Annie Karni and Maggie Haberman

“We don’t trust Russia. We don’t trust Putin,” Haley said in an interview in July 2018, days after President Donald Trump met with the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, in Helsinki. “They’re never going to be our friend.”

By the time Haley left the administration nearly a year ago, she seemed to have perfected an almost impossible dance: distancing herself from some of the president’s most criticized positions while staying publicly loyal. She managed to leave on her terms and on good terms with the president.

It was a balancing act that did not go without notice, and Haley, a woman of color and a former governor of South Carolina, was widely seen as preserving her options for a return to politics, perhaps as a post-Trump presidential candidate.

Last summer, she challenged the president once more after he had trumpeted the fact that the Baltimore home of Rep. Elijah Cummings, a critic of Trump, had been broken into.

“This is so unnecessary,” Haley wrote on Twitter in August, infuriating the president, according to aides.

But now, Haley appears to have made the political calculation to go all in supporting the president, rather than defining herself in contrast to him.

In a media blitz timed to the release of her new book, “With All Due Respect: Defending America With Grit and Grace,” Haley has consistently echoed White House talking points about how there is no case for impeachment and unequivocally defended Trump’s character.

“In every instance I dealt with him, he was truthful, he listened and he was great to work with,” Haley told NBC’s Savannah Guthrie.

In her book, Haley does not criticize the president but does take on two targets who have fallen out of favor with him and with whom she clashed repeatedly: John Kelly, the former chief of staff, and Rex Tillerson, the former secretary of state.

She praises the president as a leader who always treated her with respect and describes an honest relationship in which he would sometimes change course based on her counsel.

In describing the announcement of her resignation in October 2018, when Trump praised her for her service, she writes that the president was “the man I’d seen many times, the man he too often doesn’t let the country see.”

She even tries to explain his continuing flattery of Putin, describing a conversation with him after the Helsinki meeting.

“To his credit,” she writes, “the president soon issued additional remarks, saying he had misspoken.” She adds: “I was glad he made that clarification, and I understood what he had been trying to do. He was trying to keep communication open with Putin.”

She also credits Trump with learning from the experience of Charlottesville, Virginia, and handling synagogue shootings in Pittsburgh and near San Diego “with great sensitivity and appropriateness.”

Haley’s loyalty to Trump’s view of the world has been rewarded with a presidential endorsement. “Make sure you order your copy today, or stop by one of her book tour stops to get a copy and say hello. Good luck Nikki!” Trump wrote on Twitter.

For Haley, an Indian American Tea Party activist who became a two-term governor of South Carolina known better as a voice of moderation on racial issues in the South, the reaction to her tweet about Cummings was a rude reminder of how she risks losing the Trump base when she puts distance between herself and the president.

Trump, aides said, wanted to respond to her himself but was talked out of doing it. Instead, Kellyanne Conway, a top adviser who is close with Vice President Mike Pence, shot back at Haley in a tweet that was sanctioned from the top. “THIS is so unnecessary Trump-PENCE2020,” Conway wrote, an allusion to the rumors that Haley had been positioning herself to replace Pence on the ticket in 2020.

Haley remains close with the president’s daughter Ivanka and her husband, Jared Kushner, and they warned her to be more careful talking about President Trump, according to two people familiar with the conversation. A spokeswoman for Haley denied such a warning.

Her subsequent pivot can be seen as a recognition of the reality confronting anyone contemplating a future in today’s Republican Party — there is little future after distancing yourself from Trump.

“It is Trump’s party today and, more likely than not, it will be Trump’s party 10 years from now,” said Kevin Madden, a political strategist and former adviser to Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign. “Trump will cast a long shadow over the party’s profile and will be a litmus test for the party’s most active base voters for years to come.”

For Republicans like Haley, Madden said, the relationship with Trumpism would continue to be a balancing act.

“Stray too far and you run the risk of inviting scorn from his biggest defenders,” he said. “Go lockstep with him and, as we’ve seen with the 2018 midterm test and the 2019 contests in key states like Virginia, the potential is there to alienate voters in suburbs who are making and breaking elections right now.”

Haley has been relatively removed from public life in the year since she left the administration. She joined the board of Boeing and is reportedly being paid $200,000 a speech on the speaking tour.

But her forays into politics show someone who is tacking toward Trump while leaving herself room for daylight between them in the future.

She has held a fundraiser for the president and plans to do more, according to an aide. Haley, who still lives in New York City but plans to return to South Carolina after her son graduates from high school, has also started a nonprofit organization called Stand for America.

The group’s website describes America’s prosperity being threatened by “socialist schemes” of higher taxes, regulations and “unsecure borders,” echoing the language and themes of Trump’s own reelection campaign. She has campaigned for Republicans like Sens. Joni Ernst of Iowa and Cory Gardner of Colorado.

But she also appears to be stirring the pot on Twitter in a way that is intended to grab Trump’s attention and stay in the news.

On Monday, she targeted George Conway, the outspoken, Trump-hating husband of Kellyanne Conway, who has drawn the president’s own ire.

