President Donald Trump, increasingly nervous about the direction of his campaign as he struggles in general election polls, is considering bringing back more loyal aides from his successful campaign in 2016, according to five Republicans who speak to the president.
He wants lobbyist David Urban, a former senior adviser who was pivotal in helping him win Pennsylvania, to play a more prominent role. He is considering re-hiring Susie Wiles, who managed his Florida campaign but was unceremoniously fired last year, to help him win the nation’s largest swing state for a second time.
The campaign just hired senior advisers Jason Miller to focus on overall strategy and coordinate between the campaign and White House and Boris Epshteyn to be strategic adviser for coalitions. And officials have mentioned bringing back lobbyist Bryan Lanza, who was former deputy communications director, too.
Trump is increasingly concerned that his reelection prospects could be slipping away and wants to bring in staffers he trusts from his original scrappy campaign, the Republicans say.
“Recent internal polling painted uneasy seas ahead and President Trump wanted some of his warriors back,” according to one of the people, who worked on the 2016 campaign.
Trump remains frustrated about the leadership of campaign manager Brad Parscale, himself a 2016 loyalist who served as digital strategist and is now running his first presidential campaign, the five Republicans say. Specifically, the president has continued to complain that Parscale is burning through too much money too quickly, two of the people say.
“Brad worked when they needed someone to jump in but they don’t need him anymore,” said one of the Republicans, who previously worked at the White House. With the election approaching, “you need someone who has the experience and understanding of how all this works.” The five Republicans, who share many of Trump’s concerns about the campaign, spoke on condition of anonymity to avoid upsetting the president.
With less than five months left before the election, polls show Trump lagging behind presumptive Democratic nominee Joe Biden in most national polls. And his standing has fallen in many key states, such as Ohio and Iowa, and even in traditionally red states, such as Arizona and Georgia, in both public and campaign polls.
Trump campaign spokesman Tim Murtaugh declined to comment on specific personnel moves but said “additions to the campaign only solidify Brad Parscale’s leadership.” He also disputed concerns about polling. “In our data, the president is running strongly against a defined Joe Biden,” he said.
Some Trump aides are counting on the fact that the president often seems to defy expectations — just as he did when he prevailed against Hillary Clinton in 2016 — and downplayed his musings about bringing back 2016 staffers. They say Trump is being nostalgic, fondly remembering the days when he had a small close-knit group running an uphill battle as opposed to the impersonal, mammoth operation he has now between the White House, campaign and Republican National Committee.
“It’s the camaraderie that he misses,” said a former campaign official, who also speaks to Trump. “He had a small group of people with unquestionable loyalty.”
It’s unlikely that hiring a handful of 2016 staffers will fundamentally change the campaign unless they take on top-level jobs at headquarters, but they could help the president's prospects in pivotal states. The campaign, with staff spread out across the country, already is nearing 1,000 people.
Trump allies had expected the president to run on a booming stock market, rising wages and continued job growth, but acknowledge he’s lost ground since the start of the year with one crisis after another: The administration's sluggish response to the coronavirus pandemic left states without medical supplies and tests early in the crisis. The decimated economy spurred as many as a quarter of U.S. workers to lose their jobs. Protesters continue to take to the streets after the death of George Floyd, a 46-year-old black man killed at the hands of Minnesota police.
And Trump regularly straying from his own message causes other problems, they say. Last month, for instance, he repeatedly suggested without any evidence that MSNBC host Joe Scarborough had committed murder as a congressman in Florida in 2001.
“The president thinks he should be winning in a huge way,” one of the Republicans said. “He refuses to acknowledge his own weaknesses.”
Parscale and Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law and White House senior adviser who plays a leading role at the campaign, have been making staff changes over the last few months but the intensity has grown in the last couple of weeks, the Republicans say.
At the White House, Hope Hicks, one of Trump’s most trusted confidants, returned as a senior adviser while Johnny McEntee, who helped organize trips in 2016, rejoined the administration as director of the office responsible for filling hundreds of top political jobs. Dan Scavino, the director of social media who sometimes tweets from Trump’s account, was promoted to deputy chief of staff for communications in April. Kellyanne Conway, who was Trump’s campaign manager, has been senior White House counselor for his entire first term.
At the campaign, Bill Stepien, a top adviser in 2016, was recently promoted to deputy campaign manager. Justin Clark, another longtime adviser, is helping to spearhead the GOP legal fight over voting rules. Miller, who has remained an outspoken Trump loyalist and co-host of a podcast with former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon, started last week. Epshteyn, who briefly worked in the White House, has not started yet.
Corey Lewandowski and David Bossie, two former top aides, are spending more and more time with the president at the White House. In May, the two warned Trump that he needed to do something to fix his standing in swing states. Bossie was spotted with Trump two days in a row in late May — on a Sunday at Trump National Golf Club in Sterling, Va., and on Memorial Day at Arlington National Cemetery.
In recent weeks, Trump has been focused on some of the battleground states he won in 2016 but is in danger of losing this year, including Florida and Pennsylvania.
Trump is considering re-hiring Wiles in Florida, a state essential to his 2020 fortunes. Four years ago, when Trump was widely expected to lose Florida, he hired her to manage his campaign, partly on the recommendation of then-Gov. Rick Scott. But he fired her in September at the urging of current Gov. Ron DeSantis who suspected she bore responsibility for the leak of internal correspondence. Wiles did not return a message seeking comment.
And he has talked about finding a more prominent role in Pennsylvania for Urban, who already is unofficially involved in the campaign and speaks to the president directly. Trump is focused on Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania, which he won in 2016 but that moved away from Republicans during the 2018 midterm elections, when Democrats regained the House. The campaign has already hired back Ted Christian, Trump's 2016 state director, as a senior adviser, in Pennsylvania. Urban did not return a message seeking comment.
“There’s a group of originalists that Trump trusts,” said Dan Eberhart, a major Republican donor and CEO of the drilling services company Canary LLC. “It’s natural that he’s going to go back to what works.”
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