President Donald Trump’s refusal to hide reflects his unshakeable confidence that he’s the only one who can voters to turn out in November, allies say – and the reality that his base won’t abandon him, no matter what. | Evan Vucci/AP Photo
The president is heading out on the campaign trail as planned even as federal investigators delve into his businesses and campaign.
President Donald Trump is sticking with his ambitious midterm campaign schedule amid a cascade of scandal — a break from the typical pattern of politicians dropping out of sight in politically damaging moments.
The president will visit Ohio on Friday to speak at the state Republican Party dinner. He also is booked to do more than a half-dozen rallies and 16 fundraisers in as many as 15 states over the next six weeks, according to a person familiar with the plans.
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Trump’s refusal to hide reflects his unshakeable confidence that he’s the only one who can get them to turn out in November, allies say — and the reality that his base won’t abandon him, no matter what. He infamously boasted as a candidate in early 2016 that he could “stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose voters” — and since then has earned his “Teflon Don” reputation as his presidency has bounced from crisis to crisis.
“It’s really an important aspect,” said GOP pollster Chris Wilson. “You just don’t see in his core supporters any dip in that — no matter what happens.”
In the past week, his former campaign manager Paul Manafort was found guilty of tax evasion in Virginia and his longtime lawyer Michael Cohen pleaded guilty in New York to campaign-finance violations associated with payments made shortly before the 2016 election to two women — porn actress Stormy Daniels and former Playboy model Karen McDougal — who claimed they’d had affairs with Trump. On Friday, The Wall Street Journal reported that Trump Organization CFO Allen Weisselberg had been granted immunity in connection with the investigation into the payoffs.
Trump was briefly shunned after the “Access Hollywood” tape surfaced in October 2016, with Speaker Paul Ryan canceling campaign-trail appearances in the last weeks before the presidential election and dozens of others calling on him to step aside. But Trump has avoided the fate of his predecessor Bill Clinton, who was kept off the campaign trail after his affair with Monica Lewinsky.
To Trump supporters, the legal dramas represent the latest evidence of a “witch hunt” led by special counsel Robert Mueller, who has yet to directly charge Trump or anyone associated with his 2016 campaign with any crimes involving collusion with Russian operatives.
While Republican House consultants expect the torrent of legal dramas to give Democrats an immediate bump in the generic ballot, Trump’s track record of pushing Republicans over the line in swing districts and the unpredictability of the election cycle is bolstering their convictions that 2018 won’t be a repeat of 2006, when disillusionment over the Iraq war combined with a string of corruption cases involving Republicans helped Democrats gain 31 seats to retake the House.
“It was like chipping through concrete,” said a Republican operative involved in this year’s campaign, recalling the difficulty of persuading independent voters, women and seniors in 2006. “People were just locked.”
But this time, the electorate has proven more fluid with the rapid nature of the news cycle – from the school shooting in Parkland, Fla., to the sexual misconduct allegations against Republican Senate candidate Roy Moore to the fights on Capitol Hill over tax reform and repealing Obamacare.
“A week ago we were all talking about Omarosa,” the operative said. “Who knows what we’ll be talking about next week.”
White House and campaign officials are maintaining flexibility as the races shift, they said, and so Trump could go where he is most needed – particularly earlier House races in Georgia, Pennsylvania and Ohio.
“Whether that’s a visit, a tweet or a fundraiser, there are a lot of ways to handle these,” the GOP operative said.
Others pointed to Trump’s ability to survive political scandals that would have ended almost any other politician’s career, from the “Access Hollywood” tape in which Trump in 2005 brags about women in lewd terms to his seemingly endless insults — oftentimes about fellow Republicans. “His presidential campaign was supposed to end more than two years ago when he called out [Sen.] John McCain for ‘being captured’” in the Vietnam War, said GOP pollster Robert Blizzard.
But Democrats have been quick to jump on the legal woes threatening Trump, pointing to the Manafort and Cohen cases – along with corruption charges against California Republican Rep. Duncan Hunter, one of Trump’s earliest congressional supporters – as another reason they should be fearful.
House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, speaking at an event in San Francisco on Wednesday, said the three events in such close succession made her “sad for America … that they would do those things.” And she quickly seized on the “corruption” narrative in summing up one of her party’s most potent fall lines of attack.
The “culture of corruption, cronyism and incompetence is so pervasive and it’s in the White House,” she added. “What they are doing is stunning to behold.”
Even without the legal drama, some Republicans were already concerned about Trump’s mercurial approach to campaigning and questioning how disciplined he’ll be on the trail.
He made a last-minute endorsement Tuesday of Wyoming multi-millionaire Foster Friess, who wound up losing his gubernatorial primary – an embarrassing electoral result that echoed Trump’s failed late endorsements in a series of special elections, including Alabama’s high-profile Senate race last year.
“Look,” Trump told a raucous crowd in West Virginia late Tuesday, before Friess finished out of the money in Wyoming. “I don’t want to brag about it, but man, do I have a good record of endorsement.”
While Friess’ campaign was ecstatic about the president’s eventual endorsement, multiple Republicans close to the campaign said the bump that Friess got from Trump’s endorsement came too late.
A longtime Trump backer, Friess jumped in late to the gubernatorial race and had tried to score an earlier endorsement from the president to pair with the support of his son, Donald Trump, Jr. He also had hoped to get the president out to a rally in Casper, Wyo.
Trump was warned about the lack of an upside to wading into the race, with the other campaigns trying to dissuade the White House from getting behind any of the candidates, two Republican campaign officials said.
The White House did not respond to a request for comment.
Friess’s team only got wind the morning it came down, forcing them to scramble to highlight the support. Reached by phone Wednesday, Friess stressed how grateful he was for the Trumps’ support. Friess said he spoke with the president’s son earlier in the day, and gave him a message for Trump.
“I told Don [Jr.] that I wanted to double down on the support for the president, so he gets the kind of respect that he really deserves,” he said.
The president remains far more valuable in Senate races than House contests because of the different nature of the two maps – with the upper chamber largely being decided in states where the president won.
Trump is a major draw in Senate races across North Dakota, West Virginia, Montana and in states like Georgia, where “you see a change in the polling toward the Republican because he is able to motivate turnout amongst those presidential year Trump voters that might normally turn out in an off year,” Wilson said.
But even in districts where he is perceived as weaker, and a possible drag on Republicans, incumbents and some candidates in open seats have found a way to talk about the president’s woes without dissing him entirely.
Rep. John Katko of New York, running in a district carried by Hillary Clinton in 2016, told the editorial board of Syracuse.com and The Post-Standard that the president’s legal setbacks strengthen his resolve Mueller must be allowed to continue his investigation into Russian meddling. “It’s not a witch hunt,” he added.
Rep. Peter Roskam of Illinois has questioned how forthcoming the president has been while Rep. Carlos Curbelo of Florida criticized the president’s escalating assaults on the Russia investigation.
“It is a major mistake to attack the Mueller probe in such a personal way,” Curbelo said in a statement to POLITICO. “The best thing for everyone, especially if the White House is so confident that the president will be absolved in this process, is to let the process continue.”
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