The Trump “Campaign” Rolls On

The Donald’s campaign is pretty much an empty shell:

Donald Trump, reports Maggie Haberman, has fired Corey Lewandowski in what could be seen as either the most recent campaign shake-up, or merely the latest iteration of an endless power struggle that has seen figures like Lewandowski, Roger Stone, and Paul Manafort cycle in and out of the candidate’s earshot. When the operation in question is a garbage fire like the Trump-for-president operation, terms like “campaign manager,” which imply a cohesive entity that is managed in some hierarchical fashion, may not even apply.

Trump’s campaign, reports the Associated Press, has 30 paid staff on the ground across the United States of America.

Let’s pause here for a second, because that’s amazing. This isn’t a campaign making some dubious choices; this is a campaign that falls so far below minimum professional standards it’s barely a campaign at all.

That is a smaller number than the Hillary Clinton campaign has in many states. Clinton’s massive ground advantage is supplemented by an even more massive television-advertising advantage. The current ratio of Clinton to Trump television-ad spending in battleground states is one to zero. (Data via NBC News, chart via the Washington Post.)

Trump has previously vowed to campaign in deep-blue states like New York, California, and Maryland, where no Republican could win. He has devoted at least some of his scarce resources to this hopeless goal. Meanwhile, polls show him locked in a close race in overwhelmingly Republican Utah, where he has promised the state’s party chairman he will spend campaign time to lock down the Republican vote. If you’re a Republican presidential candidate devoting resources to Utah, that’s real bad. Trump is also spending some of his time this week on a trip to Scotland, where he will visit a golf course and discuss the Brexit vote. Scotland is not represented in the Electoral College and has very few eligible voters.

The liberal media will surely rue the day it questioned the brilliance of Trump’s plan to plaster Utica with bumper stickers. (Also, it really says a lot about Jeb! and Rubio that the guy beat them easily, all of it hilarious.) But if his staff is small, at least it must be well-organized, right?

Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump is gathering his top lieutenants, including members of his family, in New York on Monday to discuss a political strategy shift as he looks to move beyond recent missteps.

Trump is facing pressure from within his own inner circle—including from donors—who are growing increasingly frustrated with what they see as a lack of coordination and communication, members of Trump’s staff told Bloomberg Politics, at a crucial moment in the presidential race.

There’s also a growing impatience among some on Trump’s payroll that the candidate has failed to fill key roles within his campaign, including traveling press secretary and communications director, while Democrat Hillary Clinton’s synchronized political machine capitalized on a string of negative Trump headlines.

My apologies for anyone involved in McGovern ’72 for invoking them in comparison to Trump.

…I love this detail from Olivia Nuzzi’s fine story about Trump’s PR person [via Anderson]:

Getting the most out of the star requires keeping him informed. While Trump nurses an obvious addiction to cable news, the reading that’s put in front of him is largely confined to a topic he already knows well. Every morning, staffers print out 30 to 50 Google News results for “Donald J. Trump.” He then goes at the sheaf with a marker, making circles and arrows and annotating things he likes or doesn’t like. The defaced article gets scanned and e-mailed to the journalist or the person quoted who has drawn Trump’s attention, under the subject line “From the office of Donald J. Trump.”