With the coronavirus death toll surpassing 80,000 and the unemployment rate at Great Depression-era levels, there is a growing consensus among senior Republicans that Donald Trump’s reelection is slipping away. Recent internal polls show Trump trailing Joe Biden in six swing states, a data point that augurs a landslide loss in November. “The swing state polls are horrific,” a prominent Republican briefed on the numbers told me. The White House’s COVID-19 outbreak is only the latest headline that reinforces the narrative that Trump can’t get control of the pandemic. “This is what should worry the campaign: Biden is in his basement and he’s beating Trump,” a former West Wing staffer told me. “If I were Biden, the lesson I would learn is: Shut the fuck up and let Trump go out there and destroy himself.”
Seeking to change the trajectory of the race, Trump is now discussing a shake-up to his campaign leadership, three sources close to the White House told me. Two sources said Trump has told people he wants to install 2016 campaign manager Corey Lewandowski in a senior role. “Trump’s feeling is, ‘why are we losing everywhere?’ The president is sick of it,” another former West Wing official said. According to a source, Lewandowski has told Trump that the RNC doesn’t grasp how dire the polls are. “Corey thinks the GOP isn’t solid on fundamentals. He says the campaign and the party spend time sending out press releases bragging about how well they’re doing,” the former official said. (Tim Murtaugh, communications director for the Trump campaign, said in an email, “literally none of this is true.”)
Trump’s interest in Lewandowski has sparked conflict with Jared Kushner, two sources said. “There’s a battle over personnel,” a former West Wing official said. Kushner is strongly opposed to Lewandowski joining the campaign, sources said. Kushner led the effort to force out Lewandowski in 2016, and has since successfully kept Lewandowski on the outer edge of Trump’s orbit. According to two sources, Kushner is trying to recruit Mike Pence’s former chief of staff Nick Ayers to take a senior campaign role. In 2018, Kushner recruited Ayers to replace John Kelly as Trump’s chief of staff. Ayers turned down the offer, and sources said he has no interest in joining the Trump campaign. One person close to Ayers told me he’s aligning himself with Nikki Haley to lead her potential 2024 campaign. “He views Haley as the right train to be on,” the source said.
(Ayers did not respond to a request for comment.)
Trump and campaign manager Brad Parscale’s relationship has been fraying for weeks, sources said. Trump was said to be annoyed last month about a largely positive profile of Parscale in the New York Times Magazine. Trump had already been irked by Parscale because of the talk that Parscale, a former website designer from San Antonio, had made millions of dollars through his companies from Trump’s campaigns and bought a Ferrari. “The money is the biggest issue for Trump,” a former West Wing official said. A few days before the Times Magazine piece was published, Trump called Parscale and reportedly threatened to sue him for the campaign’s weak poll numbers. According to a source briefed on the widely reported call, Parscale told Trump to blame the campaign’s struggle on Kushner. “Brad said, ‘Blame the people Jared brought in,’” the source said. (Parscale did not respond to a request for comment.)
As Trump debates who should lead his campaign, he’s also struggling to settle on a 2020 strategy. Some advisers are lobbying Trump to embrace the reopening. “They’re going to gamble on the economy and hope it works,” a former West Wing official said. But another camp is pushing the view that Trump should run on a blame-China message. On top of everything, there is also fear in Trumpworld that Senate Republicans might finally break from him if the polls get bad enough. “The numbers are fucking terrible,” another former West Wing official said. “There’s massive anxiety in the GOP that he’s gonna take them all down with him.”
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