Trump’s insults and rants mask a ruthlessly efficient campaign

Donald Trump’s previous presidential runs were known for chaos and infighting. His 2024 campaign is being run more like a Fortune 500 company.

Trump the candidate remains a freewheeling frontman, attacking other candidates in off-the-cuff rants and lashing out at judges and prosecutors in court.

Yet the machine built to return him to the White House has learned from past missteps and missed opportunities, and is seizing every advantage while pressing allies to fall in line. If 2016 was Trump’s breakout moment, and 2020 offered the advantages of incumbency, 2024 marks the rise of a professionalized Trump campaign.

In Iowa, where Trump won by a historic margin, and New Hampshire, where he bested his last remaining rival, Nikki Haley, by 11 percentage points, local political operatives have seen a difference.

“I give a lot of credit to just the mechanics of how they’re running the campaign,” said Chris Ager, chairman of the Republican Party of New Hampshire. “It seems like it’s extremely well-run and professional — much more so than the Wild West phase in 2016.”

The Trump campaign worked for months to secure big early wins and drive rivals from the race quickly. It pressed to make more primaries winner-take-all, to help Trump rapidly amass the delegates needed to lock up the nomination. And it scooped up endorsements, dispatched popular surrogates to early battlegrounds, and organized volunteers and supporters to get out the vote.

“The results certainly speak to the fact that the Trump campaign effectively identified and turned out their supporters in Iowa,” said Nicole Schlinger, a Republican operative who worked on Texas Senator Ted Cruz’s 2016 win in the state. “There were no anecdotal reports of caucus cards being left on the chairs at rallies like we heard about in 2016.”

A disciplined campaign that has delivered early results and kept its staff focused and in harmony gives Trump room to be Trump – and better positions him for a potential showdown with President Joe Biden.

And Trump still will say or do what he pleases. During his victory speech in New Hampshire, he couldn’t contain his irritation that Haley had come out to speak before him.

“This is not your typical victory speech,” he said, before ridiculing Haley’s outfit and suggesting she should be under investigation.

State strategies

Given its early dominance, Trump’s campaign hopes to lock up the nomination by early to mid-March.

“Basically after New Hampshire, it is an academic exercise,” Trump senior adviser Chris LaCivita said. Trump leads Haley by wide margins in Nevada and South Carolina, the next two states to vote.

The campaign has long aimed to put the primary race out of reach early and turn its attention to Biden. In Iowa, Trump’s team spent more than a year building a network of 1,700 leaders it bestowed with white and gold baseball caps to rally supporters at caucus locations. For first-time voters, the campaign produced a three-minute video explaining how caucuses work.

As subzero temperatures and a blizzard threatened turnout, the Trump team had volunteers standing by to give caucus-goers rides.

In New Hampshire, where there are more moderate and independent voters, and where Haley made a frenzied late push, the Trump team attacked Haley on Social Security and taxes, calling her too liberal in TV ads and mailers.

The campaign also played to the MAGA faithful, bringing allies like Arizona Senate candidate Kari Lake, Georgia Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene and Florida Representative Matt Gaetz to the Granite State, while Trump held rallies in between court dates in New York.

At a rally in Manchester last Saturday, Trump brought several South Carolina legislators to the stage to offer their endorsements — a move to slight Haley, who led that state as governor from 2011 to 2017. Ager said Trump’s campaign runs a “clockwork” schedule with VIP entrances, prepared remarks and speakers to introduce Trump.

Seasoned leaders

In 2016, Trump conducted his campaign on instinct, but, eight years later, seasoned operatives are at the helm, including LaCivita and campaign manager Susie Wiles. Longtime Trump aides Jason Miller and Steven Cheung are overseeing communications strategy, and Brian Jack, Trump’s former White House director of political affairs, has coordinated endorsements.

That group has helped Trump avoid repeating mistakes. LaCivita recalled an episode in 2016 when Ivanka Trump arrived at a caucus location in Iowa to find 3,000 people standing around, and no one rallying support for her father.

“There was no one speaking on behalf of the campaign,” LaCivita said at a Bloomberg News event in Iowa. The former president “made it clear that that will not happen this time,” LaCivita said.

“It was a night-and-day difference,” LaCivita said about planning in 2024 versus 2016. “We’re utilizing four years of data. We have a candidate who has run for president three times.”

Veterans of Trump’s past runs have noticed the shift. “They’ve done a very good job of managing a campaign and not being the campaign,” said Corey Lewandowki, the controversial campaign manager Trump fired in 2016.

The Biden campaign has long said it wants to run against Trump. Aides privately say they know how to defeat the former president based on Biden’s 2020 victory and the 2022 midterms, when many Trump-backed candidates were soundly defeated. Biden on Wednesday picked up a coveted endorsement from the powerful United Auto Workers union.

Democrats are planning to run on shielding abortion rights and protecting democracy, even as polls show the economy and immigration as voters’ biggest concerns. Biden’s team thinks portraying Trump as an extremist will sway suburban women, independents and swing voters.

“Any professional who has been involved in campaigns thinks they’ve done the blocking and tackling well,” said David Axelrod, one of President Barack Obama’s top aides, who acknowledged that some traditional Democratic voters have become disillusioned with Biden. Trump has “a skilled, traditional and rational operation now, but whether he is rational is a whole different question.”