Trump Campaign Confident of Landslide Win, Targets Biden's Age and Faculties
Submitted by MAGA
Posted 21 days ago
Donald Trump is planning for a landslide win in the upcoming presidential election, according to sources close to his campaign. Chris LaCivita, one of the principals tasked with returning Trump to the White House, has expressed confidence that the former president is well on his way to a 320-electoral-vote win.
LaCivita has long conceived of the 2024 race as a contest that would be "extraordinarily visual" - namely, a contrast of strength versus weakness. Trump, whatever his countless liabilities as a candidate, would be cast as the dauntless and forceful alpha, while Biden would be painted as the pitiable old heel, less a bad guy than the butt of a very bad joke, America's lovable but lethargic uncle who needed, at long last, to be put to bed.
The public has responded to the two candidates precisely as LaCivita and his campaign co-manager, Susie Wiles, had hoped. The percentage of voters who felt that Biden, at 81, was too old for another term rose throughout 2023, even as the electorate's concerns about Trump's age, 78, remained relatively static. By the end of the primaries, the public's attitude toward the two nominees had begun to harden: One was a liar, a scoundrel, and a crook - but the other one, the old one, was unfit to be president.
In the months that followed, Trump and his campaign would seize on Biden's every stumble, his every blank stare to reinforce that observation, seeking to portray the incumbent as "stuttering, stammering, walking around, feeling his way like a blind man," as LaCivita put it. That was the plan. And it worked. Watching Biden's slide in the polls, and sitting on hundreds of millions of dollars for an advertising blitz that would punctuate the president's visible decrepitude, Trump's team entered the summer believing that a landslide awaited in the fall.
However, there is always a certain danger inherent to this assault on Biden's faculties. If Wiles and LaCivita were too successful - if too many Democrats decided, too quickly, that Biden was no longer capable of defeating Trump, much less serving another four years thereafter - then they risked losing an ideal opponent against whom their every tactical maneuver had already been deliberated, poll-tested, and prepared. Campaigns are usually on guard against peaking too soon; in this case, the risk for Trump's team was Biden bottoming out too early.
In my conversations with LaCivita and Wiles over the past six months, they assured me multiple times that the campaign was planning for all contingencies, that they took quite seriously the possibility of a substitution and would be ready if Biden forfeited the nomination. However, by mid-June, not long before the debate, their tone had changed. Trump was speaking at a Turning Point USA rally in Detroit and the three of us stood backstage, leaning against the wall of a dimly lit cargo bay, a pair of Secret Service vehicles idling nearby. When I asked about the prospect of Trump facing a different Democratic opponent in the fall, LaCivita and Wiles shook their heads. They told me it was too late; the most influential players in Democratic politics had become too invested in the narrative that Biden was fully competent and capable of serving another four years.
"We're talking about an admission that the Democratic Party establishment would have to make," LaCivita said. "We're talking about pulling the plug -"
"On the president of the United States," Wiles interrupted.
LaCivita nodded. "Who they've been saying up to this point in time is perfectly fine."
No, Wiles and LaCivita agreed, the general-election matchup was set - and they were just fine with that.
"Joe Biden," Wiles told me, allowing the slightest of smiles, "is a gift."
But now, as we talked after the debate, it was apparent that they might have miscalculated. Elected Democrats were calling for Biden's removal from the ticket. When I asked who Trump's opponent was going to be come November, his two deputies sounded flummoxed.
"Based off of the available public data," LaCivita added, "he doesn't look like he's going anywhere."
Biden quitting the race would necessitate a dramatic reset - not just for the Democratic Party, but for Trump's campaign. Wiles and LaCivita told me that any Democratic replacement would inherit the president's deficiencies; that whether it's Vice President Kamala Harris or California Governor Gavin Newsom or anyone else, Trump's blueprint for victory would remain essentially unchanged. But they know that's not true. They know their campaign has been engineered in every way - from the voters they target to the viral memes they create - to defeat Biden. And privately, they are all but praying that he remains their opponent.
I was struck by the irony. The two people who had done so much to eliminate the havoc and guesswork that defined Trump's previous two campaigns for the presidency could now do little but hope that their opponent got his act together.
Wiles and LaCivita are two of America's most feared political operatives. She is the person most responsible for Florida - not long ago the nation's premier electoral prize - falling off the battleground map, having spearheaded campaigns that so dramatically improved the Republican Party's performance among nonwhite voters that Democrats are now surrendering the state. He is the strategist and ad maker best known for destroying John Kerry's presidential hopes in 2004, masterminding the "Swift Boat" attacks that sank the Democratic nominee. Together, as the architects of Trump's campaign, they represent a threat unlike anything Democrats encountered during the 2016 or 2020 elections.
