates with voters, develop a campaign strategy from scratch and then defeat a sitting president.

All Mr Trump has to do is beat whoever they pick. He has a plan to do just that – and it is already being executed.

Tax-return day 2019 and Mr Trump has come to Burnsville, Minnesota, to tout his achievements. Addressing a few hundred supporters at Nuss Truck & Equipment, the President is listing the ways locals have benefited from his economic management.

‘Jobless claims in Minnesota have reached their lowest level in 22 years,’ he says, speaking with a yellow digger over his right shoulder and a white truck behind his left. ‘Minnesota has added more than 7,500 brand-new mining, logging and construction jobs, which nobody expected.

‘Thanks to our tremendous tax cuts – the biggest – Minnesota families are saving more than $5 billion on their 2018 tax bills. Five billion!’ He keeps going. The average Minnesotan is $1,700 richer since his election. Some 1.2 million enjoy lower utility bills. The number of new business applications has ‘skyrocketed’ by almost 20 per cent. ‘And that’s just in a very short period of time.’

Then comes the praise. One after another, workers and businessmen sitting beside the President detail how his $1.5 trillion tax cut – his biggest legislative achievement – has benefited them.

There is a plumbing-firm owner who could give his workers bonuses, a 32-year-old finally able to live the ‘American Dream’ by buying his first home, a businessman who purchased three new trucks thanks to the extra cash. Each of them credits Mr Trump’s tax reforms. At one point, the President hammers home the political point. ‘These things don’t happen by accident,’ he says. ‘It can all go away very quickly. You put the wrong people in office… and everything that we’ve done can be undone, and bad, bad things can happen.’

This hour-long ode to the Trump economy is no fluke. The President and his advisers have identified soaring growth as their best chance of re-election, judging that Americans tend not to vote against their own pockets.

Minnesota, the site of his speech, is a swing state. Mr Trump lost it to Hillary Clinton in 2016, but only by 1.5 percentage points. Spelling out the financial benefits voters have enjoyed from his first term could yet turn it red. It is classic retail politics.

This mantra is one that aides plan to repeat ad nauseam in the coming months. The national economic numbers certainly back them up. Growth is above three per cent. More than 250,000 new jobs were added in April. America’s unemployment rate has not been this low since 1969 – the year man landed on the moon.

Larry Sabato, director of the Center for Politics at the University of Virginia, believes that the economy is Mr Trump’s strongest suit for 2020. ‘The reason he’s in the race is because of the golden economy,’ Mr Sabato says. ‘Yes, it started under Obama and gained lots of momentum under Obama and most of the drop in unemployment was under Obama. But people don’t vote that way. They don’t think back eight or 10 or 12 years. They are focused on their family and whether they are better off or not when a president comes up for re-election.’

But the economy is not the only strength of Mr Trump’s campaign underestimated by those reading headlines of the latest White House controversy and presuming the Trump presidency will be four years and out.

First, there are the pledges delivered from his 2016 race – ‘promises kept’, as his campaign calls it: America is out of the Iran nuclear deal and leaving the Paris climate-change agreement. Isil’s caliphate is ‘gone’ and North Korea is ‘negotiating’.

Tariffs on tens of billions of dollars’ worth of steel and aluminium trade have been levied – much of it targeting China. The North American Free Trade Agreement [Nafta] has been renegotiated. The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act has passed. Plus, two new conservative judges are sitting on the Supreme Court – a huge win for Trump’s evangelical supporters.

Yes, there are notable failures, too. Obamacare, the flagship healthcare law of Mr Trump’s predecessor, remains on the statute books. The border wall is unbuilt and will not be financed by Mexico. Immigration numbers have not shot down.

Yet, whatever their merits, the policies Mr Trump championed during his first tilt at the White House have largely been put into practice. Second, the President’s base of supporters has not abandoned him. Mr Trump’s approval rating has hovered stubbornly around 40 per cent – that is, around four in 10 Americans think he is doing a good job. True, that is historically low. Half the country thinks he is doing badly. Indeed Mr Trump so far is the only post-second World War president not once to register an approval rating above 50 per cent on a Gallup poll – a damning statistic.

But the ‘deplorables’, as Mrs Clinton dubbed Trump supporters, appear still to stand by their man. It shows in the way previously critical senators now up for re-election have been converted into true believers. It shows too in the fact that just a handful of near-unknowns – such as Bill Weld, whose last big political gig was governing Massachusetts 22 years ago – are considering challenging Mr Trump for the Republican presidential nomination.

If Mr Trump can just hang on to the rust-belt states he flipped from Democrat to Republican last time – Michigan, Wisconsin, Ohio and Pennsylvania – then, many academics and pundits believe, a second term will be his.

And third, he is the incumbent. Since 1900

The campaign set-up dwarfs his 2016 effort in scale

there have been 20 US presidents besides Mr Trump. Just five stood for re-election and lost.

At Trump campaign HQ, the team is already plotting to take advantage of that incumbency factor. Staffers moved into their office in the Rosslyn neighbourhood of Arlington – a county in Virginia just outside the Washington city boundaries – earlier this year.

Leading the team is Brad Parscale, the bearded campaign manager from Texas who helped mastermind the social-media plan that proved so effective in 2016. A former college basketball player some 6ft 8in tall, he had little political experience before being thrust into the last campaign – something he shares with his boss. Mr Parscale enjoys the trust of both the President and his family, according to campaign officials. He talks to Mr Trump a couple of times every week and regularly joins him on Air Force One. He talks to Jared Kushner, Mr Trump’s son-in-law and an influential White House adviser, every day.