“George Conway is the last person that can call someone ‘trash’. #Pathetic,’” Haley wrote on Twitter, criticizing Conway for an attack on Rep. Elise Stefanik, R-N.Y., who emerged during the first week of televised impeachment hearings as a moderate turned Trump defender.

“You’ll say anything to get the vice-presidential nomination, won’t you?” George Conway fired back.

Haley, who declined to comment for this article, has in the past denied that she is seeking to replace Pence.

But White House advisers loyal to Pence have long faulted Haley for stoking the rumors that she could potentially replace him on the 2020 ticket — something they see as beneficial to an out-of-office politician who needs a way to stay relevant until the next presidential race.

Some have noted with frustration that it was Pence who first advocated Haley joining the administration, even though she had been tacitly critical of Trump during her 2016 response to President Barack Obama’s final State of the Union address and had supported Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida during the 2016 Republican primary.

For now, friends said, with plenty of time for another pivot down the line, supporting Trump makes sense.

“Having that tweet from Donald Trump is going to be very, very important, promoting the book,” said Bakari Sellers, the former South Carolina state legislator who ran unsuccessfully for lieutenant governor and is now a CNN commentator. “She got what she wanted.”

Sellers, a Democrat who said he considered Haley a friend, said that in her balancing act he saw someone who had plenty of time to recalibrate. Haley, he predicted, would have a longer political story to tell.

“Donald Trump is going to be a footnote in her political career,” Sellers predicted. “It won’t be defining.”

This article originally appeared in

Haley More Than Closes Her Distance From Trump

WASHINGTON — During her two years serving in the Trump administration, Nikki Haley, the former ambassador to the United Nations, managed to toe a tougher line on Russia than her boss while also never straying from his good graces.

Trump barely set foot in the state during his 2016 campaign, and his field organization on the ground was nonexistent: The lone Trump campaign staffer working the state was moved to Colorado before Election Day. But Trump lost Minnesota to his former rival Hillary Clinton by a slim 1.5 percentage points, or less than 45,000 votes.

“We almost won it,” Trump said during a visit to a trucking company in a Minneapolis suburb earlier this year. The difference between a win and a loss, Trump said, would have been coming to the state to give “one more speech.”

This time around, the Trump campaign is determined not to let Minnesota go without trying. So Thursday night, Trump will arrive in Minneapolis, one of the most Democratic congressional districts in the country, for his first political rally since House Democrats launched an impeachment investigation that threatens to engulf his presidency.

It is a rare rally for Trump in a state he didn’t win in 2016 and takes him to the heart of opposition territory: the city in 2018 helped elect to the House Ilhan Omar, a Democratic woman of color who has become one of Trump’s favorite foils.

Trump’s rally at Target Center will be bolstered by a “Women for Trump” event hosted by second lady Karen Pence and Lara Lea Trump, the president’s daughter-in-law, on Wednesday in St. Paul. Vice President Mike Pence will hold his own roundtable nearby in Lakeville on Thursday.

Meanwhile, Brad Parscale, the president’s campaign manager, is planning to pour tens of millions of dollars into the campaign’s Minnesota operation, compared to the $30,000 the Trump campaign spent on the state last cycle. The campaign already has 20 paid staffers in the state and expects to expand to 100. And the campaign and the Republican National Committee are outspending Democrats by about 4-to-1 on digital advertising, according to both campaign officials and local Democratic Party officials.

“It is a full-on major effort state campaign,” said Tim Murtaugh, a Trump campaign spokesman. “And we will have the resources behind it to make it count.”

Minnesota Democrats say it feels like their state is a true battleground for the first time in decades.

“Over the last 25 years, I’ve never seen an investment as robust and deep this early by a Republican presidential candidate,” said Ken Martin, chairman of the Minnesota Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party. Martin said it is clear to him that “Trump and the Republicans believe they can win and are doing everything to make it so.”

Few states in the Midwest exemplify Trump’s strengths, such as popularity in rural areas, as well as his weaknesses, such as his shaky standing in suburban areas, the way Minnesota does. Which group turns out in bigger numbers could determine who wins the state on Election Day.

If Trump succeeds in flipping Minnesota’s 10 electoral votes, it will likely mean he has secured himself another four years in the White House. There’s no path to victory for a Democratic candidate that doesn’t include Minnesota, and Trump officials are eager to put Democrats on the defense in a must-win state. One campaign official compared the dynamic to Republicans having to spend resources to defend a Republican stronghold like Indiana.

But the changing makeup of the state has made Minnesota something of a microcosm for the Trump campaign’s challenge as it builds him a solid infrastructure nationwide: This time isn’t last time.

“This election is much more a referendum on him and his performance as president,” said Geoff Garin, a Democratic pollster. “He has managed to turn a lot of voters off through his conduct and performance. It’s hard to overcome that with field organizing.”

