
Trump team prepares for sprint to November with ‘all hands on deck’ approach
CNN
Fresh off a week of daily counterprogramming events and an effort to steal the spotlight from his new opponent, Donald Trump and his campaign are seeking to harness that pace in the lead-up to November — with plans to aggressively ramp up the former president’s schedule, hone his debate skills and cultivate a new ground-game strategy tied to the early voting states, sources familiar with the strategy shift told CNN.
Fresh off a week of daily counterprogramming events and an effort to steal the spotlight from his new opponent, Donald Trump and his campaign are seeking to harness that pace in the lead-up to November — with plans to aggressively ramp up the former president’s schedule, hone his debate skills and cultivate a new ground-game strategy tied to the early voting states, sources familiar with the strategy shift told CNN. The new approach is itself an acknowledgment that Trump’s campaign has struggled to adapt to the fast-changing political landscape after President Joe Biden ended his campaign less than four months before Election Day. Trump’s schedule going forward will look a lot more like the past week — when the Republican nominee visited a different battleground each day — than the 20 months that preceded it. Through November, Trump is expected to hold “several events each week, if not daily,” one adviser said, while another predicted the former president will regularly visit two states in a day. “Think Trump on steroids,” one said. “It’ll be all hands on deck.” The stepped-up schedule comes as Trump is also preparing for his September 10 debate with Vice President Kamala Harris. The former president is quietly meeting with Republican lawmakers, policy experts and outside allies in advance of the high-stakes showdown. The “policy discussions” — the Trump campaign’s version of debate prep — largely mirror the sessions the former president held in the weeks leading up to his June 27 debate with Biden, sources familiar with the meetings told CNN.

The White House is making clear it views President Donald Trump’s Friday Oval Office showdown with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky as an overwhelming win underscoring Trump’s “America First” leadership, dispatching top officials and allies on the airwaves to amplify Trump’s handling of the situation even as European leaders are putting on a key show of force of unity for Ukraine and its leader.