‘Don’t know how this is going to look.’ Trump team grapples with an upended campaign

WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump’s campaign is adapting its messaging and fundraising tools for the era of social distancing. But adjusting the core argument of his reelection bid — that the economy is stronger than it was four years ago — is proving to be a much greater challenge.

A global pandemic that erased all of the economic gains made since Trump took office has kept the candidate confined to the White House and prevented large rallies and high-dollar fundraisers. It has forced his well-oiled campaign operation to radically change course.

Within weeks, the Trump campaign had to reposition from a message of financial market records and the best employment numbers in 50 years to one explaining the president’s response to unemployment levels unseen since the Great Depression.

The Trump campaign still believes it holds an advantage over former Vice President Joe Biden, the presumptive Democratic nominee for president.

But now it must write an entirely new playbook based on an unpredictable crisis that could last well into the general election race.

“We don’t know how this is going to look on the other end. But what we do know is that the president has a message and is working on the right solution,” Rick Gorka, spokesman for the Republican National Committee, said.

Senior officials are working remotely, adopting a mode of campaigning that is totally reliant on the digital tools they had built before the crisis.

Trump’s campaign had built an ambitious data operation mapping out unreliable voters in battleground states, plugging in information from ticket request forms that rally attendees were required to fill out into a sophisticated database.

The campaign is currently pulling in millions of viewers through virtual town halls and using social media to get its message out, but without the information from the rally forms it is unable to track those voters and target them directly afterward.

“We obviously are missing all of that information that we are used to getting,” Lara Trump, a senior adviser to the campaign and the president’s daughter-in-law, said.

Because the campaign still has seven months until Election Day, she told McClatchy, “It’s not that devastating to us. But if this continued into the fall, we would have to look at maybe a different model to figure out what to do in terms of turning out voters, and making sure that we are getting the same information that we are used to having at the campaign.”

President Trump has also made regular use of the bully pulpit, conducting lengthy news conferences that are oriented around his administration’s efforts to protect the public from the coronavirus.

Trump’s campaign is using its online tools to help spread the word about how potential voters can access government benefits. It is also using its rapid response team to slap down criticisms of the administration’s handling of the pandemic.

Navigating an entirely digital operation, the Trump campaign in late March began regular programming for its most dedicated supporters. A rotating cast of senior campaign officials have been broadcasting individual and panel interviews on Facebook and Twitter with conservative activists, faith leaders and other Trump backers for a half hour or more each day.

With the federal government’s coronavirus response absorbing much of the president’s time and the appetite from voters for the kind of partisan bickering that goes hand-in-hand with elections almost nonexistent, the campaign has had to recalibrate its message and senior aides have had to take on additional responsibilities like hosting the specials.

A former Inside Edition producer and the current host of a weekly news webcast the campaign has been running for several years, Lara Trump has taken a lead role in shaping the virtual town halls.

“We find ourselves in unchartered waters,” she told McClatchy. “We’d love to be out there doing things the old-fashioned way, but we’re figuring it out day by day.”

» FAQ: Your coronavirus questions, answered.

President Trump has not appeared on a broadcast yet, but Lara Trump indicated he is likely to participate at the conclusion of the test phase, so that he can speak to his supporters directly about topics other than the federal response to the coronavirus, including Biden.

The free airtime the White House briefings provide is an advantage for Trump. National networks have cut down on how much of the sessions with the president they show but continue to air the briefings in part.

But Gorka acknowledged that incumbency can also be a burden. “There’s the pressure to deliver results. And if you’re not delivering, then all of those advantages become disadvantages very quickly,” he said.

Political communicators warn that incumbency has made Trump vulnerable during a time of crisis — when Americans are closely examining the president’s response and what he had done to prepare for the pandemic that could lead to a projected 100,000 or more deaths in the United States.

Ari Fleischer, who was White House press secretary to former President George W. Bush at the time of the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks, has advocated for television networks to carry Trump’s news conferences live and in their totality. But he has also recommended that Trump appear at the podium for a shorter period of time each day, saying the president risks overexposure by taking questions for two hours.