Garin noted that the suburban vote in Minnesota is much more significant than in neighboring Wisconsin, and Trump is consistently polling poorly in suburbs. “A variety of factors have taken it from being a closely contested state to much more of slingshot for Trump,” Garin said. “The kind of antics at his rallies that occur are unlikely to help him in Minnesota.”

To win Minnesota, Trump would have to win about 45,000 more votes than he did in 2016, while keeping Democratic turnout roughly the same as it was last cycle. A poll commissioned ahead of his visit Thursday by Alliance for a Better Minnesota, a group aligned with Democrats, showed that 49% of respondents favored an impeachment inquiry, compared to 44% who thought it was a bad idea.

The poll, conducted by Public Policy Polling, also found that 52% of respondents would vote for an unnamed Democratic opponent if the election were held today, compared to 42% who said they would vote for Trump.

“We had record turnout for a midterm election in 2018,” Martin said. “That was fueled in urban cores and suburbs. He’s going to have to do better than he did in the suburbs and exurbs, and we haven’t seen that happening.”

For their part, Trump campaign officials are more focused on the Iron Range, the mining communities in the northern part of the state. In 2016, for instance, Trump won the states’ 8th District in the north by 16 points. President Barack Obama won it by 6 points in 2012. That’s where Trump officials see an urban-rural divide that’s trending in their direction, while the election of progressive lawmakers like Omar has pushed voters further in the direction of Democrats in urban areas.

Iron Rangers in northern Minnesota have been fleeing the Democratic Party because of promises to end the fossil fuel industry, among others, according to local officials, who point to Rep. Collin Peterson, a Democrat, as an example of the state’s changing politics. Peterson, who represents Minnesota’s 7th District, won his race in 2012 by 26 points. In 2018, he eked out a victory with a much slimmer 4-point margin. In 2016, Trump won the 7th District by 31.5 points.

But the rural regions in the state have also seen a loss of population, while the suburbs, where Trump has done little to expand his appeal with voters, have grown.

This week, Trump tried to capitalize on the rural-urban divide by leaning into a fight with Jacob Frey, the Democratic mayor of Minneapolis, who wanted to charge the campaign about $500,000 for the extra security required to host the presidential visit. Framing Trump as a victim, his campaign accused the mayor of trying to shut down the rally.

In a statement, the campaign called Frey a “radical leftist mayor” who was “abusing the power of his office and attempting to extort President Trump’s reelection campaign by conjuring a phony and outlandish bill for security in an effort to block a scheduled Keep America Great rally.”

The campaign ultimately settled the dispute without paying the additional funds. It was not clear whether the city or the arena would be footing the bill instead. But some Democrats said they worried Frey had inflamed a real divide in the state, emboldening people to go see Trump after a Democratic mayor appeared to try and tell them they could not.

The heated back-and-forth hinted at the aggrieved tone Trump plans to strike at the rally Thursday night. “The lightweight mayor is hurting the great police and other wonderful supporters. 72,000 ticket requests already. Dump Frey and Omar! Make America Great Again!” Trump wrote Tuesday on Twitter.

Plan B After a Slim Loss: More Time in Minnesota

WASHINGTON — A Republican presidential candidate has not won the state of Minnesota since Richard Nixon’s victory there in 1972. But President Donald Trump has long viewed it as the one that got away.

The state parties have not formalized their decisions, but Trump’s challengers denounced the move. Joe Walsh, a former Tea Party congressman from Illinois who announced his candidacy last month, said he planned to fight the move legally and by appealing directly to voters in those states.

“It’s something a mob boss would do,” Walsh said in an interview. “All the times in 2016, when he said the Democrats were rigging the system to elect Hillary? He is actually eliminating elections in certain states, and that’s undemocratic.”

William Weld, a former governor of Massachusetts who is also challenging Trump for the party’s nomination, said he found the move concerning but not surprising.

“Mr. Trump has not been bashful about his desire to avoid primaries or even elections,” Weld said. “He spoke admiringly of Xi Jinping getting rid of elections and talks about a third term for himself, which he has to know is not lawful. This is something that would be appropriate in a monarchy.”

Other states could follow suit before the Oct. 1 deadline for state parties to file delegate selection plans with the Republican National Committee, campaign officials said. States that do not hold primaries still choose delegates, often by holding a convention. The plans to cancel primaries were first reported Friday by Politico.

The Trump campaign said there was nothing unusual about a move that was intended to help state parties save money on costly primary elections.

“These are decisions made entirely by state parties, and there are volumes of historical precedents to support them,” said Tim Murtaugh, a Trump campaign spokesman. “Nevertheless, President Trump will dominate and prevail in whatever contest is placed before him.”

Despite the outcry from Republican challengers who so far have gained little traction within a party in which Trump’s approval rating is consistently in the high 80s, blocking presidential primaries in some states is not unusual when an incumbent is running for reelection, officials said.

The Trump campaign pointed out that in 1992, when President George Bush was seeking reelection, Republicans canceled primaries in eight states, and in 2004, when President George W. Bush was running again, they canceled 10.