On the evening of March 5 - Super Tuesday - I sat down with them in the tea room at Mar-a-Lago, an opulent space where intricate winged cherubs are carved into 10-foot marble archways. As the sun set behind the lagoon that borders the western edge of Trump's property, the lights were also going out on his primary challengers. Soon the polls would close and the former president would romp across more than a dozen states, winning 94 percent of the available delegates and effectively clinching the GOP nomination. Trump had just one target remaining.
For an hour and 15 minutes, Wiles and LaCivita presented their vision for retaking the White House. They detailed a new approach to targeting and turning out voters, one that departs dramatically from recent Republican presidential campaigns, suggesting that suburban women might be less a priority than young men of color. They justified their plans for a smaller, nimbler organization than Biden's reelection behemoth by pointing to a shrunken electoral map of just seven swing states that, by June, they had narrowed to four. And they alleged that the Republican National Committee - which, in the days that followed our interview, would come entirely under Trump's control - had lost their candidate the last election by relying on faulty data and botching its field program.
In political circles, it's considered a marvel that Trump won the presidency once, and came within 42,918 votes of winning it a second time, without ever assembling a sophisticated operation. Trump's loyalists in particular have spent the past few years haunted by a counterfactual: Had the president run a reelection campaign that was even slightly more effective - a campaign that didn't go broke that fall; a campaign that didn't employ unskilled interlopers in crucial positions; a campaign that didn't discourage his supporters from casting votes by mail - wouldn't he have won a second term comfortably?
Wiles and LaCivita believe the answer is yes. Both have imported their own loyalists, making the campaign a Brady Bunch configuration led by the oddest of couples. Wiles, who runs the day-to-day operation, is small and self-possessed, a gray-haired grandmother known never to utter a profane word; LaCivita, a Marine combat veteran who charts the macro strategy, is a big and brash presence, famous for profane outbursts that leave Wiles rolling her eyes. They disagree often - staffers joke about feeling like the children of quarreling parents - but Wiles, who hired LaCivita, pulls rank. What unites them, with each other and Trump, is an obsession with winning. To that end, Wiles and LaCivita have never been focused on beating Biden at the margins; rather, their plan has been to bully him, to humiliate him, optimizing Trump's campaign to unleash such a debilitating assault on the president's age and faculties that he would be ruined before a single vote is cast this fall.
At one point that March evening, the three of us sat discussing the era of hyperpolarization that Trump ushered in. Given the trench-warfare realities - a vanishing center of the electorate, consecutive presidential races decided by fractions of percentage points, incessant governing impasses between the two parties - I suggested that Electoral College blowouts were a thing of the past.
"I could too," LaCivita said. He was grinning.
In the scenario they were imagining, not only would Trump take back the White House in an electoral wipeout - a Republican carrying the popular vote for just the second time in nine tries - but he would obliterate entire downballot garrisons of the Democratic Party, forcing the American left to fundamentally recalibrate its approach to immigration, economics, policing, and the many cultural positions that have antagonized the working class. Wiles and LaCivita wouldn't simply be credited with electing a president; they would be remembered for running a campaign that altered the nation's political DNA.
It's a scenario that Democrats might have scoffed at a few months ago. Not anymore. "The numbers were daunting before the debate, and now there's a real danger that they're going to get worse," David Axelrod, the chief strategist for Barack Obama's two winning campaigns, told me in the first week of July. "If that's the case - if we get to the point of fighting to hold on to Virginia and New Hampshire and Minnesota, meaning the main six or seven battlegrounds are gone - then yeah, we're talking about a landslide, both in the Electoral College and in the popular vote."
Axelrod added, "The magnitude of that defeat, I think, would be devastating to the party. Those margins at the top of the ticket would sweep Democrats out of office everywhere - House, Senate, governor, you name it. Considering the unthinkable latitude the Supreme Court has just given Trump, we could end up with a situation where he has dominant majorities in Congress and, really, unfettered control of the country. That's not far-fetched."
In the course of many hours of conversations with the people inside Trump's campaign, I was struck by the arrogance that animated their approach to an election that most pundits long expected would be a third consecutive cliff-hanger. Yet I also detected a certain conflict, the sort of disquiet that accompanies abetting a man who is both a convicted felon claiming that the state is persecuting him and an aspiring strongman pledging to use the state against his own enemies. People close to Trump spoke regularly of his victimhood but also his own calls for retribution; they expressed solidarity with their boss while also questioning, in private moments, what working for him - what electing him - might portend.
At the center of the campaign, I would come to realize, is a comedy too dark even for Shakespeare: a mad king who shows flashes of reason, a pair of cunning viziers who cling to the hope that these flashes portend something more, and a terrible truth about what might ultimately be lost by winning.
