Trump's re-election strategy is all wrong — and his staffers know it

With just over 130 days remaining until the jury that is the American electorate renders a verdict on the previous 1,383 days of Donald Trump’s presidency, his campaign for reelection has backed itself into a corner.

The presumptive Democratic nominee, former Vice President Joe Biden, has opened up a national polling lead that a recent Fox News poll estimates could be as large as 12 percentage points among registered voters.

In the state-by-state polling that can forecast the winner of the Electoral College, Biden leads in nearly all the so-called battleground states (including Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.) He’s also polling within the margin of error in solidly Republican states like Arkansas, Iowa, Georgia, and Texas. And all these numbers came in before Americans saw how Donald Trump could only draw a paltry crowd of just 6,200 people in Tulsa, Oklahoma (after predicting an audience of millions in a state he carried with over 65 percent of the vote four years ago) to watch him deliver a rambling, disjointed speech to a mostly empty arena, outside of which a construction crew was breaking down an outdoor stage that the Trump campaign had built for overflow crowds who simply turned out not to exist.

For just under two hours, the President of the United States put on a show that The Recount editor-in-chief compared to an overweight, drugged-out Elvis Presley in his final years. And while Trump got the familiar cheers for all the familiar hits — attacks on “crooked Hillary,” Barack Obama, and “fake news,” plus “build the wall” and “lock her up” chants, complaints about so-called sanctuary cities and rants about NFL players kneeling during the national anthem — his attempts to introduce new material into his act generally fell flat.

Instead of making the case for his reelection — and against electing Biden — Trump spent most of the time attacking old enemies and airing grievances both old and new. At one point, he devoted a full 16 minutes to explaining why it was that he appeared to have serious trouble descending a ramp during an appearance at West Point the previous week. At another, he crossed from dog-whistles into out-and-out racism with an attack on Minnesota Representative Ilhan Omar, who, he said, “would like to make the government of our country just like the country from where she came, Somalia”.

Trump went on to lament that Omar, a sitting member of Congress who came to the US as a refugee after her family fled Somalia, is “telling us how to run our country”.

And to the extent he previewed his case against Biden, Trump largely stuck to the now-familiar claims that the former Vice President is too feeble or senile to lead the country — a claim which, judging from Biden’s seven-point lead in Florida, appears to be falling flat with senior citizens.

That Saturday’s trip to Tulsa was a disaster for Trump and a boost for Biden was not lost on members of the president’s team. When your intrepid correspondent texted a Trump campaign staffer to ask their opinion of the night’s events, the staffer replied: “Biden should have to report our costs to the [Federal Election Commission] as a campaign contribution”.

According to a report in Vanity Fair, Trump is now considering a campaign shake-up that would make a scapegoat of campaign manager Brad Parscale, the political neophyte who was his 2016 campaign’s digital director, and potentially elevate veteran Trumpworlders Bill Stepien and Jason Miller. And the Trump campaign is also doubling down on the “Biden is senile” messaging with a now-failed attempt to goad Biden into agreeing to add an extra debate to the three-night schedule of debates organized by a bipartisan commission.

But veterans of past presidential campaigns from both parties are not sure anything the campaign can do will make a difference at this point.

Stuart Stevens, the veteran GOP strategist who advised Mitt Romney’s 2012 campaign, said it won’t matter who is nominally in charge of the campaign because the only people Trump will ultimately listen to are his sons, his daughter, and his son-in-law, Jared Kushner.

“Trump is Tony Soprano: He's ultimately only gonna trust the family, and they have no idea what they’re doing,” Stevens said. “The whole campaign reminds me of somebody goes to a cocktail party, has some drinks, drives home safely, and decides that alcohol helps you drive.”

Stevens explained that Trump and his team have learned all the wrong lessons from his narrow 2016 victory.

“On a basic level, Trump won because he ran in a year in which a Republican could win with 46.1 percent of the vote, when third-party votes increased, and the non-white vote declined for the first time in 20 years. Trump has always had a very small margin that they took as a mandate and they never tried to expand their electorate,” he said, adding that the massive Black Lives Matter protests that have swept across the country could also be considered get-out-the-vote rallies for Biden, particularly since Trump is running as a “white grievance candidate”.

Trump’s Tulsa debacle, he said, shows the folly of running a campaign based more on mechanics — large rallies, data collection, digital metrics, turnout operations — than on message.

“It’s not that that stuff doesn’t matter, but it’s a lot less important than overall messaging,” he said, adding that Trump’s recent embrace of a “law and order” message in the mould of Richard Nixon is doomed to fail because the demographics of 2020 are not close to what they were in previous years.