The campaign also pointed out that in 1996, when President Bill Clinton was running for a second term, Democrats canceled primaries in eight states, and in 2012, when President Barack Obama was running, they canceled 10.

“Whether or not to hold a presidential primary is a decision made by our state executive committee every four years,” said Drew McKissick, chairman of the South Carolina Republican Party. “There is strong precedent on the part of both parties to not hold a primary when they control the White House.”

Weld acknowledged the precedent but said the Trump campaign was taking it a step further. “This year the Trump people tried to cancel the first-in-the-nation primary in New Hampshire,” he said. “They did not succeed, but it shows you the lengths it will go to.”

But with the potential for more Republicans to enter the race — Mark Sanford, former governor and congressman from South Carolina, has been toying with a run — political strategists said there was also a case for the White House to confront the challengers head-on.

“Our policy in the past has always been, you’re an incumbent president, you have certain advantages, and you’ll probably be nominated again, but go out and win it,” said Ed Rollins, national campaign director for Ronald Reagan’s 1984 reelection effort.

For a year, Trump’s advisers have made moves to block any challenger from gaining traction, saying that incumbents who have faced debilitating primaries have gone on to lose in the general election, as President Jimmy Carter did in 1980 after a strong challenge from Sen. Edward M. Kennedy.

David Axelrod, who was President Barack Obama’s chief strategist in the 2012 reelection campaign, said that “obviously, any incumbent president works to forestall a primary challenge.”

“But cancellation of them?,” he added, “I don’t remember that being fundamental to our strategy. And I’m not sure that it bespeaks a great deal of confidence.”

GOP in Four States May Cancel Primaries, a Blow to Trump Challengers

WASHINGTON — The Republican parties in Arizona, Kansas, Nevada and South Carolina intend to cancel the 2020 presidential primaries in their states, according to three people familiar with their plans, a move aimed at depriving President Donald Trump’s long-shot challengers of chances to build support.

Walsh stands virtually no chance of wresting the Republican presidential nomination from Trump, whose approval rating with Republican voters is consistently in the high 80s, and whose political aides have been aggressively moving to tighten their control over state parties to thwart primary challenges.

But those encouraging Walsh, a Tea Party conservative who served one term in the House and went from staunch Trump supporter to acerbic critic, hope he can appeal to reluctant Trump voters who are open to an alternative.

In 2016, Walsh wrote on Twitter that he was voting for Trump, adding: “On November 9th, if Trump loses, I’m grabbing my musket. You in?” Now, Walsh is calling the president a “racial arsonist” and hoping to turn his fighter personality around on Trump to help defeat him.

Before his likely announcement, according to two people who have spoken with him, Walsh has hired a senior political adviser, organized meetings with high-profile Trump antagonists in New York City, and published an op-ed in The New York Times with the goal of previewing his campaign message.

Walsh has yet to definitively say whether he is running. “If I do it, it’s going to be before Labor Day,” he said in an interview.

Once an ardent and vocal critic of Hillary Clinton, Walsh said the breaking point for him came last year during Trump’s meeting in Helsinki with President Vladimir Putin of Russia.

“He lost me for good in Helsinki, when he stood in front of the world and said, ‘I believe Putin and I don’t believe my fellow Americans,’” Walsh said, framing a potential run as a moral imperative “to stick our necks out because when people see that, more and more people will.”

Walsh is being encouraged by William Kristol, the conservative writer and former editor of the now-defunct magazine The Weekly Standard. Kristol has been a “Never Trump” Republican since Trump was elected in 2016 and has been working hard over the past year to recruit someone to run against him.

Kristol said Walsh’s comfort with the in-your-face format of conservative talk radio makes him a potentially more effective combatant against Trump than someone like William Weld, the genteel former governor of Massachusetts, whose own primary challenge to the president has gained little traction.

“He has a different appeal than Bill Weld,” Kristol said. “The fact that he was a Tea Party congressman who voted for Trump in 2016 gives him an ability to speak to Republican primary voters that ‘Never Trumpers’ like me don’t have.”

Tim Murtaugh, a spokesman for Trump’s campaign, responded to a request for comment with two words about Walsh’s possible challenge: “Certain failure.”

But Lucy Caldwell, an adviser to Walsh, said she planned to make an appeal to “traditional campaign consultants who should look beyond fear of losing an RNC contract, and think about why they got into politics in the first place.”

Trump’s advisers have been mindful for over a year that primary challenges can expose weaknesses in reelection efforts, and can conclude with messy delegate fights on the floor of the Republican National Convention. Led by Bill Stepien, a former White House political director, they have been working to tighten their stranglehold on state parties to make it virtually impossible for any primary challenger to amass delegates.

Some Trump advisers are more concerned about a primary challenge than they publicly let on, as Trump faces more strain in the job than he has in many months. They are also aware that primary challenges can weaken incumbents in a general election. The most recent example was President George H.W. Bush, who faced a primary challenger from the right in 1992 from Patrick Buchanan, a former aide to Richard Nixon and a prominent conservative.

