After a rocky week, Donald Trump's team projected confidence Thursday, with Trump, his running mate, his staff and his surrogates all sending the same message: The campaign is moving in the right direction — and it’s Hillary Clinton who’s in trouble.
Ben Carson and other surrogates are working to put Trump’s feud with a Gold Star family in the campaign’s rear-view mirror. Indiana Gov. Mike Pence is working to mend frayed fences with fellow Republicans after Trump offered a surprise non-endorsement to Paul Ryan ahead of his Tuesday primary. And Trump himself on Wednesday aimed to squash reports of campaign strife with assertions that the campaign is more unified than it has ever been.
Top Trump advisers and aides vowed that the candidate would pivot to more substantial issues like Clinton’s role in the Iranian nuclear deal, and the candidate himself acknowledged as much to a Florida TV station.
But while Trump’s team asserted they were moving in the right direction, a slew of polls — normally one of the GOP nominee’s favorite talking points — suggested otherwise.
Polls in Florida, New Hampshire, Michigan and Pennsylvania — battleground states Trump needs to win to have any chance at winning in November — showed him trailing Clinton substantial margins. Coupled with a national Fox News poll taken in the days following Clinton’s official nomination at the Democratic National Convention last week, the numbers suggested big trouble.
A new McClatchy-Marist poll released on Thursday puts Clinton 15 points ahead of Trump nationally, 48 percent to 33 percent. That's a surge from last month's edition of the survey, in which Clinton led Trump by only 3 points.
Trump foreshadowed the latest wave of dismal polling on Tuesday, when a CNN/ORC poll taken after the DNC showed him trailing by 7 points. "I think these polls — I don't know — there's something about these polls, there's something phony," Trump said. A day before, Trump similarly expressed a fear that the general election “is going to be rigged.”
Meanwhile, Trump's opponents continue to pile on. President Barack Obama on Thursday repeatedly took Trump to task in a press conference. The president suggested it was "ridiculous" for Trump to speak of rigged elections, suggested Trump was unfit to be in charged of nuclear weapons and even said that if Trump wanted access to classified briefings, he needed to start "acting like a president."
Trump's problems don’t stop at the numbers. A number of high-profile Republicans have in recent days withdrawn their support from Trump or, like retiring New York Rep. Richard Hanna, defected entirely to Clinton. And even in the face of intraparty tension over his refusal to support House Speaker Paul Ryan in his primary election, Trump showed no remorse.
“I was, you know, very forthright when I said, when I made certain statements," Trump told Florida CBS affiliate WPEC on Wednesday, in discussing his snubs of Ryan and Sens. John McCain of Arizona and Kelly Ayotte of New Hampshire. "And you know, I’m happy with them. We’ll see what happens. I think we’re going to do very well."
Trump's plan to refocus on Clinton seemed to go into action in part Thursday when he criticized Clinton over a report of money transferred to Iran under the supervision of the Obama administration, but Trump again put himself into the center of the story by claiming that he had seen a video of the cash exchange — a claim that has been widely debunked.
But even with wilting poll numbers and widespread GOP concern about the man the party nominated less than two weeks ago, there's plenty of time to make up ground, campaign Chairman Paul Manafort insisted in two television interviews Thursday morning.
"Usually campaigns don’t even start until September. We’re using August as a very aggressive month, however," Manafort remarked on "CBS This Morning." He cited the large crowd Trump had drawn in Florida the night before — even though the candidate himself had mused during that same Jacksonville rally: “I don’t know why we’re not leading by a lot. Maybe crowds don’t make the difference.” And he boasted about the campaign's announcement of 50 state directors — "everybody’s deployed and working" — and, he said, it's impressive, though not quite as impressive as the "record" fundraising haul of $80 million in July. "So, no, we’re feeling comfortable," he concluded.
And the campaign is working to refocus scrutiny on Clinton, especially with an emphasis on her role in orchestrating the beginnings of the nuclear deal with Iran after it was reported this week that the United States secretly delivered $400 million to the Iranian government on the same day four American prisoners were released.
Pence peppered his address Thursday morning with multiple shots at Clinton and President Barack Obama, making note of the money sent to the Iranian government on the day of the prisoner release. Clinton and Obama, he declared at a stop in Raleigh, North Carolina, “essentially put a price tag on every American” who goes abroad.
Manafort told CBS that he rejects the media narrative that Democrats are currently in command of the 2016 race — though he acknowledged being surprised by the onslaught of negative polls.
Pence, who has tried as Trump’s running mate to bridge the divide between the blunt businessman and the GOP grass roots, got called out on his role Thursday morning by an 11-year-old boy in North Carolina.
