The Patriot Post® · Yellow Flags in the Trump Campaign
Donald Trump shattered all variety of political predictions and won the Republican primaries by simply being a force of nature. He figures to win the White House the same way, but politics has some forces of its own, as the presumptive and presumptuous GOP nominee is finding out.
Trump could have opened this week dealing blows to Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama over their crass exploitation of Orlando for gun control or their politically correct refusal to acknowledge the Islamist threat. Instead, Trump’s campaign opened the week with a double whammy that included the firing of his campaign manager Corey Lewandowski and a May fundraising report that shows the Trump machine in dire financial straits.
How dire? According to the numbers submitted to the Federal Election Commission, Trump’s campaign raised $3.1 million during the month of May. Even worse, it has just $1.3 million in cash on hand, and that is only due to a loan made by the candidate himself. Compare that to Clinton’s May report, which puts her campaign at $28 million raised and $41 million on hand. It’s evident that Trump is going to have to do a lot better on the fundraising front, but more on that in a moment.
First, let’s look at the train wreck that has been Trump’s campaign management. Lewandowski’s “let Trump be Trump” strategy allowed the candidate to shoot himself in the foot so many times that it’s a wonder Trump can still walk. While Lewandowski certainly can’t be blamed for every Trumpism that tumbled out of The Donald’s mouth, his lackadaisical handling of basic campaign mechanics has put the presumptive GOP nominee in a very uncomfortable position.
Trump has not put together any ground game in crucial swing states, allowing Clinton to take the lead in media ad buys and setting up field operations. He has waffled back and forth between announcing that he was going to “go it alone” without coordinating with the RNC, then saying that he was going to leave swing-state planning to the national Republican party.
This lack of strategy was symptomatic of Lewandowski’s campaign leadership. Rather than corralling his candidate and developing a game plan, he let himself be the yes-man, convinced like Trump that everything would just magically come together like it did in the primaries. But the general election is a different contest entirely, and Trump has seemingly squandered the first crucial weeks.
In May 2012, Mitt Romney raised $86 million and pledged $38 million in media buys for the month of June. (To be sure, Romney’s own poor campaign strategy cost him a very winnable election.) This year, Clinton has pledged $20 million in media buys over the next few weeks, and Trump has pledged … zero. Trump may be running an unorthodox campaign that transcends traditional politics, but the complete absence from the ad market is puzzling. He’s allowing Clinton and her Leftmedia super PAC to set the tone unchallenged.
May 2016 should have been a free month for Trump to mount his broadside against an incredibly weak Democrat opponent. He had conquered his Republican rivals while the Democrats continued to brawl it out. He could have set up field operations; instead entire states have no campaign presence. He could have laid out a media strategy; instead there is only the earned media he has received through his own entertaining bombast.
Trump’s campaign will live to fight on thanks to the intervention of his children and new campaign boss Pal Manafort. But there are some serious corrections that need to be made. It is never a good sign when the presidential candidate ranks behind 76 House Republicans in campaign fundraising.
Trump will also have to reconcile with his supporters just how he plans to fund his campaign. Charles Krauthammer put it this way: “The one thing that is interesting and paradoxical — and that would be a problem for any other ordinary candidate — is that he did campaign very strongly and very aggressively against his competitors in the primary for being owned lock, stock and barrel by the people they took money from. And here he is going around cup in hand trying to raise money from donors and complaining that he’s not getting enough.”
Maybe he won’t actually try to step up his fundraising game, though. “I think I could spend $50, $60, $70 million of my own money and run a wonderful campaign,” he says. But there have long been questions about whether he has vastly overstated his personal wealth, meaning that he will not be able to self-fund his campaign as he claimed.
And if he keeps paying out company staff and making repayable loans to his own campaign, he is not going to fill potential donors with any confidence as to his commitment or his future.
The other option is public financing. But again, money didn’t help John McCain or Mitt Romney. Money doesn’t hurt, but it’s the candidate and the campaign approach that matter most.
In any case, Donald Trump is full of surprises. And we have surely not seen the last of them.