In Trump’s case, there is little to no space to his right for a challenger to occupy. And his lock on Republican voters has remained solid. But primaries can drain energy and resources, particularly when the president is increasingly focusing on distractions, like a feud with his 11-day communications director, Anthony Scaramucci, who has recently turned against his former boss, calling him a “demagogue” and encouraging Republicans to take a stand against him.

Some public polling has found that more than 40% of Republicans are open to a primary challenge to Trump.

“One of the things that is clear is that there is a high interest in an alternative,” said Sarah Longwell, a Republican strategist who has been working with Kristol on a group called Defending Democracy Together, to resist Trump from within the party.

“People say they like the economy and some of the things he’s doing on immigration and judges, but he’s divisive and doesn’t tell the truth,” Longwell added. “People have eyes. They’re very clear about who this person is. These are not the people who attend the rallies.”

Kristol, who acknowledged that he had made several efforts at recruiting a Republican to take on Trump, admitted that the race would be “David and Goliath,” with Walsh as the underdog.

“But I think he’s a good David,” he said.

In his New York Times op-ed, Walsh said he regretted some of the excesses of his own political career like questioning President Barack Obama’s “truthfulness about his religion” and expressing “hate for my political opponents,” noting “we now see where this can lead.”

He called Trump “unfit for office” and wrote that “in Mr. Trump, I see the worst and ugliest iteration of views I expressed for the better part of a decade.”

Walsh said he was aware of the challenges that he would face if he ran. Among them will be the almost certainty of losing his radio show.

“Unless you wash this guy’s feet every day,” he said, “it’s hard to keep a radio show or TV show in conservative media.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/21/us/politics/joe-walsh-trump-2020.html" id="6d97ee1c-add8-3627-a711-11a53f2339d3">The New York Times</a>.

A Former Congressman and Tea Party Republican Considers a Challenge to Trump

WASHINGTON — Joe Walsh, a conservative radio show host and former Republican congressman from Illinois, is expected to announce he is running for president as early as this weekend, presenting President Donald Trump with a challenger from the right his critics hope will weaken the president in the 2020 election.

<h1>WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump’s reelection campaign and the Republican National Committee said on Tuesday they had raised $105 million in the second quarter of this year, outraising President Barack Obama in the equivalent period during his 2012 reelection campaign and signaling that Trump will have far more resources than he did in 2016.</h1>

The campaign and the committee said that they had a combined $100 million in cash on hand, and that they had raised more money online in the second quarter than in the first half of 2018. Trump and his committees raised $54 million, they said, and the Republican National Committee raised $51 million, money that can be plowed into television and digital advertising, get-out-the-vote efforts and other activities related to the 2020 election.

While Trump may be trailing the Democratic front-runners in the polls, his second-quarter numbers were a reminder that as an incumbent, he has advantages that were unavailable to him as an untraditional, first-time candidate in 2016.

Trump rose to the presidency with fewer staff members and less money than his opponent, Hillary Clinton. This time, he will have the Republican Party’s fundraising mechanism, as well as the powers of the presidency, bolstering his raw personal appeal to his base, even as he tries to present himself as the outsider to the political establishment that he once was.

“A huge advantage the president’s got is, he’s the nominee, he’s the incumbent,” said Ann Herberger, a veteran Republican fundraiser who worked for Jeb Bush over several campaigns, including his presidential run. The Democrats, Herberger said, “are in the same boat that we were in 2016 — until their convention, it’s a food fight, it’s every man for himself.”

Trump campaign officials said they received 725,000 individual donations online, with supporters giving an average of $48 — small-donor enthusiasm that was unprecedented in Republican politics, according to a committee official, who noted it was the first time the Republican National Committee attracted a larger share of donations under $200 than the Democratic National Committee.

At the same time, as president, Trump also has command of the party’s donor base in a way he never did in 2016. The official said the Republican National Committee, which has taken the lead on fundraising for Trump’s reelection, overseeing the digital efforts and major donor events, also saw a large uptick in traditional party donors, which increased to more than one-third of the committee’s total fundraising since the last cycle.

The official report on the Trump’s campaign finances for the quarter, which will include spending, will be filed on July 15 with the Federal Election Commission.

In 2011, during the same period, Obama’s reelection campaign raised $47 million, and the Democratic National Committee brought in $38 million, Jim Messina, the Obama campaign manager, said at the time. The comparisons are not perfect because a 2014 Supreme Court case and other legal changes allowed candidates and parties to form joint fundraising committees that can accept single donations of hundreds of thousands of dollars.

The Trump campaign manager, Brad Parscale, called the $105 million a “massive fundraising success” based on enthusiasm for the president’s record, which Parscale said no Democratic candidate could match. He has said in the past that his goal is to raise $1 billion for the cycle among the various committees supporting Trump’s reelection.

The early fundraising totals are also a testament to the more professional operation working on Trump’s behalf both at the Republican National Committee and his campaign headquarters in Arlington, Virginia — a tactical element of the campaign that is separate from Trump. It is a sharp departure from how he ran his 2016 general election campaign as an underdog taking on a better-funded Democratic opponent, Clinton.

