Inside
Donald Trump’s Meltdown
Alex Altman
@aaltman82 Philip Elliott @Philip_Elliott Zeke J Miller @ZekeJMiller
Donald
Trump's sinking polls, unending attacks and public blunders have the
GOP reconsidering its strategy for November
When Donald Trump
mucks things up, the first person to let him know is usually
Republican Party boss Reince Priebus. Almost every day, Trump picks
up his cell phone to find Priebus on the line, urging him to quash
some feud or clarify an incendiary remark.
The Wisconsin lawyer
has been a dutiful sherpa to the Manhattan developer, guiding him
through the dizzying altitude of the presidential race and lobbying
the GOP to unite behind a figure who threatens its future.
But every bond has
its breaking point. For this partnership, the moment nearly arrived
in early August. Priebus was on vacation when he learned that Trump
had declined to endorse Paul Ryan, the Speaker of the House and a
close friend. The chairman had a frank message for the nominee,
according to two Republican officials briefed on the call. Priebus
told Trump that internal GOP polling suggested he was on track to
lose the election. And if Trump didn’t turn around his campaign
over the coming weeks, the Republican National Committee would
consider redirecting party resources and machinery to House and
Senate races.
Trump denies the
exchange ever took place. “Reince Priebus is a terrific guy,”
Trump told TIME. “He never said that.” Priebus could not be
reached for comment. But whatever the exact words spoken on the
phone, there is no doubt that the possibility Republicans will all
but abandon Trump now haunts his struggling campaign.
Since his convention
in Cleveland, Trump has done almost nothing right by traditional
standards. He has picked fights with senior Republicans and Gold Star
parents, invited Russian spies to meddle in U.S. democracy, appeared
to joke about gun enthusiasts’ prematurely removing a U.S.
President from office. He’s shuffled campaign messages like playing
cards and left GOP elders fretting that he lacks the judgment to be
Commander in Chief. During a dismal two-week stretch, he surrendered
a narrow lead over Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton and now trails
by an average of 8 points in recent nationwide polls.
Trump has overcome
rough patches before. But with fewer than 90 days until Nov. 8, he
now faces a reckoning. There are daunting demographics to surmount.
Allies complain of massive staff shortages in battleground states.
And voters are skeptical of a billionaire reality star who seems to
study the rules of campaigning only so he can break them.
Then there are the
challenges entirely of Trump’s own making. More than three months
after he effectively clinched the Republican nomination, he has yet
to settle on a strategy to match the demands of a broader electorate.
In an interview with TIME on Aug. 9, the improvisational candidate
sounded torn between conflicting pieces of advice, unsure of how much
to hold back and when to let loose. “I am now listening to people
that are telling me to be easier, nicer, be softer. And you know,
that’s O.K., and I’m doing that,” he says. “Personally, I
don’t know if that’s what the country wants.”
Polls show that
Trump has failed to grasp one of the essential truths about this
extraordinary contest: in a race between the two most unpopular
major-party nominees in modern history, it’s in each campaign’s
interest to train the spotlight on the other. Clinton wants the race
to be about Trump. Which is what the publicity-addled Republican
wants too. And why not? It worked for him in the Republican
primaries. “I got 14 million votes and won most of the states,”
he boasts. “I’m liking the way I ran in the primaries better.”
But the general
election will likely be decided by groups of voters who are rarely
among the cheering throngs at his rallies. This is a fact that Trump
is only now starting to confront. “I don’t know why we’re not
leading by a lot,” he admitted to a crowd of thousands in
Jacksonville, Fla., on Aug. 3. One reason is that he’s getting
crushed by minority voting blocs that Republican strategists have
suggested courting, such as blacks, Hispanics and young women.
Ask him about these
struggles and the braggadocio fades to fatalism. “All I can do is
tell the truth,” he says. “If that does it, that’s great. And
if that doesn’t do it, that’s fine too.” Even the best salesman
must bow to the realities of the marketplace.
The trouble started
before Trump even left Cleveland. Twelve hours after accepting his
party’s nomination, he arrived in a half-empty hotel ballroom for a
victory lap. It was a chance to thank supporters and bask in the
previous night’s afterglow. Free’s “All Right Now” echoed
through the speakers. And then, as Priebus’ team watched live from
their hotel a few blocks away, everything went wrong.
