Not that you’d know that from this Politico headline: “Trump orders new campaign hierarchy, spending plan.” To be fair, that in itself is news, as is the new twenty million May/June budget being reported… but possibly it is just as newsworthy that Trump’s national field director Stuart Jolly quit today rather than be transferred over to work for Rick Wiley (best known for his disastrous turn as Scott Walker’s national campaign manager). Jolly was a Corey Lewandowski (Trump’s embattled beleaguered campaign manager) loyalist, and Lewandowski is himself steadily being supplanted by new head Trump yes-guy Paul Manafort. Honestly, that this quitting will roil Trump’s existing state campaign staffs at a critical moment in the campaign should be a story of its own; we’ll see if anybody picks up on it.
None of this will have any effect on New York tomorrow, of course – it’s widely assumed that Trump will romp through that primary; the question is by how much – but it’s also instructive that the campaign is telling itself internally that they will pick up between “200 and 255” delegates between now and the end of the month. For the benefit of those playing at home, that means that the Trump campaign thinks that it will absolutely sweep all of the primaries between now and then… including the unbound delegates of Pennsylvania and the proportional ones of Rhode Island. This is… optimistic of them.
Finally: it looks like that the Trump campaign is leaking like a sieve at this point. Also, that his staffers are increasingly now more than happy to go tattle and gossip to the political rags. Go ask some seasoned political operatives just how well that usually works out for campaigns.
Via @BuzzFeedAndrew.
Moe Lane
PS: Do note that the Trump campaign does in fact need a reboot, given that their existing delegate strategies are, well, awful. And I will readily enough admit that I’d prefer that Donald Trump not spend twenty million over the next two months to try to fix his campaign’s problems. But the timing here is remarkable. It should have happened two months ago, or some time in June.
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