In announcing changes in President Trump’s reelection campaign staff on Wednesday, campaign spokesman Tim Murtaugh said it wasn’t about the unexpectedly low turnout in Tulsa (an estimated 6,200 people attended):
This is not a reaction to Tulsa. Michael Glassner [who organized the Tulsa rally] is moving into the long-term role of navigating the many legal courses we face, including suits against major media outlets, some of which will likely extend beyond the end of the campaign.
Replacing Glassner is Jeff DeWitt, who served as head of Trump’s 2016 campaign in Arizona. And that’s it. Driving the campaign reelection bus remains in the hands of Brad Parscale, the campaign’s overall manager.
Karl Rove, Republican Party insider and political consultant to President George W. Bush, expressed his concern that the Trump campaign hasn’t found its footing for the upcoming reelection battle with presumptive Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden. The campaign, he noted in an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal, needs “new policy initiatives,” a “change in tone,” and a “repositioning” of the president. Rove said that the one thing that the Trump campaign must do is set the parameters and frame in advance the upcoming battle as “a choice between two fundamentally different views of the future.”
That is exactly what the Trump campaign is gearing up to do. In answer to Rove’s op-ed, Trump’s campaign manager took to the same pages, writing an op-ed in the Journal on Wednesday that those parameters — the framing of the contest — will revolve around Biden as the ultimate Washington “insider” and Trump as the “outsider” taking on the Washington establishment.
Wrote Parscale:
When your opponent has been a career politician in Washington for 47 years and is campaigning on a return to the former status quo, it’s clear who the insider is and who remains the political outsider.
Biden, like Hillary Clinton in 2016, is a career politician who has been a central part of the very Washington political system that voters opposed in 2016 and are doing so again.
Parscale pointed to Trump’s campaign assets, among them an enormously successful fundraising effort that included a record-setting $131 million in June. In the quarter ending in June, Trump’s campaign raised more than $266 million, and currently has nearly $300 million in cash on hand. Said Parscale: “The Trump campaign’s monumental June fundraising haul proves that people are voting with their wallets.”
They are also voting with their votes. Wrote Parscale: “In 23 of the 27 states that [just] held primaries … Trump outpaced then-President Obama’s vote by wide margins, even doubling Obama’s numbers.” In Wisconsin, for example, Trump received more than 616,000 votes compared to Obama’s 293,000 in 2012 and George W. Bush’s 158,000 in 2004. In Georgia, noted Parscale, “the president hit almost one million primary votes this year, compared with Obama’s 139,273 and Bush’s 161,374.”
Added Parscale: “When it comes to the most important factor, enthusiasm, President Trump is dominating. The unprecedented enthusiasm behind the president’s reelection efforts stands in stark contrast to the flat, almost nonexistent enthusiasm for Biden.”
Parscale says he is heading up “the largest field program and data operation in Republican Party history, including 1.3 million volunteers.… The campaign has already made … 45 million voter contacts, and efforts are growing stronger by the day.”
RNC Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel is calling Trump’s reelection campaign the “Great American Comeback that will reignite our economy, restore law and order, and usher in a new era of strength.”
That is the great “reset” that Rove is calling for and that Trump’s campaign staff adjustment is preparing for. Expect a fuller and much more complete political platform when the president accepts his party’s nomination in Jacksonville, Florida in August.
Image of Donald Trump: Screenshot from donaldjtrump.com
An Ivy League graduate and former investment advisor, Bob is a regular contributor to The New American, primarily on economics and politics. He can be reached at [email protected].
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