INTERESTING: Inside Operation Trump, the Most Unorthodox Campaign in Political History. [archive]
His campaign lists 94 people on the payroll nationwide, according to the latest Federal Election Commission filing (Hillary Clinton has 765). Trump has no pollsters, media coaches, or speechwriters. Hefocus-groups nothing. . . .
“I’m the strategist,” Trump told me. Which would make him . . . one of the greatest political savants of the modern era. . . .
All his utterances are, by his account, spontaneous. “It’s much easier to read a speech, obviously,” he said. “I speak from the brain and from the heart in combination, hopefully in equal combination.” . . .
As much as his campaign appears off the cuff, Trump diligently laid the groundwork for his 2016 run over the course of several years, cultivating relationships with powerful allies in the conservative firmament and in the media, inviting them to private meetings at Trump Tower and golf outings in Florida, all the while collecting intelligence that he has deployed to devastating effect. . . .
“[GOP chairman] Reince [Priebus] called Trump thinking they were talking about donations, but Trump was asking him hard questions,” recalled Nunberg. From his conversations with Priebus, Trump learned that the 2016 field was likely to be crowded. “We knew it was going to be like a parliamentary election,” Nunberg said.
Which is how Trump’s scorched-earth strategy coalesced. To break out of the pack, he made what appears to be a deliberate decision to be provocative, even outrageous. “If I were totally presidential, I’d be one of the many people who are already out of the race,” Trump told me.