Donald Trump is scheduled to venture out of his Mar-a-Lago resort and conduct a swing of presidential campaign events later this month, ramping up efforts to secure the Republican nomination after facing hefty criticism over the slow start to his 2024 White House bid, according to sources familiar with the matter.
The former US president is expected to travel to a number of early voting states for the Republican nomination – the specific states have not been finalized – around the final weekend of January, the sources said, where he is slated to announce his state- level teams.
The move comes after a slow start to the campaign and an announcement speech at Mar-a-Lago that has been widely panned as “low energy” and inactive in terms of events, further knocking Trump’s political image after key Senate candidates he endorsed in November’s midterms faced embarrassing defeats.
That has apparently given enough confidence for a host of Republicans to prepare their own White House runs and though Trump says he believes a wide field will be beneficial, he seems set to face possible candidates including the Florida governor, Ron DeSantis, and ex-cabinet officials such as Nikki Haley.
Trump’s quick blitz of travel on his private plane is aimed at giving him something of a narrative reset, the sources said, as well as conveying a sense of swagger and the insurgency feel of his 2016 presidential campaign that he has told advisers in recent weeks he is determined to recapture.
The campaign has otherwise planned for Trump to gradually increase the number of political events this year, while it first spends time building out the wider political operation with the aim of starting to peak in activity at the start of election year.
The idea, the sources said, is to do the less glamorous but operationally necessary groundwork now, when Trump remains the only declared candidate for the presidency, to build as large a head start as possible for when DeSantis or others formally enter the 2024 fray.
In the weeks since Trump announced his candidacy at Mar-a-Lago last November, the campaign appears to have spent the majority of its time building its fundraising operation based off small-donor lists that his political action committees have amassed since 2016.
Trump has historically had among the best lists in politics and the team has started to transfer the rich data of names, email address, phone numbers and contributions histories over to the campaign.
The snag has been that the lists are technically owned by his Pacs, and the campaign has needed to find workarounds to access the data; for instance, Trump has raised money through another Pac that shares proceeds between an entity like Trump’s Save America Pac and the 2024 campaign.
The campaign has also focused on expanding the pool of potential donors, one source familiar with the matter said. In recent weeks, it has stepped up efforts to identify moderate Republican voters who have supported Trump politically but have not made contributions for possible ad targeting.
Trump has endorsed this strategy of completing the groundwork while he remains the only declared candidate for 2024, people close to the campaign said, and has largely shrugged off his initial anger at having the launch derided as “low energy” after a disappointing midterms for the GOP.
Still, Trump has remained attuned to criticism that the campaign had a slow start and appears to have taken steps to make the leadership team for his latest bid for the White House similar to the 2016 team, which featured a group of core aides and advisers.
The campaign is being helmed by Susie Wiles, the top political adviser to Trump for the past two years who helped him win Florida in his previous two presidential bids, and Chris LaCivita, a veteran strategist and former political director for the National Republican Senatorial Committee.
Both Wiles and LaCivita are considered seasoned political operatives who know how to run successful campaigns but Wiles in particular is expected to be an asset for 2024 as DeSantis considers a presidential run, given she previously worked as a top adviser for DeSantis.
The group of top aides also includes the former White House political director Brian Jack, former Trump 2016 campaign rapid response director Steven Cheung serving as the senior adviser for communications, Justin Caporale who helped create some of the most memorable Trump rallies in the past, and Trump’s in-house counsel Boris Epshteyn.
But even as Trump assembles what Republican operatives consider the gold standard for a presidential campaign team, whether he heeds their advice over the long term remains an issue.
The former president invariably turns to informal advisers on all topics and over the objections of his professional team, particularly when he finds people who might be willing to affirm his own ideas and impulses, or find him convenient exits from otherwise uncomfortable realities.
To be sure, part of the reason for Trump’s early 2024 campaign announcement was his own eagerness to begin a new campaign. But it was also a result of advice that declaring his candidacy might make the justice department less inclined to pursue criminal investigations or indictments against him.
That theory did not pan out, and the 2024 campaign launch led the attorney general, Merrick Garland, to appoint a special counsel whose prosecutors have in fact been even more aggressive and escalatory than before Trump announced his third bid for the White House, the Guardian has previously reported.
The legal blowback underscores how Trump at times has demonstrated a remarkable ability for self-sabotage, such as when he was waived off taking a meeting with the disgraced rapper Kanye West but did it anyway, and ended up also having dinner with the white supremacist Nick Fuentes.
Advisers have also wrestled with Trump’s impulses for airing grievances about the 2020 election, even when the topic was shown to be a loser in the midterm elections. But even at his campaign launch, Trump could not help himself, and discussed it at length in his speech.
