OPINION:
In August 2020, the Trump campaign found itself with a staggering US$200 million budget shortfall. In September 2020, Brad Parscale, a senior adviser who had until recently served as campaign manager, had a public breakdown on the street in front of his house in Florida, and the police were called to restrain him. In the crucial last months of the race, campaign staff members kept Donald Trump away from their data guru, Matt Oczkowski, whom Trump found weird and boring. And by the final weeks of the campaign, the incumbent president was being outspent by as much as three to one — an unprecedented mismatch in the history of modern presidential races.
In the opinion of the many Trump insiders with whom I have spoken, including nearly all the top members of his campaign and West Wing staff, those few months laid bare the chaos at the heart of Trumpian politics, exposing Trump for what he is: not a model chief executive but an inattentive, lazy, incompetent manager whose defiance of convention and hot mess of a personality were saddling his campaign with a heavy disadvantage. The government can continue to function if a president isn’t on top of the details, but a presidential campaign is in trouble when a candidate can’t be bothered with the game plan and is dismissive of the people trying to stick to it. And while Trump won his first campaign and lost the second by only a relatively slim margin in just a few key states, that was in spite of the calamity that surrounded him.
The path to his 2024 declaration has been a characteristic prelude to the burden he imposes on a campaign. His close circle first believed he had signed off on plans for an announcement in early summer, which was seen as the best opportunity to frame the investigations proceeding against him as inherently political, stop the advancing prospects of Governor Ron DeSantis and seek an early consolidation of the Republican Party behind Trump. But that time passed without any action or explanation from the prospective candidate. New dates were rumoured to be set, and missed, throughout the summer and early fall, first, according to one aide, to distract from the Mar-a-Lago documents search and then to position him to claim as his own the red wave he believed was coming.
At the same time, though, there was never any doubt that he would run. “He would put his head down and die if another Republican became the king,” the aide told me. In long rambling calls and meetings with aides and friends, Trump never considered a different avenue for himself. At the same time, he made little effort to assemble a team and organisation. His most reliable political handlers — among them Jared Kushner, Stephen Miller, Jason Miller and Kayleigh McEnany — were pursuing their own interests. Even Donald Trump Jr. was staying mostly on the sidelines. No new team had clearly emerged. Boris Epshteyn, a persistent Trump hanger-on who never quite made it into the White House and who became involved in Rudy Giuliani’s ludicrous legal efforts to overturn the 2020 election, is one of the few people now front and centre in the incipient campaign — a portent of the kind of talent that might fill the West Wing in a Trump restoration.
