Trump’s 2024 Campaign Feels Much Different Than 2016 Effort: Here’s Why
“Buttoned up” and “conventional” are hardly concepts that come to mind when considering Donald Trump’s presidential campaigns, but that said, observers from all political spectrums have struggled not to notice a different atmosphere surrounding Trump 2024, The Daily Caller reports.
The transformation has been striking. In 2016, despite a campaign plagued by inexperience, leaks, firings, and controversy, an innovative strategy propelled Trump to victory. Four years later, amid the challenges of a global pandemic, Trump’s campaign struggled to address the numerous new voting measures that Biden’s team adeptly maximized, the outlet reported.
Insiders are dissecting the 2024 operation in and around the campaign, telling the outlet that the transformation boils down to personnel and messaging.
“He has put together in 2024, a group of competent loyalists, who are also, I think he’s thrown around the term ruthless killers, something along those lines around, which should make all of us very happy,” Ned Ryun, CEO of American Majority Action and a longtime Trump ally who served on the administration’s 1776 Commission, said.
From the outset of the Republican presidential primary, Trump was the clear frontrunner for the party’s nomination. By March, as the sole remaining candidate, the former president rejoined forces with the Republican National Committee (RNC). However, this time he restructured the leadership, appointing his daughter-in-law Lara Trump as co-chair and senior adviser Chris LaCivita as chief of staff.
“There is no daylight between the RNC and between the Trump campaign,” Danielle Alvarez, a spokesperson for both organizations, told the Caller, noting that LaCivita holds top positions in both the Trump campaign and the RNC as an example of the conjoined operation.
Insiders told the Daily Caller that the Trump campaign didn’t mesh ideally with the RNC in 2016. There was drama, and all too often, leaks ended up in the media.
“The communications teams in 2016, between the Trump campaign and the RNC, were at times not even speaking. They were in different rooms and were not working together at all. Reporters would come in from out of town to establish relations with the campaign and there was a real tug-of-war as to who would talk to those reporters,” a former senior Trump campaign official told the outlet, which added:
In 2016, the Trump campaign was small but lethal. Despite their eventual success, trouble brewed prior to Trump’s shocking defeat of Hillary Clinton.
About two weeks before the party convention where Trump would be affirmed as the nominee, the 2016 campaign moved to completely disband the RNC communications team in an effort to take full control, the former official told the Caller. Even at the convention, RNC leadership wasn’t fully bought into Trump’s bid for president.
“It was only right after the convention that Reince Priebus, who had been head of the RNC, that he met with Trump — the Monday after the convention, and Reince Priebus got the green for the first time to have the RNC really work together with Trump’s campaign,” the official told the Caller.
“They didn’t ever want to communicate with each other. There was tension,” another source, granted anonymity to speak freely about the situation, told the Caller about 2020. “It was very weird that there had to become a staffer who was almost like a mediator, but I would say 100% it was almost like there were two different teams and they just really didn’t like each other but they knew that they needed to work together.”
Of course, in 2020, neither campaign was conventional, considering it occurred as COVID-19 hit.
“During the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic, there was a situation where the Trump campaign was really working to get people back to being in-person and returning to normal,” the source told the Caller. “The RNC, however, was more concerned about following the COVID rules.”
“The RNC wanted to make sure temperatures were checked and that people were notified correctly and that masks were worn and the Trump team wasn’t as concerned with allowing COVID rules to hinder their campaign operation,” the source said, adding that the partnership between the RNC and the Trump campaign on the fundraising front was also disrupted.
But this time around, things are much different — meaning better — for the Trump campaign and the RNC.
“It’s streamlined the process where there’s no confusion over how this is supposed to work,” Ryun told the Daily Caller. “They’re simpatico, and they’ve demonstrated that through how they’ve basically unified key positions. I would say they’ve also made sure, and they’re making sure, that everybody inside the building is also on the same page with the Trump campaign, which is a huge thing that might have been lacking in the past.”
“Our conversations with Trump officials, allies and alumni reveal the off-the-rails public Trump has a more conventional, buttoned-up operation built around him. His advisers see this as a template for governing if he were to win,” Axios previously reported.
It’s all paying off, the Caller noted: “Since dominating the Republican presidential primary, Trump has held a steady lead in polls against President Joe Biden both nationally and across key swing states. A New York Times/Siena College survey from May 13 shows Trump leading Biden in Nevada, Georgia, Arizona, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin by as much as 13 points.”
Fundraising is also catching up to Biden. Trump and the RNC have managed to bring in north of $200 million just since his conviction on Thursday, and more billionaire GOP donors are jumping on board his campaign.
Battle-Tested Trump Brings A New And Improved Ground Game To Iowa https://t.co/b3PogRJ7Nm
— Mollie (@MZHemingway) January 12, 2024
Eight years after his first presidential bid, Trump’s 2024 campaign seems better prepared to staff a federal administration if he wins. In 2016, Trump’s team scrambled to form a transition team to vet and hire thousands of staffers, having only about 70 people ready by election day, according to the Portland Press Herald. By contrast, previous presidential campaigns typically had hundreds of people working on transition teams well before election day.
But this campaign is already ahead of where it was in 2016. In April, Axios reported that the former president’s sons, Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump, have taken the lead in vetting potential administration staffers, grading their loyalty to the former president and their ideology.
Also, long before Trump was the presumptive nominee, the Heritage Foundation launched Project 2025 with the mission of making the next Republican president “ready to govern in the most aggressive, ambitious, audacious way to destroy the Deep State and devolve power back to the individual Americans.”
As of December 2023, Project 2025 had collected at least 5,000 applications for the next administration, the Daily Caller noted.
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