Two evenings before,
Trump had crushed the last vestiges of Republican opposition,
orchestrating an outburst of boos as Senator Ted Cruz of Texas
delivered the ultimate snub: refusing to endorse his onetime rival.
But for Trump, that victory wasn’t enough. Rather than mend fences,
he told fans he didn’t want the GOP runner-up’s endorsement and
might bankroll a super PAC to kill Cruz’s career. Apropos of
nothing, he revived a dormant controversy involving an unflattering
picture of the Texan’s wife, boudoir shots of Trump’s and a tiny
super PAC that no longer exists. He once again linked Cruz’s father
to the Kennedy assassination, a false conspiracy fed by a 50-year-old
photo published in a supermarket tabloid. For good measure, Trump
fired a parting shot at Ohio Governor John Kasich, another vanquished
rival whose political machine could provide a boost in a critical
swing state.
The riot of
recrimination was a vivid reminder that some of Trump’s worst
traits as a candidate–paper-thin skin, an absence of discipline, a
bottomless capacity to nurse grudges–are not going away.
Republicans waiting for the long-promised presidential pivot seemed
like characters in a Beckett play, trapped in Trump’s theater of
the absurd.
As Democrats hurled
criticism during their convention, Trump tried to compete with press
conferences. But his counterprogramming verged on the bizarre. In a
striking breach of protocol, he urged Russia on July 27 to hack
Clinton’s emails. “Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you’re
able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing,” Trump said,
essentially urging a geopolitical adversary to commit espionage
against his opponent. Establishment-minded Republicans phoned one
another. Was this really happening?
The next night, a
Virginia lawyer named Khizr Khan stepped to the microphone in
Philadelphia. The Pakistani émigré turned American citizen spoke of
his son Humayun, a U.S. Army captain killed by a suicide bomber in
Iraq in 2004. “If it was up to Donald Trump,” he thundered, his
son “never would have been in America.” Brandishing a pocket-size
copy of the Constitution, he addressed Trump directly: “You have
sacrificed nothing and no one.”
The return volley
was predictable. Trump seemed to question whether Khan’s wife
Ghazala, who had stood silently alongside her husband, was barred
from speaking because of her religion. “It’s Queens,” one
Republican operative mused, invoking Trump’s birthplace. “If they
hit you, you hit back.” A stirring moment became a multiday feud.
And Trump lost. More than 70% of respondents in a Washington Post/ABC
News poll said they disapproved of his handling of the dispute,
including 59% of Republicans. The emergence of the Muslim parents,
blistering Trump’s policies through the scrim of their own
patriotism, was more than karmic irony. It was strategic success. A
hook had been dangled by the Clinton campaign that he could not help
but bite.
Trump goes with his
gut, and when his instincts betray him, no one can rein him in. “No
one puts words in his mouth, and nobody decides what he says other
than him,” says longtime adviser Roger Stone. “Politics is
nine-tenths discipline.”
For party officials,
the Trump campaign has become like the sign inside factories: X days
without an accident, with the tally regularly resetting to zero. “I
think what he wants to do and what he does do are two different
things,” says another senior GOP official.
And so more missteps
followed. The campaign announced a 13-member economic advisory
council with zero women and just three trained economists. The
self-styled law-and-order candidate attacked fire marshals for
turning away supporters when his venues hit capacity. At a rally, he
described watching a U.S. plane deliver $400 million in cash to Iran
in exchange for the release of American hostages. Trump’s own
campaign acknowledged that he was wrong; it was footage of the
prisoners being freed in Geneva. The candidate repeated the canard
anyway, goaded by an audience that bought the story.
When a chorus of
criticism rained down from Republicans, Trump lashed back. He slammed
Senators John McCain of Arizona, the party’s 2008 nominee, and
Kelly Ayotte of New Hampshire. Both are incumbents locked in tight
re-election races. He trolled Ryan a week before the House Speaker’s
contentious primary, withholding an endorsement in nearly the same
language Ryan had once deployed against him. “I’m not quite there
yet,” Trump said coyly.