Sources:
webcache.googleusercontent.comtheatlantic.com
rumble.com
100percentfedup.com
LaCivita has long conceived of the 2024 race as a contest that would be "extraordinarily visual" - namely, a contrast of strength versus weakness. Trump, whatever his countless liabilities as a candidate, would be cast as the dauntless and forceful alpha, while Biden would be painted as the pitiable old heel, less a bad guy than the butt of a very bad joke, America's lovable but lethargic uncle who needed, at long last, to be put to bed.
The public has responded to the two candidates precisely as LaCivita and his campaign co-manager, Susie Wiles, had hoped. The percentage of voters who felt that Biden, at 81, was too old for another term rose throughout 2023, even as the electorate's concerns about Trump's age, 78, remained relatively static. By the end of the primaries, the public's attitude toward the two nominees had begun to harden: One was a liar, a scoundrel, and a crook - but the other one, the old one, was unfit to be president.
In the months that followed, Trump and his campaign would seize on Biden's every stumble, his every blank stare to reinforce that observation, seeking to portray the incumbent as "stuttering, stammering, walking around, feeling his way like a blind man," as LaCivita put it. That was the plan. And it worked. Watching Biden's slide in the polls, and sitting on hundreds of millions of dollars for an advertising blitz that would punctuate the president's visible decrepitude, Trump's team entered the summer believing that a landslide awaited in the fall.
However, there is always a certain danger inherent to this assault on Biden's faculties. If Wiles and LaCivita were too successful - if too many Democrats decided, too quickly, that Biden was no longer capable of defeating Trump, much less serving another four years thereafter - then they risked losing an ideal opponent against whom their every tactical maneuver had already been deliberated, poll-tested, and prepared. Campaigns are usually on guard against peaking too soon; in this case, the risk for Trump's team was Biden bottoming out too early.
In my conversations with LaCivita and Wiles over the past six months, they assured me multiple times that the campaign was planning for all contingencies, that they took quite seriously the possibility of a substitution and would be ready if Biden forfeited the nomination. However, by mid-June, not long before the debate, their tone had changed. Trump was speaking at a Turning Point USA rally in Detroit and the three of us stood backstage, leaning against the wall of a dimly lit cargo bay, a pair of Secret Service vehicles idling nearby. When I asked about the prospect of Trump facing a different Democratic opponent in the fall, LaCivita and Wiles shook their heads. They told me it was too late; the most influential players in Democratic politics had become too invested in the narrative that Biden was fully competent and capable of serving another four years.
"We're talking about an admission that the Democratic Party establishment would have to make," LaCivita said. "We're talking about pulling the plug -"
"On the president of the United States," Wiles interrupted.
LaCivita nodded. "Who they've been saying up to this point in time is perfectly fine."
No, Wiles and LaCivita agreed, the general-election matchup was set - and they were just fine with that.
"Joe Biden," Wiles told me, allowing the slightest of smiles, "is a gift."
But now, as we talked after the debate, it was apparent that they might have miscalculated. Elected Democrats were calling for Biden's removal from the ticket. When I asked who Trump's opponent was going to be come November, his two deputies sounded flummoxed.
"Based off of the available public data," LaCivita added, "he doesn't look like he's going anywhere."
Biden quitting the race would necessitate a dramatic reset - not just for the Democratic Party, but for Trump's campaign. Wiles and LaCivita told me that any Democratic replacement would inherit the president's deficiencies; that whether it's Vice President Kamala Harris or California Governor Gavin Newsom or anyone else, Trump's blueprint for victory would remain essentially unchanged. But they know that's not true. They know their campaign has been engineered in every way - from the voters they target to the viral memes they create - to defeat Biden. And privately, they are all but praying that he remains their opponent.
I was struck by the irony. The two people who had done so much to eliminate the havoc and guesswork that defined Trump's previous two campaigns for the presidency could now do little but hope that their opponent got his act together.
Wiles and LaCivita are two of America's most feared political operatives. She is the person most responsible for Florida - not long ago the nation's premier electoral prize - falling off the battleground map, having spearheaded campaigns that so dramatically improved the Republican Party's performance among nonwhite voters that Democrats are now surrendering the state. He is the strategist and ad maker best known for destroying John Kerry's presidential hopes in 2004, masterminding the "Swift Boat" attacks that sank the Democratic nominee. Together, as the architects of Trump's campaign, they represent a threat unlike anything Democrats encountered during the 2016 or 2020 elections.