“I’ve noticed you’ve been softening up on Trump’s policies and words. Is this going to be your role in the administration?” the boy asked Pence, who replied: “Sometimes things don’t come out the way that you mean them.”
Explicitly tying the media and the Democratic Party together as having mutual interests and methods, Pence observed, “I mean the media, and the Democrats, they all have the same problems.”
Pence added, “They all keep telling each other the usual methods are going to work against him, they keep thinking they’ve done him in, they think this is over, we finally got him, and they turn on the TV the next morning and Donald Trump is still standing and fighting in front of thousands of people, and he will make America great again.”
And Pence publicly broke with Trump and endorsed Ryan in his primary on Wednesday, saying that Trump himself encouraged him to support the speaker.
Manafort suggested to ABC's "Good Morning America" that the speaker need not worry. "Of course, he's gonna work with Paul Ryan, of course he's trying to bridge the party together, but Ryan is also running against somebody who's not going to win but nonetheless is a strong supporter of Mr. Trump's," Manafort mused. "So it's not just in Paul Ryan's district. That gets all the notoriety because he's the speaker."
In any case, Trump campaign officials said, it wouldn't be prudent to endorse Ryan, anyway. Manafort told ABC that the campaign has "sort of had a rule of not getting involved in primaries because it's usually not a good situation for the presidential candidate." (Trump endorsed Rep. Renee Ellmers (R-N.C) in her special primary election in June, which she lost.) Trump co-chair and policy adviser Sam Clovis suggested to CNN's "New Day" that it would not be an "appropriate move" to endorse primary candidates, pointing to McCain's "strong" opponent in former state Sen. Kelli Ward.
Senior communications adviser Jason Miller sounded a note of frustration on "Fox & Friends," calling "absolute pure fiction" multiple reports about a so-called "intervention" for Trump with Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich and former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani.
Giuliani singled out Gingrich for using the word "intervention" "in a memo that got around" during a discussion on Fox Business Network.
"What a ridiculous word. An intervention is for a drug addict and it's for someone who's an alcoholic, and I've had to do them with people at times. There's nothing wrong with them, if that's the case. Donald Trump doesn't drink or smoke, by the way. We don't have that problem," Giuliani said. Gingrich did not return a request for comment.
"A lot of this talk is just silliness coming from Washington or coming from the Clinton campaign," Miller said. "And I’ve got to give the Clinton camp credit. They’ve done a pretty good job of working their contacts in the media, you know, pushing a lot of this."
“Not all networks and news outlets are quite as fair and balanced as Fox News," he added.
While not disputing that Trump's continued reluctance to endorse Ryan has created a complication for the campaign, both Miller and Manafort emphasized the point that their boss is running a campaign with little precedent.
"I think the important thing to keep in mind is that Donald Trump is more different from any other candidate," Miller said on Fox News, going on to lay out what he suggested will be the Republican nominee's winning argument: "What kind of justices do we want nominated to the Supreme Court? Do we want to stop an Iran nuclear deal? Do we want to lower taxes, reduce regulations? So Republicans who want to stop this — otherwise — we don't want eight years of Hillary Clinton. That would be disastrous. Think about what the country would look like if we have eight years of Obama and then Hillary Clinton. It’d be a disaster."
Still, the RNC remains “frustrated” with Trump, said one person who is close to Priebus – who described the current situation as “unfathomable.”
Several RNC officials suggested that the party might need to consider diverting resources away from the presidential race and toward key House, Senate, and governors races. With concern mounting about the party’s congressional majorities, the sources suggested that Trump had until Labor Day – about a month from now – to turn things around.
Such a drastic measure would be similar to what happened during the final weeks of the 1996 presidential contest, with the GOP shifted funds away from Bob Dole’s flailing campaign toward congressional battles. One RNC official described the blueprint as “Plan B.”
Yet within the party, there’s rampant confusion about where things stand. One GOP official said they’d reached out to Priebus in hopes of figuring out what was happening within the Trump campaign but hadn’t heard back.
Trump surrogates insisted reports of the candidate's struggles were misguided.
The past week has even been "good for Trump," Giuliani said at another point during his Fox Business appearance. "My father taught me to be a boxer. And the only way you find out how good a boxer is when you hit him in the face the first time. Or when he gets knocked down the first time.”
“Donald Trump I think is positioned very, very well," the former mayor said, adding that “the fundamentals remain the same. America wants change desperately. America doesn’t want Hillary Clinton."
While conceding that Trump's campaign is "evolving" and that Trump, as a political neophyte, has "a little more of a learning curve than normally would be the case," Giuliani added: "But you get bad weeks and good weeks.”
"Tough couple of days," Giuliani concluded later in the same program. "But that’s what’s gonna happen when you’re breaking eggshells."