For Republicans
loyal to the party but scornful of their nominee, the Trump campaign
was increasingly becoming a moral conundrum. As if to goad them,
Trump even began to call the integrity of the American democratic
process into question. “I’m afraid the election is going to be
rigged,” he said in Ohio. “I have to be honest.”
On Aug. 9 in North
Carolina, he appeared to go even further. In an errant aside, he said
the only remedy to a more liberal Supreme Court under a President
Clinton would be Second Amendment supporters. “If she gets to pick
her judges, nothing you can do, folks,” Trump said, before shifting
his tone. “Although the Second Amendment people, maybe there is, I
don’t know.” Critics pounced, saying those words could spur a
fanatic to endanger Clinton’s life. The Secret Service, which
investigates threats against its protectees, said it was aware of the
remark. Trump responded by arguing that he was simply encouraging
activists to exercise their political power at the polls and blamed
the press for misinterpreting his words. Ryan, the highest-ranking
elected Republican, said it sounded like”a joke gone bad.”
At Clinton
headquarters in Brooklyn, aides still nursing scars from skirmishes
with Bernie Sanders marveled at their good fortune. As in all
campaigns, researchers watch every public event, read every
interview, archive every tweet. “On other campaigns, we would have
to scrounge for crumbs,” says a senior Clinton adviser. “Here,
it’s a fire hose. He can set himself on fire at breakfast, kill a
nun at lunch and waterboard a puppy in the afternoon. And that
doesn’t even get us to prime time.”
Republicans began to
openly wonder whether Trump could be trusted with the nation’s
nuclear arsenal. Sensing an opportunity to pounce, Barack Obama
declared Trump “woefully unprepared” for the presidency during an
East Room press conference. Hank Paulson, a former Bush Treasury
Secretary, said Trump had led “a populist hijacking of one of the
United States’ great political parties.” Fifty Republicans with
deep experience in national security signed a letter opposing him. A
steady stream of Republican operatives and members of Congress,
including Senator Susan Collins of Maine, announced that they could
not vote for Trump either.
“This was a
terrible week, and it kept going from bad to worse,” says veteran
Republican consultant Scott Reed, who ran Bob Dole’s 1996 campaign.
“He’s got to stop picking fights and settling scores.”
With their candidate
mired in self-sabotage, Republicans could only watch and wince. “I
don’t think we’ve seen anything like this since George Wallace,”
said retail mogul Art Pope. Sitting at a lakeside hotel in the
Colorado Rockies on July 31, the conservative megadonor wondered how
his party had wound up cowering in fear of the latest tweet from a
former reality star. “My concern is Donald Trump will depress the
Republican vote and hurt down-ballot candidates,” said Pope, a
close ally of North Carolina Governor Pat McCrory. “We’re going
to lose races because of him. I just hope it’s not all lost.”
Republicans groan
that the difficult task of keeping their Senate majority gets tougher
with each outré remark. Which is why the RNC is considering shifting
some cash and staff away from the presidential race and toward
down-ballot contests. That plan is already in motion among powerful
outside groups that typically spend hundreds of millions of dollars
on behalf of the party nominee. “There’s going to have to be some
resource reallocation,” says a senior Republican official familiar
with internal party deliberations. A second senior party official
routinely instructs Senate campaign managers to distance their
candidates from Trump. “Don’t worry about the appearances,” the
official said on a recent conference call. “Worry about winning.”
That explains why
Republicans running for office this year don’t meet Trump’s plane
at airports or introduce him at rallies. In some places, the
avoidance strategy seems to be working. Senator Pat Toomey is in a
statistical tie in his re-election bid in Pennsylvania, a state where
Trump trails by about 10 points. In the key swing state of Florida,
Senator Marco Rubio is running ahead in his re-election bid even as
Trump narrowly trails Clinton. But in New Hampshire, Trump’s
troubles may be dragging down Ayotte, who plummeted from a virtual
tie to 10 points down in a recent poll.
On calls with Senate
campaign donors, Trump often comes up, as moneymen probe for details
on coordination with the top of the ticket. “What Trump campaign?”
one swing-state Senate campaign manager snapped at a volunteer
recently. “We have more offices than they do.”