On the evening of March 5 - Super Tuesday - I sat down with them in the tea room at Mar-a-Lago, an opulent space where intricate winged cherubs are carved into 10-foot marble archways. As the sun set behind the lagoon that borders the western edge of Trump's property, the lights were also going out on his primary challengers. Soon the polls would close and the former president would romp across more than a dozen states, winning 94 percent of the available delegates and effectively clinching the GOP nomination. Trump had just one target remaining.
For an hour and 15 minutes, Wiles and LaCivita presented their vision for retaking the White House. They detailed a new approach to targeting and turning out voters, one that departs dramatically from recent Republican presidential campaigns, suggesting that suburban women might be less a priority than young men of color. They justified their plans for a smaller, nimbler organization than Biden's reelection behemoth by pointing to a shrunken electoral map of just seven swing states that, by June, they had narrowed to four. And they alleged that the Republican National Committee - which, in the days that followed our interview, would come entirely under Trump's control - had lost their candidate the last election by relying on faulty data and botching its field program.
In political circles, it's considered a marvel that Trump won the presidency once, and came within 42,918 votes of winning it a second time, without ever assembling a sophisticated operation. Trump's loyalists in particular have spent the past few years haunted by a counterfactual: Had the president run a reelection campaign that was even slightly more effective - a campaign that didn't go broke that fall; a campaign that didn't employ unskilled interlopers in crucial positions; a campaign that didn't discourage his supporters from casting votes by mail - wouldn't he have won a second term comfortably?
Wiles and LaCivita believe the answer is yes. Both have imported their own loyalists, making the campaign a Brady Bunch configuration led by the oddest of couples. Wiles, who runs the day-to-day operation, is small and self-possessed, a gray-haired grandmother known never to utter a profane word; LaCivita, a Marine combat veteran who charts the macro strategy, is a big and brash presence, famous for profane outbursts that leave Wiles rolling her eyes. They disagree often - staffers joke about feeling like the children of quarreling parents - but Wiles, who hired LaCivita, pulls rank. What unites them, with each other and Trump, is an obsession with winning. To that end, Wiles and LaCivita have never been focused on beating Biden at the margins; rather, their plan has been to bully him, to humiliate him, optimizing Trump's campaign to unleash such a debilitating assault on the president's age and faculties that he would be ruined before a single vote is cast this fall.
At one point that March evening, the three of us sat discussing the era of hyperpolarization that Trump ushered in. Given the trench-warfare realities - a vanishing center of the electorate, consecutive presidential races decided by fractions of percentage points, incessant governing impasses between the two parties - I suggested that Electoral College blowouts were a thing of the past.
"I could too," LaCivita said. He was grinning.
In the scenario they were imagining, not only would Trump take back the White House in an electoral wipeout - a Republican carrying the popular vote for just the second time in nine tries - but he would obliterate entire downballot garrisons of the Democratic Party, forcing the American left to fundamentally recalibrate its approach to immigration, economics, policing, and the many cultural positions that have antagonized the working class. Wiles and LaCivita wouldn't simply be credited with electing a president; they would be remembered for running a campaign that altered the nation's political DNA.
It's a scenario that Democrats might have scoffed at a few months ago. Not anymore. "The numbers were daunting before the debate, and now there's a real danger that they're going to get worse," David Axelrod, the chief strategist for Barack Obama's two winning campaigns, told me in the first week of July. "If that's the case - if we get to the point of fighting to hold on to Virginia and New Hampshire and Minnesota, meaning the main six or seven battlegrounds are gone - then yeah, we're talking about a landslide, both in the Electoral College and in the popular vote."
Axelrod added, "The magnitude of that defeat, I think, would be devastating to the party. Those margins at the top of the ticket would sweep Democrats out of office everywhere - House, Senate, governor, you name it. Considering the unthinkable latitude the Supreme Court has just given Trump, we could end up with a situation where he has dominant majorities in Congress and, really, unfettered control of the country. That's not far-fetched."
In the course of many hours of conversations with the people inside Trump's campaign, I was struck by the arrogance that animated their approach to an election that most pundits long expected would be a third consecutive cliff-hanger. Yet I also detected a certain conflict, the sort of disquiet that accompanies abetting a man who is both a convicted felon claiming that the state is persecuting him and an aspiring strongman pledging to use the state against his own enemies. People close to Trump spoke regularly of his victimhood but also his own calls for retribution; they expressed solidarity with their boss while also questioning, in private moments, what working for him - what electing him - might portend.
At the center of the campaign, I would come to realize, is a comedy too dark even for Shakespeare: a mad king who shows flashes of reason, a pair of cunning viziers who cling to the hope that these flashes portend something more, and a terrible truth about what might ultimately be lost by winning.
Sources:
webcache.googleusercontent.comtheatlantic.com
rumble.com
100percentfedup.com
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