In that race, Trump funded his campaign with $66.1 million of his own money. He raised $86.7 million from donors who gave $200 or less, and $46.9 million from large individual contributions, according to campaign filings. In total, including his own money, Trump raised $350.7 million, far less than Clinton’s campaign, which raised $585.7 million.

The main effect of his early fundraising is the ability to stockpile large bundles of cash while Democrats are spending their money fighting each other.

“Democratic fundraising is getting a lot of attention, but the Trump campaign is slowly amassing a huge war chest, and unlike theirs, it won’t be spent trying to win a primary,” said Matt Gorman, a former adviser to the Jeb Bush and Mitt Romney presidential campaigns. “Events like debates or announcements that are cash cows for Democrats are just as helpful to Republican fundraising, too.”

Ronna McDaniel, the Republican National Committee chairwoman, said the fundraising allowed the committee to “identify troves of new supporters online and continue investing in our unprecedented field program.”

The committee and campaign plan to invest heavily in online advertising, the committee official said, in order to help build out their email and cellphone lists. So far, the official said, the Republican National Committee has spent close to $20 million on prospecting for new donors and is looking to spend more.

Trump’s campaign relied primarily on the Trump family to solicit online donations, blasting out appeals from the president, as well as from his adult sons, Eric Trump and Donald Trump Jr.; his daughter-in-law, Lara Trump; and from Parscale himself. One fundraising email featured a pitch from Newt Gingrich, the former House speaker.

Previous reports with the Federal Election Commission show that the Trump campaign and the party committee have spent roughly $17 million on legal fees, some of them related to campaign compliance. Other expenses relate to legal fees for members of the Trump family or officials who were connected to congressional inquiries and the special counsel’s investigation.

Even with a heavy legal overhead, the amount of money that was both raised and stored away will be daunting for Trump’s eventual challenger, underscoring the benefits of incumbency.

By comparison, the announcement on Monday that Pete Buttigieg, the mayor of South Bend, Indiana, and a Democratic presidential candidate, had raised $24.8 million in the second quarter was seen as a stunning number for a candidate who was relatively unknown six months ago.

Trailing Buttigieg was Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont, whose campaign said he had raised $18 million in the past three months.

Other campaigns in the large Democratic field have yet to announce fundraising for the quarter, although some saw an increase after the first primary debate, which was held last week over two nights in Miami.

“There’s a very real risk for Democrats that Trump is going to have the resources to define himself and our nominee in the spring before we can,” said Robby Mook, who served as Clinton’s campaign manager in 2016. “That’s a very real risk. It should worry us.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/02/us/politics/trump-fundraising.html" link="null" target="_blank">The New York Times</a>.

Reelection Bid Gets Hefty Lift of $105 Million

While Trump may be trailing the Democratic front-runners in the polls, his second-quarter numbers were a reminder that as an incumbent, he has advantages that were unavailable to him as an untraditional, first-time candidate in 2016.

Reelection bid gets hefty lift of $105 million

<h1>ORLANDO, Fla. — The crowd in the Amway Center, an arena that seats 20,000, cheered loudly as oversize screens hanging from the ceiling broadcast Fox News projections that Donald Trump would win Florida and Ohio — in 2016.</h1>

Die-hard supporters bused in from across the state Tuesday to celebrate the “official” kickoff of Trump’s 2020 campaign appeared frozen in time, reliving Trump’s surprise victory over Hillary Clinton nearly three years ago.

The evening rally, a supersize version of the “Make America Great Again” rallies Trump has been staging in red states since the beginning of his presidency, was meant to energize the president and consolidate support in a must-win state where Trump’s numbers are still softer than his advisers would like them to be.

But the vibe — the red caps and campaign slogan, a refreshed but familiar playlist featuring “Eye of the Tiger” and “My Way” on loop, an invocation by megachurch pastor Paula White — was that Trump and his supporters really wanted to relive their surprise victory.

“2016 was not merely another four-year election,” Trump said when he took the stage. Pointing to the press pen, he noted that it was “a defining moment in American history; ask them right there.”

He followed up with promises to “drain the swamp,” pausing as the crowd picked up the familiar refrain, and assurances that he was going to “build the wall.” He mentioned Hillary Clinton more than half a dozen times before he even acknowledged a single Democratic candidate running for president in 2020.

“Do you remember this?” Trump asked. “They called us deplorables. I think Hillary Clinton made a big mistake with that speech.”

Of course, they remembered. They were here to relive it. And so were members of Trump’s family as they lined up to warm up the crowd before his arrival.

Trump’s daughter-in-law, Lara Trump, who is married to Eric Trump, was the first, reminiscing about the now iconic escalator ride four years ago in Trump Tower when Donald Trump announced his candidacy.

“They thought it was a publicity stunt,” Lara Trump said of a disdainful news media. “Wasn’t it that much sweeter on Nov. 8, 2016?”