Internal and public
polling suggests that the party will see record numbers of
split-ticket voters who shun Trump but remain open to supporting
vulnerable congressional candidates. Traditionally, these voters
would be among the last targets for the party’s get-out-the-vote
effort. But that might change if Trump’s poll numbers remain
moribund. That’s why Priebus told the nominee that the RNC would
soon decide which voters to prioritize. Trump, who is helping the
party collect cash, is mystified by this account. “Why would they
state that when I’m raising millions of dollars for them?” he
asked TIME.
Like the rest of the
party, Trump’s staff has been flummoxed by his political naiveté.
They describe a candidate who doesn’t understand the basics of
modern campaigns, from why you knock on doors to how to read a poll
to why he should be dialing for dollars more aggressively. His
headquarters has enough palace intrigue and warring fiefs to rival
the fictional badlands of Westeros. “You’re always afraid of
getting fired,” says one staffer, “but it’s his fault, not
ours.”
These staff members
are still cashing checks but have begun to lose faith that their boss
can or should win the top prize in American politics. Most highly
regarded Republican operatives have stayed away from the campaign,
wary of being blackballed for future gigs. “If someone applied for
a job and brought in a résumé that had Trump 2016 on it,” says a
GOP fundraising consultant, “I wouldn’t give them an interview.”
But if many
republicans are urging a more measured approach, still others preach
confrontation as the surest path to victory. In early August, Trump
traveled with Priebus to the tony island of Nantucket, off the
Massachusetts coast. At an $800,000 fundraiser, he hobnobbed inside a
steamy home filled with donors who wrote checks of $50,000 or more.
Over and over, they pressed Trump to “take the gloves off” and
attack Clinton as well as Republicans who won’t fall in line. His
response, related by an attendee: “Reince tells me not to.”
Trump still has
reasons to be bullish. For starters, roughly two-thirds of poll
respondents don’t believe his opponent is honest or trustworthy.
There’s no predicting what outside forces could intrude: another
batch of leaked emails, a terrorist attack, a blow to the economy.
Trump’s team frames the election as a choice between continuity and
change, and change–even Trump’s radical variety–usually wins
out. Conservative critics are finding ways to justify their vote for
him. Some cite the stakes. “Forty years of Supreme Court Justices
are going to be determined this November,” says Senator Cory
Gardner, a Colorado Republican who has not formally endorsed Trump.
Trump himself appreciates the power of that argument. “You have no
choice,” he told doubters at his Cleveland press conference.
“You’ve got to go for Trump. Supreme Court.”
If his position is
precarious, even his fiercest critics believe it’s too early to
write him off. There are signs Trump is trying to change. During an
economic speech in Detroit, he ignored more than a dozen protesters
and delivered a game impersonation of a conventional Republican. He
is teeing up his first televised ad campaign of the general election
in the coming weeks. “They’ve spent $240 million on ads,” Trump
says, dramatically overstating the advertising spending on behalf of
Clinton. “I’ve spent nothing. Zero. Purposely.” He didn’t
think he needed to. Polls disagree.
History suggests
that 8-point leads in August can melt like ice cream in the heat. Al
Gore was down by that margin in August 2000 and came back to win the
popular vote. In 1988, George H.W. Bush rebounded from a similar
deficit to win the White House. Over the coming weeks, Clinton’s
convention bounce may dissipate.
The debates in the
fall will provide Trump an opportunity to change his public
perception. Trump told TIME he would “absolutely” debate Clinton
three times as scheduled but, ever the wily foe, suggested that he
might try to renegotiate the terms. Clinton’s unforced errors and
defensive crouch have only magnified voters’ distrust. But most
seasoned Republicans are far from optimistic about Trump’s chances.
“It’s hard to say I’ve given up hope,” says a party official.
“But I have yet to see evidence of anything else.”
Trump has made a
sport of defying prediction, party orthodoxy and political gravity.
He thinks he’s on to something he alone can see, and if he is
right, it wouldn’t be the first time. For a candidate who has
staked his campaign on a pessimistic vision of the nation, he still
manages to summon a sense of optimism despite the darkening polls. “I
actually think we’re doing better,” Trump says. “I may be
wrong, but I think we’re doing much better than anybody
understands.”
This appears in the
August 22, 2016 issue of TIME.
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