O VOO DO CORVO

 

Trump Tries a New Campaign Tack: Small-Scale

 

At two events on Saturday, Donald J. Trump embraced more traditional campaigning as he struggles to maintain support for his third White House bid.

 

By Michael C. Bender and Mei-Ling McNamara

Jan. 28, 2023

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/28/us/politics/trump-campaign-events.html

 

COLUMBIA, S.C. — Donald J. Trump campaigned during his first presidential race in a distinctly audacious style, giving free helicopter rides to children at the Iowa State Fair and using his Trump-branded 757 jetliner as an event backdrop.

 

He rolled out a second campaign in equally unusual fashion, filing re-election paperwork on the same day as his inauguration and holding 10 signature mega-rallies before the end of his first year in office.

 

For his third campaign, it’s back to basics — for the first time.

 

More than two months after formally opening his White House comeback bid, the 76-year-old former president held his first two public events on Saturday. Both were the type of textbook campaign stops he mostly skipped in his first two runs for office.

 

In New Hampshire, Mr. Trump spoke in a high school auditorium in Salem, where he addressed an annual state party meeting. In South Carolina, where he has previously attracted thousands to rallies, Mr. Trump introduced his state leadership team at the State Capitol, an extraordinary setting for a politician known for upsetting the establishment and taking direct aim at longstanding public institutions.

 

But while the settings were new, his speeches carried a typically Trumpian timbre.

 

He mocked President Biden for losing New Hampshire’s Democratic primary in February 2020, and ignored that Mr. Biden defeated Mr. Trump in the state’s general election nine months later. He disputed that electric cars were environmentally friendly and declared windmills a threat to the nation’s prairies, oceans and birds.

 

Mr. Trump framed his candidacy as a shield for the country from communism and Marxism and vowed to keep transgender athletes out of women’s sports. He falsely claimed that his administration had been on pace to eliminate the national debt — it grew by about $7.8 trillion during his administration and now stands at $31 trillion — and promised an economic plan that would rely mostly on tax cuts.

 

“I am more angry now and I am more committed now than ever,” Mr. Trump said in New Hampshire.

 

Mr. Trump’s attempt to drape himself with the trappings of a traditional campaign is an unspoken acknowledgment that he begins the race in one of the most politically vulnerable positions of his public life. He remains the clear front-runner for the Republican presidential nomination, yet the solidity of his support seems increasingly in doubt.

 

Longtime donors have been reluctant to recommit. Leaders in the Republican National Committee are openly encouraging other candidates to run. Voters rejected the handpicked candidates he vowed would win Republicans control of the Senate, but whose losses instead left the chamber in Democratic hands.

 

“There’s no question former President Trump has lost some people — independents, some people in his base — so he’s got to come out of the gate slowly,” said Jim Renacci, a former Ohio congressman and a Trump acolyte. “He’s got to work to get them back.”

 

Mr. Renacci provided one of Mr. Trump’s earliest endorsements in the 2016 campaign. But he said he was waiting to see how the rest of the Republican field took shape before deciding on whom to back for the 2024 nomination.

 

Since announcing his campaign in November, Mr. Trump has spent much of the past two months out of the public eye. He has spoken at private events, worked behind the scenes to help House Speaker Kevin McCarthy win his leadership position and maintained an aggressive schedule on the golf course.

 

And he has been busy doing something that’s yet another sign he’s eager to embrace a new tack: policy videos.

 

Over the past six weeks on his social media platform, Truth Social, Mr. Trump has been posting videos about his policy positions, including plans to protect Social Security and Medicare and ban Chinese citizens from owning U.S. farmland or telecommunications, energy, technology or medical supply companies. The videos, in which the former president speaks directly to the camera, are aimed at reassuring supporters that he’s focused on topics other than his 2020 defeat, an issue that flopped with midterm voters.

 

Still, old habits die hard. Within three minutes of beginning his speech in New Hampshire, he falsely claimed he had won his last race.

 

 

Mr. Trump’s fixation on the 2020 election has been one reason that he has had trouble attracting top-dollar backing. His past campaigns largely relied on small online donations but, at the start of his third race, he has shed support from some deep-pocketed donors and struggled to secure commitments from others.

 

In recent weeks, two longtime Republican financiers — Bernie Marcus, the Home Depot founder, and Miriam Adelson, a physician and philanthropist and the widow of Sheldon Adelson, the casino magnate — have not committed to matching their previous financial support for his campaigns, according to people familiar with the discussions who insisted on anonymity to speak about private conversations.

 

A spokesman for Ms. Adelson said she was planning to sit out the Republican primary.

 

Still, Mr. Trump maintains his perch as the most powerful Republican. An Emerson College poll this week showed Mr. Trump with support from 55 percent of primary voters, nearly twice as much as his closest competitor, Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, in a hypothetical matchup. The same poll showed Mr. Trump in a statistical tie against Mr. Biden in a potential rematch next year.