More than 30 people are already employed by the campaign, with more to come. A wider group of so-called ‘surrogates’, ex-advisers and talking heads who defend the President publicly, are also considered part of the team, often dialling into conference calls explaining ‘lines to take’ on hot topics.

The headquarters is still a work in progress. There was a smell of burning as wires were being laid when we visited

– a sign of expansion to come. A full TV studio is being installed so campaigners can be ready to spin whatever stories break.

The office itself belonged to a former financial trading firm. It was snapped up for a bargain when the company was sold and needed to get out of its lease. ‘We paid $36 a square foot,’ a campaign aide said proudly – well below the $100 average. Referencing the President, they added: ‘We know one guy who was really pleased.’

Fundraising is one area where the campaign is succeeding. It raised $30.3 million in the first quarter of 2019, dwarfing what individual Democrat 2020 hopefuls raised. Add in previous donations, the campaign says, and it has 21 times more cash in hand than Barack Obama did at this stage of his re-election bid.

Another is the voter database. The Republican Party, in contrast to its role in 2016, is said to be working ‘hand in glove’ with the Trump team and believes it has far superior information on US voters

than the Democrats. Every American is given a score between 0 and 100, the latter denoting the most dedicated Trump fan, and targeted accordingly. It is based on data like past voting history and location. Key to the re-election plan are Mr Trump’s rallies. The events, attended by thousands of cheering, raucous supporters, were a centrepiece of his first White House bid. Their political benefit is partly messaging, allowing Mr Trump to speak unfiltered to voters. But also they glean another vital campaign commodity: data.

The Trump team sees rallies as a volunteer registration opportunity, a way to log personal details of supporters and lock them in tighter to the campaign. Sign-up forms to attend capture valuable information. Staff question those queuing to get in for more intel.

Once inside, people are encouraged to text words like ‘WALL’ (a reference to the border wall) to a campaign number, another form of data collection. It all helps the campaign approach its target of two million Trump ‘volunteers’ by election day – a term loosely defined to include everything from sharing messages on Facebook to knocking on doors and making calls.

And then there is what Tim Murtaugh, campaign communications director, considers one of the most significant incumbent advantages of all – time. ‘Whoever emerges from the Democrat convention next summer will be beat up from the primary and broke after spending all their money to get to that point,’ he says.

‘They will inherit a Democratic National Committee in debt. They will not have a national operation that they can just flip a switch on and set into motion. Finally, they will be saddled with socialist policy proposals they were forced to adopt to become the nominee.’

That attack line – that whoever the Democrats pick will be a ‘radical socialist’ – has been identified as the campaign’s most important message after the economy. It too will be repeated again and again until polling day – 3 November 2020.

Perhaps the biggest challenge the campaign has is Mr Trump himself or, more specifically, what spin doctors call his ‘message discipline’.

That day in Minnesota, the President spent almost the whole event on script – the economy, the economy, the economy. But as the hour neared its end, he turned to another familiar topic.

‘You see what’s happening at the border and you know how unfairly you’ve been treated as a state,’ Mr Trump said.

‘These horrible and foolish loopholes,’ he went on, singling out the ‘visa lottery’, which randomly allocates green cards to people from countries that send few people to America. ‘You take people out of a lottery… who do you think these countries are giving us? They’re not giving us their finest, that I can tell you. It’s just insane.

‘And, of course, asylum. Asylum is a ridiculous situation. People come in, they read a line from a lawyer… It’s a big con job. That’s what it is.’

A hard line on immigration has been central to Mr Trump’s campaign since day one in 2015, when he descended an escalator in Trump Tower and warned against Mexican ‘rapists’ and drug-smugglers.

Yet there are concerns in some Republican corners about whether the ploy can work again. Mr Trump lent in hard on immigration before last year’s midterm elections, deploying 5,000 soldiers to the Mexican border and warning about an ‘invasion’ from migrant caravans.

When the votes were counted, Republicans had lost control of the House of Representatives – driven in part by suburban voters abandoning the party. Their majority in the Senate did grow, but some saw a warning sign. Were moderates put off by his immigration rhetoric?

Mr Trump’s political instincts and media manipulation – not least by tweet – were key factors in his 2016 win. Already he has identified weak spots in potential Democrat rivals and handed out nicknames – ‘Crazy’ Bernie Sanders; ‘Sleepy’ Joe Biden.

Campaign officials make clear they have no intention of trying to quieten ‘the boss’. But could his unpredictability distract from that ‘golden’ economic message? Mr Sabato thinks so: ‘This is going to be a contest not so much between Trump and the Democrats but between Trump’s economy and Trump’s personality.’

Outside the Minnesota event in April there were two sets of Americans squaring off either side of the road that led to Nuss Truck & Equipment’s headquarters. One group, some 100 or so Trump fans, urged passing drivers to honk in support of the President. The other, dozens of Democrats, dubbed him a racist.

Randal, a 59-year-old dog breeder sporting a Trump T-shirt and a vast American flag, is a presidential superfan. He has been to 47 Trump rallies and events. ‘The number-one thing was he spoke like me,’ he told The Telegraph of his early conversion. ‘He spoke my language. I love the fact that he wasn’t beholden to what we call the swamp.’

Maury, 69 and dressed in a waterproof, was on the other side of the road. He was holding a white piece of paper with a message scrawled in pen: ‘Trump = Hitler.’ A Democrat, he saw Mr Trump’s migrant detention camps as being like something from Nazi Germany. Neither man agreed on the President, nor his policies, nor the state of America today. Both had driven miles to protest what the other stood for.

But they did agree on one thing. Would Mr Trump win again in 2020? Both men said yes.

He’s identified rivals’ weak spots and given them nicknames