“In 1980, Ronald Reagan wins a 44-state sweeping landslide, with 55 percent of the white vote, but in 2008, John McCain lost with 55 percent of the white vote. So it’s a very different country,” he said. “They're looking at the 1960’s model with Nixon, but Trump isn't Nixon, the country is different, and they seem unable to embrace that reality,” he went on, adding that it was unlikely that Trump would be able to attract any top-tier talent to replace Parscale or anyone else he might get rid of in a staff shake-up: “Why would you want to do that [work for Trump] — who has benefited from any association with Donald Trump? You're just being brought in there as a scapegoat.”

It’s unlikely that the campaign will succeed as long as Trump’s son-in-law remains involved, Stevens said: “Jared Kushner, maybe he'll reach 27 books on how to run campaigns instead of the 26 he read on the Mideast. As far as I know, he has singularly failed at everything he's attempted in government.”

Former Republican National Committee Chair Michael Steele said Trump’s campaign appears to relying on a message that activates the most partisan of his supporters by arguing that electing Biden — and Democrats in general — would be worse than anything that could happen during a second Trump term, but he cautioned that circumstances have undermined that message.

“Trump has been trying to ignite that passion that flame again, but the problem — the cold water on that — is Covid-19, a poor economy, and now, bad race relations,” he said. “None of these voters want to be sick. They've either lost a job or been furloughed, so they've been impacted by the economy, and none of them wants to be called a racist. So the narrative that Trump is trying to push is running up against a very hard reality, and that’s the great irony here, that reality is smacking up against the reality TV presidency.”

“You've got a 133-day window now,” he continued. “In politics, that's a lifetime… but the reality for the campaign is, given the way the President has refused to dial back the stuff that's drawing that's moving people off of him and dial back into things that could strengthen his hand, the window to turn things around keeps narrowing.”

Like Stevens, Steele said Trump and his team have learned all the wrong lessons from his narrow victory four years ago.

“Trump does not realize the source of his win in 2016, and does not fully appreciate that that election was less about him and more about Hillary, and now when given an opportunity to evaluate… his leadership, his temperament, his demeanor, and his policies… against a Joe Biden, they’re not afraid of Biden the way they were afraid of Hillary Clinton,” he said.

And as for the Trump campaign’s demands for an additional debate and their attempts to define Biden as a mentally deficient, debilitated shadow of a figure, Steele said such a strategy was not one devised by people who are operating in reality.

“They’re not working in a real world — they’re working in Trump's world, so everybody has to pretend that what the President is thinking and feeling about this is exactly how it is or how it's going to play out,” he said, adding that Biden would be “very well prepared” for this fall’s debates.

Former Deputy Assistant Secretary of State Philippe Reines, a longtime Hillary Clinton aide who played Trump during her 2016 debate preparations, called Trumpworld’s apparent hope that Biden would implode during debates “magical thinking with a Hail Mary,” and said that such a belief was ironic, given Trump’s tendency to damage himself every time he opens his mouth.

“I don't know why you would look at his primary performances and think people are going to be left with a bad taste in their mouth, because irrespective of how you want to grade his performances, he went on to win the nomination in resounding form,” he added.

Reines called the Trump campaign’s attempts to define Biden as senile and unfit as a “caricature” that “is not anywhere near reality,” and predicted that voters watching Biden and Trump side-by-side on a debate stage would come away with a favorable impression of Biden and questions about whether Trump was suffering from significant health issues.

“It's strange, given the particular vulnerabilities of Donald Trump and the particular strengths of Joe Biden, that they think putting [them side-by-side] somehow benefits Trump. If anything, it reinforces the very attributes and behavior that have created the problem he is in,” he said. “What Trump is suffering from, with every day that goes by, there are more and more people trusting their own two eyes. And maybe that's his own doing because he's told them not to trust anything and that's all they're left with, but in that calculus, Joe Biden is the winner.”

Steele, too, panned the idea that a single Biden gaffe made during a debate would somehow reverse Trump’s fortunes, noting that the reason Biden’s lead has been so consistent despite previous a reputation as a self-described “gaffe machine” is because people know and like him.

Biden, he said, is the uncle who everyone wants to be at Thanksgiving dinner, even if he might say some off-color or confusing things, while Trump is the uncle who everyone wants to leave after he shows up late and gets drunk.

“With Uncle Joe, they're like: ‘I'm glad he's here,’ but with Uncle Trump, it’s, ‘When does he go? When does he leave?’” he said. “So that’s the selection, and if you don't appreciate how that impacts the way voters look at this, you're going to make some dumb mistakes.”