Her brother-in-law Donald Trump Jr. was more forward-looking, debuting his own nickname for former Vice President Joe Biden, “floppy Joe,” and previewing the line of attack the campaign hopes to use against Biden.

“The problem is, you’ve been in government for almost 50 years,” said the younger Trump, underscoring his father’s status as an outsider, despite occupying the Oval Office.

Ivanka Trump, the president’s older daughter, who introduced her father at his announcement four years ago, did not take a speaking role this time around but was greeted with cheers when her blonde hair became visible near the stage.

Aboard Air Force One en route from Washington, there was something of a throwback theme, as well. En route to Florida, Trump was accompanied by Kellyanne Conway, who served as his final campaign manager in 2016, and who is not part of his regular traveling entourage.

Sarah Huckabee Sanders, Trump’s departing press secretary who has been with Trump since his last campaign, wrote wistfully on Twitter that this was to be her final flight with the president.

Trump, for his part, surrounded by his family and the aides who were with him on his first improbable run, seemed ready to run the same campaign all over again.

He ended telling the crowd that the themes of his campaign had not shifted, and that the country was still in a dark place and in need of change. “Together we will make America wealthy again,” he said. “We will make America strong again. We will make America safe again.”

Whether the message will have the same effect as it did four years ago — when Trump’s reading the room and responding to the crowd was a novel and mesmerizing act — is an open question.

Unlike last time, some of his most avid supporters seemed to have exhausted themselves before the end of the show. By the end of Trump’s 76-minute speech, there were patches of blue seats visible across the arena. Some supporters had left the rally early, maybe because they had seen it before.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/18/us/politics/orlando-rally-trump-campaign.html" target="_blank">The New York Times</a>.

Die-hard supporters bused in from across the state Tuesday to celebrate the “official” kickoff of Trump’s 2020 campaign appeared frozen in time, reliving Trump’s surprise victory over Hillary Clinton nearly three years ago.

2016 all over again

<h1>His pitch to Democratic lawmakers was simple: He told them he was the person who could “land this plane.”</h1>

Buoyed by his success in helping pass a criminal justice bill, Kushner, a senior White House adviser, agreed to take the lead when the president asked him to find a way to end the monthlong stalemate. He hoped his experience winning over Democrats skeptical of the Trump administration during negotiations for that measure would produce a similarly successful conclusion.

But negotiating a broad immigration deal that would satisfy a president committed to a border wall as well as Democrats who have cast it as immoral proved to be more like Kushner’s elusive goal of solving Middle East peace than passing a criminal justice overhaul that already had bipartisan support.

For one, Kushner inaccurately believed that moderate rank-and-file Democrats were open to a compromise and had no issue funding a wall as part of a broader deal.

“If Jared Kushner thinks there is any daylight between House Democratic leadership and rank-and-file members on this issue, then the extent that he lands this plane it will land in the Alamo,” said Rep. Hakeem Jeffries, D-N.Y.

And Democratic leaders like Sen. Chuck Schumer, party officials said, did not believe Kushner had the power to circumvent Stephen Miller, a senior policy adviser to the president. In meetings, they also noticed, Kushner appeared to prop up Miller as an expert on immigration, noting that Miller’s reputation as a hard-liner was out of sync with his reasonable nature.

On Friday, President Donald Trump did what Kushner had privately insisted was not an option on the table: He folded.

Standing in the Rose Garden, Trump announced he was ending the standoff, during which he had failed to convince Democrats to fund a $5.7 billion border wall, and was reopening the federal government for three weeks.

It was a stunning setback for the president and for Kushner, who had told colleagues that public opinion would move to their side and that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., would emerge as the one who looked unreasonable and intransigent.

Kushner had advised the president against declaring a national emergency, which would enable him to get funding for his wall without approval from Congress. Instead, he ultimately pushed Trump toward the announcement he made Friday, supporting it as a way to buy more time to reach a deal.

Trump, White House aides said, has been frustrated at everyone around him for not delivering a deal he can accept. And he has become wary of his son-in-law’s advice on this issue, the aides said.

This account is based on interviews with more than a dozen congressional officials, White House aides and people involved in the immigration debate.

On Capitol Hill, aides said, Kushner had positioned himself as the person who could sell the president on a compromise, casting himself as a facilitator who did not lobby for details of any proposal but simply wanted to find a solution that both sides could claim as a victory.

Kushner has told Trump that he should spend the next three weeks trying to achieve a broader immigration package. That challenge has eluded both parties for years, but Kushner has suggested to colleagues that it is worth trying for, according to West Wing aides.

The president appears to have internalized the advice. “21 days goes very quickly,” Trump wrote on Twitter on Saturday morning. “Negotiations with Democrats will start immediately. Will not be easy to make a deal, both parties very dug in. The case for National Security has been greatly enhanced by what has been happening at the Border &amp; through dialogue. We will build the Wall!”

