Republicans don’t face a particularly heavy lift at their national convention this week convincing Americans that when it comes to security, the house is on fire. The harder test may be convincing them that Donald Trump is more fireman than arsonist.
.. “I think they will do a great job [this week] of reinforcing all the scary stuff,” says the long-time GOP strategist Mike Murphy, a frequent Trump critic. “The question is how they make Trump the answer.
.. Trump suggested to O’Reilly that if elected he would direct the attorney general to investigate the BLM movement. “I have seen them marching down the street essentially calling death to the police,” Trump said. “And I think we’re going to have to look into that.”
.. Indeed, analysts in both parties believe one of the principal hurdles Trump faces is the sense among many voters that at a time when the seams appear to be loosening in America, he would intensify racial, ethnic, and cultural divisions.
.. “One of the big fears about Trump is that he will make a divided country even more divided. And that he exacerbates the divisions for his own political benefit.”
Political ‘Hunger Games’ roils Trump’s inner circle
According to interviews with more than a dozen people on or close to the campaign, staffers are increasingly dividing themselves into competing factions aligned with Trump’s three top officials – embattled campaign manager Corey Lewandowski, who still commands deep loyalty among many of the people he hired; deputy campaign manager Michael Glassner, who has a growing group of supporters; and newly hired strategist Paul Manafort, who was elevated this week and is building his own fiefdom.
.. That stretch coincided with his daughter Ivanka Trump having a baby, which limited her availability as a trusted adviser to her father. He was even caught off guard when he appeared on a Wisconsin conservative radio show without being informed that the host Charlie Sykes was leading the state’s #NeverTrump brigade, and he lost the state by double digits a week later.
.. “I’ve got state team leaders in Indiana who’ve been furious for months … they’ve had no campaign material, no ground game, no nothing and they’re going into these states 15, 20 days before the primary and it’s just too late.”
.. The in-fighting has further damaged morale inside the campaign, said multiple staffers and former staffers. They cited slow repayment of expenses, a confrontational management culture and mass layoffs in states that have already voted.
.. But one former staffer said “nobody trusts anybody” on the campaign. The former staffer, who stays in touch with current staff, added “especially since the shakeup, people are trying to save their asses, and throw their rivals under the bus, and campaigns don’t win that way.”