Brutal week

Trump campaign spins a brutal week: This is fine

There's plenty of time to make up ground, campaign chairman Paul Manafort says. 

By Nick Gass

A double-digit deficit in the polls. Defections from prominent Republicans. Talk of a political "intervention" for the candidate, who boasted in an interview that he is "happy" with his statement refusing to endorse the speaker of the House in his primary.

That was Wednesday for Donald Trump and his campaign, which began Thursday on the defensive and staring down more negative numbers from a string of battleground state polls conducted in the days following Hillary Clinton's formal nomination. Trump trailed Clinton 49 percent to 39 percent in a Fox News poll out Wednesday evening and is looking at similarly dismal margins in surveys of likely voters in New Hampshire, in Pennsylvania and in Michigan -- states the Manhattan billionaire needs to win if he has any hope of securing an Electoral College majority in November.

His campaign's uniform response on Thursday: This is fine.

There's plenty of time to make up ground, insisted campaign chairman Paul Manafort 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 it's impressive, though not quite "record" haul of $80 million in July. "So, no, we’re feeling comfortable," he concluded.

What the campaign is not comfortable with, Manafort told CBS, is the media narrative of Democrats in command of the 2016 race -- though he acknowledged being surprised by the onslaught of negative polls.

As for Trump declining to endorse Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) in his primary, Manafort suggested to ABC's "Good Morning America" that the House speaker of the House 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 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 Arizona Sen. John 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 so-called "intervention" of 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 a 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."

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 as a political neophyte has "a little more of a learning curve than normally would the case," Giuliani continued, "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."