Donald Trump Scraps the Usual Campaign Playbook, Including TV Ads
His advisers have not revealed the existence of any pollsters on their staff or any advertising team. He has no real research operation to examine his own vulnerabilities or those of his opponents, and, based on Federal Election Commission filings, little in the way of a voter contact operation to identify and turn out his supporters.
.. If Mr. Trump’s team had researched Mr. Cruz’s weaknesses, for example, then incorporated them in Mr. Trump’s heavily covered speeches and ceaseless television appearances, as well as in paid advertising, he may have been able to pre-empt or at least slow the senator’s rise there.
.. In 2000, when Mr. Trump was toying with a possible third-party presidential candidacy, he had a contract with the motivational speaker Tony Robbins to make $1 million for giving speeches at some of Mr. Robbins’s seminars. Fortune reported that Mr. Trump had engineered his political events so that he would give speeches in the same cities.
“It’s very possible that I could be the first presidential candidate to run and make money on it,” Mr. Trump told the magazine.
In the most recent period for which there are records, the third quarter of the year, Mr. Trump raised just under $4 million from donors. He contributed only $100,779 of his own money in that quarter, and has lent roughly $2 million since the start of the campaign.
But some of the money Mr. Trump’s campaign spends is on reimbursing him: His largest expense in the last filing period, $723,000, was on a company he owns, Tag Air, which controls the fleet of aircraft he uses to fly to all his events.