But Democrats said they do not believe that Kushner will have better luck drafting a larger deal in the next few weeks. “Unless he’s able to convince his father-in-law to abandon his obsession with building a medieval border wall, then he’s not going to be successful in finding a bipartisan agreement,” Jeffries said.

Sarah Huckabee Sanders, White House press secretary, noted that Kushner was still seen internally as one of the administration’s most successful negotiators, pointing to his involvement with the criminal justice bill as well as the new North American trade deal. “Jared is a key player in the administration and will continue helping the president accomplish his top priorities,” she said in an email.

But for now, Kushner appears to have few allies, occupying what people close to him describe as a no-win position.

Kushner finds himself with little sway over Democrats, who consider the substantial changes that the White House keeps proposing for asylum-seekers to be poison pills. And conservatives are not convinced Kushner is the right person to negotiate a deal. They recognize he has Trump’s ear, but worry he does not understand the fault lines of the debate or what proposals will anger Trump’s base. One proposal that was reviewed, which would give green cards to 700,000 young immigrants in the country illegally, enraged conservatives.

Within the White House, several aides said Kushner is not interested in opinions that vary from his, and tends to view people who disagree with him as problems, closing them out of discussions. People close to Kushner, however, speaking on the condition of anonymity, have described him as working well with West Wing colleagues, particularly legislative affairs Director Shahira Knight, a veteran of Capitol Hill.

But even Kushner’s allies concede that when it comes to immigration, he has not grasped the emotional nature of the fight the way he did when he tackled the criminal justice overhaul, an issue that was personal because of his father’s own incarceration.

Kushner, allies said, sees the $5.7 billion request for border wall money as reasonable, and has compared it to one month of troop deployments in Afghanistan. He views Pelosi as “trophy hunting,” or trying to take down the president politically with the shutdown.

Allies of Kushner say that not all of his discussions with Democrats have been publicized, and that he has gained trust partly because he keeps his conversations confidential. But on Capitol Hill, many Democrats said discussions on immigration have been scarce.

Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., was given no notice about Trump’s announcement last weekend in which he offered temporary protections for young immigrants in the country illegally in exchange for wall money, according to a congressional aide. Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., heard from Kushner only once, when he phoned before the president’s prime-time address from the Oval Office to warn him that the moment would move public opinion to the president’s side. Jeffries, who worked closely with Kushner on criminal justice reform, had no conversations about forging a bipartisan immigration bill.

Some Democrats, however, gave Kushner credit for at least trying to keep a dialogue going, even if it did not result in a compromise.

“We disagreed on the issue, but talking is essential in a divided government, especially if we want to solve any problems,” said Rep. Josh Gottheimer, D-N.J.

Confident negotiator, kushner finds immigration deal to be elusive

WASHINGTON — Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law, was confident in his ability as a good-faith negotiator who could find a compromise to end the government shutdown.

Confident negotiator, Kushner finds immigration deal to be elusive

Trump, speaking with reporters on the White House lawn before departing for the Army-Navy football game in Philadelphia, said he would announce a replacement for Kelly, perhaps on an interim basis, in the next day or two.

“John Kelly will be leaving — I don’t know if I can say ‘retiring,'” the president said. “But he’s a great guy. John Kelly will be leaving at the end of the year.”

The leading candidate to replace Kelly is Nick Ayers, Vice President Mike Pence’s chief of staff and a Republican political operative, who possesses the kind of savvy about campaigns that Trump has craved. Kelly, a career military officer before becoming Trump’s first homeland security secretary, lacked such experience.

Ayers, 36, has told Trump he would serve on an interim basis through the spring, when his family will return to Georgia, according to people familiar with the discussions. But Trump, who frets about the image of a White House in constant chaos, wants a full-time replacement and is eager for Ayers to stay for the duration.

If the president ultimately turns to another candidate, potential choices include Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin; his budget director, Mick Mulvaney; and the U.S. trade representative, Robert Lighthizer.

Kelly’s coming departure leaves Trump with an ever-shrinking team of close advisers as he begins to navigate the new power structure on Capitol Hill that will be ushered in next month when Democrats assume control of the House.

The chief of staff’s exit also adds another prominent name to the list of core advisers who have left after trying to manage the president through his nearly two years in office, often finding themselves shunned and sidelined for their efforts.

Kelly did not show up to work Friday. But Trump and Kelly met in the White House residence Friday night and hashed out the details of a departure that had been anticipated for months, according to people familiar with the meeting. Pence and Ayers also attended the meeting.

Kelly had planned to announce his departure to senior staff members Monday, but Trump pre-empted him on the South Lawn on Saturday afternoon.

Although the president had previously made a display of saying that Kelly, 68, would stay through the 2020 re-election effort, the chief of staff had been blunt with several people in the White House that he planned to make it only through the midterms.

WASHINGTON — John Kelly, the retired Marine general tapped as chief of staff by President Donald Trump last year to bring order to his chaotic White House, will leave the job by the end of the year, Trump said Saturday, the latest departure from the president’s inner circle after a bruising midterm election for his party.