Fleischer said the 2020 campaign is comparable to the midterm election that followed 9/11 more than a typical presidential reelection campaign, in which the economy is often the dominant issue.

“Coronavirus is going to be on the minds of voters this November, just as in 2002, Sept. 11 was on the minds of voters,” he said.

Mike Czin, a spokesman for former President Barack Obama’s 2012 reelection campaign, said that the dynamic most presidential campaigns are oriented around — the primary, convention and the start of voting for Election Day — has been altered tactically and thematically because of the coronavirus.

Czin said that most Americans are paying close attention to the federal response to the coronavirus outbreak. They have either faced personal difficulty or know someone else who was unable to access a test, capital or other government services.

“Once faced with a crisis, this administration is incapable of being thoughtful responsible managers, and they’re going to have to show that they can govern,” he said. “You can only fake it so much.”

Trump campaign officials referenced internal polling that showed the president with a 50% approval rating and majority support for his approach to the coronavirus as a barometer for the president’s and the campaign’s effectiveness at communicating the administration’s coronavirus successes to voters.

The president’s initial response to the coronavirus, however, has been the subject of scrutiny. While the president shut down travel from China in January, when an outbreak there became apparent, he repeatedly dismissed the possibility it would spread on a large scale in the United States.

In March he began characterizing the crisis as a war against an “invisible enemy” — and himself as a wartime president, leading a united nation through a historic struggle.

“While promoting the president’s leadership in fighting the war on the coronavirus, we are also highlighting how Joe Biden and the media have filled the role of the opposition in that war,” a senior Trump campaign official said of their message.

The Biden campaign is already preparing to counter that narrative, challenging the president’s wartime analogy and asking voters to hold Trump accountable for his administration’s level of pandemic preparedness and for the economic fallout that followed.

“When Joe Biden was sounding the alarm about this outbreak, Donald Trump was downplaying the threat we faced and disregarding warnings about the most severe public health crisis in generations,” said Andrew Bates, director of rapid response for the Biden campaign. “Now we have more coronavirus cases than any other country and we’re losing jobs at an historic rate.”

The Biden campaign noted that, while wartime presidents historically experience surges in popular support, Trump has yet to experience a similar polling bounce. In many cases, the U.S. economy has also seen a boost during wartime, such as when the country emerged from the Great Depression during World War II, a campaign official said.

Several polls released this month show that Trump has not seen the sort of rallying effect that has boosted support for past presidents in crises, with six surveys showing his approval numbers under 50 percent.

The economy has long been Trump’s strongest issue in polling, and Saul Anuzis, a former chairman of the Michigan GOP, said the issue continues to work in Trump’s favor, because the number of jobs available in America is likely to soar after the coronavirus curve is flattened.

“The bad news for the Democrats is that this pandemic provided the excuse that the Republicans and the president would have needed in case the economy would have tanked in other circumstances,” Anuzis said.

Trump has repeatedly lamented that the coronavirus got in the way of a robust U.S. economy, and he told reporters this month that he may form a task force to help get it back on track.

“We built the greatest economy in the world. I’ll do it a second time. We got artificially stopped by a virus that nobody ever thought possible,” he said at a press briefing.

Since the president and his coronavirus task force advised Americans to stay at home as much as possible for 45 days to stop the spread of the coronavirus, individual states used emergency powers to order non-essential workers to stay at home and certain businesses to close under penalty of law.

Unemployment claims skyrocketed in the month of March to more than 7 million, leaving Congress and the Treasury Department to figure out how to get money into the bank accounts of cash-strapped Americans.

The downturn has also presented a fundraising challenge for the Trump campaign, which takes pride in the tally of donations it receives from grassroots supporters.

Gorka said that the party is continuing “call time” between top Republican officials like RNC Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel and high-dollar donors, who have grown accustomed to facetime with the candidate.

McDaniel is careful to open up the conversation by asking donors how they are faring amid the coronavirus crisis before launching into campaign content, and the national party has advised its volunteers to emulate that communication tactic when they call potential voters, Gorka said.