Trump team prepares for sprint to November with ‘all hands on deck’ approach
Fresh off a week of daily counterprogramming events and an effort to steal the spotlight from his new opponent, Donald Trump and his campaign are seeking to harness that pace in the lead-up to November — with plans to aggressively ramp up the former president’s schedule, hone his debate skills and cultivate a new ground-game strategy tied to the early voting states, sources familiar with the strategy shift told CNN.
Trump’s schedule going forward will look a lot more like the past week — when the Republican nominee visited a different battleground each day — than the 20 months that preceded it. Through November, Trump is expected to hold “several events each week, if not daily,” one adviser said, while another predicted the former president will regularly visit two states in a day.
[We, the Harris Walz camapign, should assume that he is physically able to maintain so ambitious and greuling a schedule until proven otherwise.]
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Trump’s schedule this week is a clear example.
On Monday, the former president will address the National Guard Association’s conference in Detroit; on Thursday, he will travel to Michigan for a speech on the economy before participating in a town hall in Wisconsin that evening. On Friday, he will hold a rally in Pennsylvania, then head to Washington, DC, to speak at the “Joyful Warriors” summit, held by the conservative Moms for Liberty group.
[That's one tomorrow then nothing till Thursday, when he will have two, then two on Friday.]
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Trump’s accelerated schedule also follows a trying stretch of his campaign. ...
Even his choice of where to hold events — visiting deeply red Montana and solidly blue New Jersey while leaving monthlong gaps between stops in key states — sometimes left Republicans scratching their heads.
[Yes, those were very puzzling.]
Trump’s campaign now views the period after the Democratic National Convention as an all-out sprint to November, several senior advisers told CNN. ...
[I see sprinting from here as a reasonable strategy. It doesn't ameliorate the brain-dead schedule of the past post-Biden weeks but he has plenty of time.
Moving forward, Trump will focus on battlegrounds where mail-in ballots will soon go out and early voting locations will first open, including in North Carolina and Pennsylvania, as well as states tilting toward one party or the other, such as Minnesota and Florida.
[Mn. and Fl.? GOOD, trumpie, spend time and money in those states.]
The Trump campaign also plans to bolster its teams on the ground in those states, as well as to deploy surrogates to hold get-out-the-vote events.
[He's way behind on the ground game. You have to lay the groundwork for the GOTV, we have done a superb job of that, trumpie has done comparatively next to nothing. That's an impossible to overstate advantage that we have in razor close states. I don't think kamala's mo is going to be blunted anytime soon, trumpie's pollsters think the same, and right now, at 7:05 pm on Aug. 25, I don't think Pa., Wi., and Mi. are going to be so close that a reinforced ground game will help trumpie. I believe at this time that Kama Walz will win those states (and with them the presidency) outside of GOTV range.]
As he did over the last week, Trump is expected to hold smaller events — in addition to his larger rallies — centered on tailored messages in the hope that some guardrails could help the campaign better focus their candidate. ...these stops will take place in more intimate venues with fewer people and — many of his allies hope — a sharper focus.
The limitations of those efforts, though, grew increasingly apparent throughout last week. Those who know the former president best have long acknowledged that Trump’s innate predilection to veer off script and air his grievances can’t be changed.
“He’s 78 years old and has never been someone easily controlled,” one Trump ally told CNN.
[He's 78 years old, right. There are physical "limitations" that cone with that advanced age as well. And, he gas brought Corey "LET TRUMP BE TRUMP" Lewandowski back. He will not even try to focus trumpie.]
During a stop in North Carolina billed as a speech on national security, Trump polled the crowd on whether they wanted him to continue to lob insults at his opponents or stick to policy. When it became clear they preferred the former, Trump mocked his own team.
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It’s a schedule that didn’t appear problematic for Trump when his opponent was an unpopular 81-year-old incumbent who struggled to attract audiences. But with Harris and her running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, fanning out across battlegrounds and pulling in massive crowds, a change became necessary.