 

“The campaign is firing on all cylinders and continues to build up an operation that will be unmatched,” Steven Cheung, Mr. Trump’s campaign spokesman, said in a statement. “President Trump’s significant lead in poll after poll shows that there is no other candidate who can even come close to matching the enthusiasm and excitement of him returning to the White House.”

 

In November and December, Mr. Trump’s standing among Republicans dipped in public opinion polls after he failed to help deliver the “red wave” he had promised voters in the midterm elections. He was also roundly criticized after hosting a private dinner with Kanye West, who has been denounced for making antisemitic statements, and Nick Fuentes, an outspoken antisemite and prominent young white supremacist.

 

Mr. Trump was stunned by the criticism over the dinner, particularly that from close advisers, according to people familiar with the conversations.

 

The biggest risk to Mr. Trump’s campaign may not be political so much as legal: the five criminal and civil investigations targeting both his conduct before he was a candidate in 2016 and his efforts to thwart the peaceful transfer of power after he lost in November 2020.

 

But Mr. Trump must also reassure Republicans that he can win over general election voters.

 

Republicans have struggled through three disappointing election cycles with Mr. Trump as the face of the party — a situation the party has been unwilling to confront, or even fully examine.

 

Wavering support from some of the nation’s evangelical leaders — whose congregants provided crucial backing to Mr. Trump in his ascent to the White House — has raised the possibility of a tectonic shift in Republican politics.

 

Many members of the Republican National Committee — activists who shape the party's direction, including many who won seats during the Trump administration — have been unwilling to support the former president’s third bid. Interviews with 59 of the R.N.C.’s 168 members revealed dozens who said Mr. Trump should not be the party’s nominee, who preferred a big field or who declined to state their position on the former president. Only four of those 59 offered unabashed endorsements of his third campaign.

 

And in South Carolina on Saturday, Mr. Trump’s leadership team was missing some the state’s most prominent politicians: former Gov. Nikki Haley, Senator Tim Scott. and former Representative Mick Mulvaney, who was acting White House staff chief under Mr. Trump but has said he wants the party to choose a different nominee in 2024.

 

Ms. Haley, who served as ambassador to the United Nations in the Trump administration, is weighing her own Republican presidential campaign.

 

Mr. Scott, the keynote speaker at Mr. Trump’s last presidential nominating convention, has asked allies in the state to hold off endorsing the former president while he similarly considers a potential national campaign, according to two Republicans familiar with the conversations.

 

Mr. Trump told reporters earlier that Ms. Haley had recently called him to say she was considering a presidential campaign. Mr. Trump said he told her, “You should do it.”

 

New Hampshire Republicans cheering Mr. Trump’s address on Saturday. He framed his candidacy as a shield for the country from communism and Marxism, and falsely claimed that his administration had been on pace to eliminate the national debt.Credit...John Tully for The New York Times

 

Still, as Mr. Trump stood in the ornate second-floor lobby of the State Capitol — just outside the House chamber where Mr. Scott served before running for Congress, and a floor above the governor’s office that helped Ms. Haley raise her national profile — his choice of venue could be viewed as a direct message to his potential challengers.

 

“Together, we will complete the unfinished business to make America great again,” Mr. Trump said before introducing his leadership team.

 

Before the event, Mr. Trump told reporters that the death of Tyre Nichols, a Black man who was beaten by Memphis police officers, was “terrible” but not reason alone to call for police reform. “You have to get the right people that know when you have to be tough and when not to be tough,” Mr. Trump said of law enforcement. “This was a case of being very, very tough — overly, overly crazy. And it was sad to watch, it was a very sad thing to watch. He was begging for his mother.”

 

Jane Brady, a Republican National Committee member from Delaware, said Mr. Trump’s pugilistic personality had long been a distraction from his policies, which, generally, much of the party supports.

 

“Some people look past that, and some people don’t,” she said.

 

Alex Olson, a Republican strategist, was in Salem, N.H., on behalf of Ron to the Rescue, a new super PAC that is pushing for a 2024 bid by Mr. DeSantis. (The governor and the group are unaffiliated.)

 

“We have no problem with what Trump has done as president,” Mr. Olson said. “I supported him. But DeSantis can bring together the Chamber of Commerce Republicans and the MAGA Republicans. He is less bombastic, and he understands the legislative process.”

 

Michael C. Bender reported from Columbia, S.C., and Mei-Ling McNamara from Salem, N.H. Reid J. Epstein contributed reporting from Washington, and Maggie Haberman from New York.

 

Michael C. Bender is a political correspondent and the author of “Frankly, We Did Win This Election: The Inside Story of How Trump Lost.” @MichaelCBender