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Fresh off a week of daily counterprogramming events and an effort to steal the spotlight from his new opponent, Donald Trump and his campaign are seeking to harness that pace in the lead-up to November — with plans to aggressively ramp up the former president’s schedule, hone his debate skills and cultivate a new ground-game strategy tied to the early voting states, sources familiar with the strategy shift told CNN.
The new approach is itself an acknowledgment that Trump’s campaign has struggled to adapt to the fast-changing political landscape after President Joe Biden ended his campaign less than four months before Election Day.
Trump’s schedule going forward will look a lot more like the past week — when the Republican nominee visited a different battleground each day — than the 20 months that preceded it. Through November, Trump is expected to hold “several events each week, if not daily,” one adviser said, while another predicted the former president will regularly visit two states in a day.
“Think Trump on steroids,” one said. “It’ll be all hands on deck.”
The stepped-up schedule comes as Trump is also preparing for his September 10 debate with Vice President Kamala Harris.
The former president is quietly meeting with Republican lawmakers, policy experts and outside allies in advance of the high-stakes showdown. The “policy discussions” — the Trump campaign’s version of debate prep — largely mirror the sessions the former president held in the weeks leading up to his June 27 debate with Biden, sources familiar with the meetings told CNN.
“It won’t be any different this time around. It worked well for him last time. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it,” a Trump adviser said.
Trump, who has an aversion to traditional debate prep and has argued he doesn’t need formal preparation, such as engaging in mock debates, prefers to study his opponent and fine-tune his messaging in a more casual setting, the adviser added.
Former Hawaii Rep. Tulsi Gabbard, for example, has been working with Trump behind the scenes to help him understand Harris’ debate style.
Gabbard was among the 2020 Democratic presidential contenders who challenged Harris on the debate stage. Trump’s advisers believe Gabbard’s attacks on then-Sen. Harris — particularly the scrutiny of her record as a prosecutor — helped undermine Harris’ candidacy.
While Trump was always expected to escalate his campaign activity after the conventions, the heightened pace planned for the coming weeks goes well beyond previous preparations and is a direct response to the enthusiasm spike from Democrats since Harris replaced Biden atop their ticket, sources familiar with the plans told CNN. Trump’s schedule this week is a clear example.
On Monday, the former president will address the National Guard Association’s conference in Detroit; on Thursday, he will travel to Michigan for a speech on the economy before participating in a town hall in Wisconsin that evening. On Friday, he will hold a rally in Pennsylvania, then head to Washington, DC, to speak at the “Joyful Warriors” summit, held by the conservative Moms for Liberty group.
Meanwhile, Trump pollsters Tony Fabrizio and Travis Tunis released a memo Saturday predicting a post-convention bump in polls for Harris, with Fabrizio blaming it largely on favorable media coverage of the vice president.
“The other thing to keep in mind is that while the media is going to focus on the national polls, we need to keep our eye on the ball — that is the polling in our target states,” the memo said. “Our goal is to get to 270 and winning these states is how we do it.”
Trump’s accelerated schedule also follows a trying stretch of his campaign. The former president’s erratic response to the change in opponent set off a wave of discussions about the strategy for the new reality. Close allies cautioned Trump to focus on policy over personal attacks and urged him to get in front of voters more often.
Even his choice of where to hold events — visiting deeply red Montana and solidly blue New Jersey while leaving monthlong gaps between stops in key states — sometimes left Republicans scratching their heads.
Trump’s campaign now views the period after the Democratic National Convention as an all-out sprint to November, several senior advisers told CNN. The former president’s team team recently beefed up its political operation by adding new advisers, including Trump’s first 2016 campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski, to assist in the approach.
Moving forward, Trump will focus on battlegrounds where mail-in ballots will soon go out and early voting locations will first open, including in North Carolina and Pennsylvania, as well as states tilting toward one party or the other, such as Minnesota and Florida. The Trump campaign also plans to bolster its teams on the ground in those states, as well as to deploy surrogates to hold get-out-the-vote events.
As he did over the last week, Trump is expected to hold smaller events — in addition to his larger rallies — centered on tailored messages in the hope that some guardrails could help the campaign better focus their candidate. Unlike Trump’s sprawling, daylong rallies, these stops will take place in more intimate venues with fewer people and — many of his allies hope — a sharper focus.
The limitations of those efforts, though, grew increasingly apparent throughout last week. Those who know the former president best have long acknowledged that Trump’s innate predilection to veer off script and air his grievances can’t be changed.
“He’s 78 years old and has never been someone easily controlled,” one Trump ally told CNN.
During a stop in North Carolina billed as a speech on national security, Trump polled the crowd on whether they wanted him to continue to lob insults at his opponents or stick to policy. When it became clear they preferred the former, Trump mocked his own team.
“My advisers are fired,” he joked, then added: “Nah, we’d rather keep it on policy, but sometimes it’s hard when you’re attacked from all ends.”
During a Michigan speech on public safety, Trump veered into more attacks on Harris, failing to touch on the policies that his team had shared with reporters in advance of his remarks, including a proposal to execute child rapists and traffickers. When asked why Trump didn’t announce the new policies previewed by his campaign, a campaign official said the former president was “saving those” until after the Democratic National Convention.
Still, the week of events marked one of the most active periods on the campaign trail of Trump’s third White House bid. Since effectively wrapping up the GOP nomination in March, Trump has maintained a notably light campaign calendar, holding one or two rallies a week and spending long stretches out of the public view.
It’s a schedule that didn’t appear problematic for Trump when his opponent was an unpopular 81-year-old incumbent who struggled to attract audiences. But with Harris and her running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, fanning out across battlegrounds and pulling in massive crowds, a change became necessary.
The Vance factor
Ohio Sen. JD Vance is also expected to take on a more vigorous schedule in the weeks ahead, a source familiar with his plans told CNN.
Trump’s running mate will hit all the major battlegrounds, with a particular focus on the three states that make up the so-called blue wall that Trump won in 2016 but lost to Biden in 2020: Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania — the latter of which Vance is expected to visit more frequently than any other state, the source said. The thinking behind that specific focus is that Vance’s background growing up in southwestern Ohio strengthens his appeal with Rust Belt voters. He is expected to continue efforts to connect the opioid epidemic to immigration.
The plans for Vance are in part a direct reaction to his performance on the trail, which people close to the former president say has delighted Trump despite Vance’s shaky start, which was plagued by criticism over resurfaced clips of him deriding “childless cat ladies” and suggesting that parents should have more voting power.
In recent conversations, Trump has referred to his running mate as a “political athlete,” two people with direct knowledge of the remark told CNN, and has expressed a desire for Vance to get out in front of voters and media viewers as frequently as possible.
Vance is expected to continue being a regular feature on the Sunday morning news shows, those people said, as well as to participate in more long-form podcasts designed to target younger audiences.
CNN’s Kit Maher contributed to this report.