Trump campaign, struggling in the polls, aims for comeback

Washington — For weeks, President Donald Trump’s campaign aides have fretted about whether he could draw a major crowd to an outdoor venue Saturday night in Portsmouth, N.H., or if not, whether they could stage the event to make it look full.

The danger, all agreed, was a repeat of Trump’s disastrous last rally, three weeks ago in Tulsa, Okla., where TV cameras showed two- thirds of the indoor arena as a sea of empty blue seats, and the vast throngs predicted outside failed to materialize.

Worse, health officials later said the president’s Tulsa rally “likely contributed” to a sharp spike in coronavirus infections in the state, one of three dozen now battling a record increase in COVID-19 cases.

On Friday, the White House abruptly pulled the plug on the planned New Hampshire rally, citing weather worries even though the forecast showed morning thunderstorms mostly clearing by the evening. Aides said it would be rescheduled.

The decision reflects the growing nervousness in Trump’s campaign, which is desperate to avoid another embarrassment as his prospects for a second term dim. The struggle to stage the giant raucous rallies that propelled

Trump’s 2016 run makes clear just how difficult his second campaign has become.

Even before the rally was scrubbed, there was little of the hype that preceded Tulsa, far less talk about a triumphant return to the campaign trail or an aggressive relaunch of a reelection bid that ran aground once the economy tanked this spring as COVID-19 spread from state to state and Trump’s response was widely seen as lacking.

“People recognize there’s been a rough patch and it’s been a challenging month or so,” said one former administration official with ties to the campaign. “That rally in Tulsa did not go well by any stretch, by any measure.”

While rumors still swirl about a looming staff shake-up, those involved in the reelection effort are increasingly resigned to getting behind their often self-destructive candidate, according to interviews with numerous people involved in the campaign who spoke on the condition of anonymity.

They are pinning their hopes on the possibility that Trump or the broader political and economic environment will somehow change in the next four months and that the magic of 2016, when Trump eked out a narrow win at the wire, will repeat itself in his face-off against Joe Biden.

“We were in dire straits in early October and mid-October” in 2016, then Trump “ran the script beautifully” in the final weeks, another Trump campaign official said.

Claiming that a reopening of schools and businesses will boost confidence in Trump’s leadership, the official added, “Everybody is concerned but way more optimistic than they were a month ago. If you can win each day, that’s kind of what we need to get back to.”

That may be a tall order for Trump, who has bitterly complained that he is a victim of the coronavirus crisis, portraying the worsening contagion as more as a threat to his campaign than to the country.

A record 63,000 new U. S. cases were reported Thursday, pushing the total to above 3.1 million. Researchers recently upped their projections of the likely U.S. death toll from 160,000 to more than 200,000 by Election Day, the worst by far of any country in the world.

“He bungled the virus response, and he doesn’t want to deal with it anymore,” said

Ed Rollins, a veteran of several GOP presidential campaigns. “He needs someone on his campaign who is really in charge and can dictate the strategy and message to the candidate.”

In 2016, Trump shook up his campaign twice. After he emerged as the likely GOP nominee, Trump brought on veteran GOP consultant Paul Manafort to stabilize his barebones operation through a potential delegate fight and the Republican National Convention.

He later replaced Manafort with Steve Bannon and Kellyanne Conway to sharpen his message over the final months. (Manafort was later convicted of multiple tax and bank fraud charges; he was recently moved to home confinement due to the COVID-19 threat in prison.)

Neither Bannon nor Conway is officially involved in the reelection campaign, which is steered primarily by Trump’s son- in- law, Jared Kushner, who continues to serve as a senior White House adviser.

Bannon, a fiery nationalist whom Trump fired six months after he took office, has been slowly working his way back as an informal adviser and has been in touch with the president in recent weeks about strategy. But a formal campaign role is unlikely, aides said.

“He can influence the president’s thinking without being part of the campaign,” one official explained, noting that Trump is loath to allow Bannon to be viewed as a leading intellectual force in the campaign, as he was four years ago. “The Svengali stuff doesn’t play well with Trump, so that hurt him.”

Brad Parscale, whom Kushner had picked as campaign manager in 2018, has “been sort of pushed aside” and has resumed his narrower 2016 role, running the data operation while Kushner oversees strategy, one campaign official said.

Trump’s campaign maintained that Parscale remains in charge. “President Trump has built a formidable campaign, and additions to the team have only fortified Brad Parscale’s leadership,” said Tim Murtaugh, the campaign’s communications director.

“As we enter the home stretch, we look forward to defining Joe Biden by his half- century of failure in Washington, his dismal record on the economy, and plans to raise taxes and enforce crippling regulations on job creators,” he said.

Kushner’s and Trump’s adult children were behind every campaign shakeup in 2016. Changing the lineup may be harder this time.

“Who within this family is going to say ‘Fire Jared’?” one former Trump staffer asked. “It’s just not likely he’s going anywhere.”

Multiple advisers expressed frustration that Trump continues to undercut his own progress, grumbling about how Trump’s tweet last weekend demanding that Black NASCAR driver Bubba Wallace “apologize” for his response after a noose was found in his garage blunted any positive momentum generated by a speech days earlier at Mount Rushmore, where he positioned himself as a defender of history — Confederate monuments and all — against a “radical” movement dedicated to a “cancel culture.”

Even though Trump’s responses to the coronavirus outbreak and to the mass protests after the death of George Floyd in police custody in Minneapolis cost him support, the president and some advisers believe his staunch defense of “law and order” and blunt demands that schools reopen despite the coronavirus will win some suburban voters back.

“He bungled the virus response, and he doesn’t want to deal with it anymore. He needs someone on his campaign who is really in charge and can dictate the strategy and message to the candidate.”

ED ROLLINS

A VETERAN OF SEVERAL GOP PRESIDENTIAL CAMPAIGNS