(Reuters) - In the weeks after Vice President Kamala Harris’ rapid ascent to the top of the Democratic ticket, Donald Trump’s allies and advisers urged him to stay on message.
Polls showed Americans trusted the former Republican president more on the economy and immigration than Harris. All he needed to do, they reasoned, was stick to those issues.
He didn’t.
In the final months of the presidential campaign, Trump did it his way: diverging from prepared remarks, resorting to personal attacks, spouting anti-immigrant rhetoric, threatening retribution against rivals and ignoring advice from allies to stay focused on the issues.
As Trump sealed the presidential election, winning 279 electoral votes to Harris’ 223 by early Wednesday morning, the result wasn't just a win for him. It was also a triumph for the chaotic, scorched-Earth politics of Trumpism.
There were fewer leaks, less infighting and a more deliberate strategy honed by seasoned professionals this time than in Trump's prior two campaigns, to be sure. Yet his third White House bid ultimately drew its force from the candidate himself. In the final weeks, that included meandering, apocalyptic speeches, race-baiting attacks on Harris and strongman language at odds with America’s political institutions.
Reuters spoke to more than 20 Trump allies, advisers, donors and Republican operatives for a detailed account of how Trump managed to pull off a stunning comeback, becoming the first former president in more than a century to win a second term after leaving the White House.
The interviews reveal how he forged key alliances, including with tech billionaire Elon Musk, who spent at least $119 million on canvassing for Trump in the seven battleground states. He also resisted calls to fire senior campaign staffers, choosing to keep together a team that avoided the internal chaos of Trump’s previous bids. And he kept the spotlight on immigration, rather than abortion, where Democrats have an edge with voters.
Scott Bessent, a Trump donor and economic adviser, recalled meeting with Trump speechwriters in August to offer ideas for what the campaign was billing as a big economic speech in the battleground state of North Carolina. But when Trump got on stage, he essentially tore up the script, dropping some economic talking points, delving instead into the border and crime – and ripping into Harris in personal terms.
Bessent told Reuters he initially was caught off guard by Trump’s address. But the crowd seemed to lap it up. After hearing rave reviews from blue-collar workers later that day, Bessent said he realized the power of Trump’s political instincts.
"I have to do it my way,” Trump told reporters a day after the North Carolina event, dismissing suggestions to alter his approach.
Issues outside Trump’s control gave him built-in advantages. Harris' shortened campaign season narrowed the time she had to make her case to voters and launch attack ads on Trump. Musk's ownership of Twitter – now called X – offered a powerful platform for misinformation to go viral, including falsehoods about migrant crime that resonated with many voters.
And crucially, Trump was able to capitalize on voters’ sour economic mood, which left them looking for a change in leadership.
Stubbornly high prices weighed on voters, an issue Trump successfully pinned on Democrats. The inflation rate dropped sharply this year, but the easing came too late for Harris. Prices during the first 35 months of Democratic President Joe Biden’s administration increased 17.6%, nearly triple the 6.2% during the first 35 months of Trump’s 2017-2021 administration, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
“The major factor in Trump’s victory is that many people remember the pre-pandemic Trump economy as better for them than the Biden-Harris economy," said Republican pollster Whit Ayres.
A majority of voters said they trust Trump more to handle the economy, with 51% saying they did so compared to 47% for Harris, according to preliminary results from a national exit poll conducted by data provider Edison Research. And the voters who identified the economy as their primary concern voted overwhelmingly for Trump over Harris -- 79% to 20%.
Trump's hardline rhetoric on immigration and other issues, which many Americans see as unsettling, energized some of his supporters on a visceral level. Those Americans, especially white, working-class voters in economically struggling towns, once again saw Trump as an anti-establishment figure who understood their grievances.
"America has given us an unprecedented and powerful mandate," Trump said early on Wednesday to a roaring crowd of supporters at the Palm Beach County Convention Center.
The Harris and Trump campaign did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
CONFIDENT, THEN FURIOUS
Up until the summer, the Trump campaign was largely coasting.
Trump refused to debate his Republican rivals during primary elections, yet he still glided to victory as the party’s nominee. In May, when he became the first former U.S. president to be convicted of a crime, opinion polls barely moved, broadly showing him ahead of Biden in key battleground states.
On June 27, the Republican got a huge break when Biden performed disastrously in their first debate. Trump allies were suddenly talking about winning safe Democratic states such as Virginia and New Hampshire.
Then, on July 13, Trump was grazed in the ear by a would-be assassin’s bullet during a speech in Pennsylvania. His party rallied around him. Iconic photos – Trump’s face blood-stained, fist in the air – were hailed by supporters as a symbol of Trump’s strength, endurance and sacrifice. Musk, the chief executive of electric car maker Tesla (NASDAQ:TSLA), endorsed him later that same day.
The Republican National Convention a few days later had a triumphant air. Reuters spoke to several business executives and donors at the convention who hoped to land jobs in what they were sure would be a second Trump administration.
That week, Trump announced his running mate would be Senator JD Vance, author of best-selling 2016 memoir "Hillbilly Elegy” and a youthful advocate of isolationism, trade restrictions and strict abortion curbs. The pick brought few new voters into Trump's corner, underscoring the ex-president’s confidence that he was bound for victory.
Just three days after the convention, however, Biden announced he was dropping his re-election bid. Harris quickly emerged as the alternative, raising $100 million in two days – about the amount Trump had spent during his entire campaign to date – and unifying the Democratic Party almost overnight.
The Trump campaign appeared caught off guard. His team did not put out a statement for hours after Biden dropped out. And while the main pro-Trump super PAC, MAGA Inc, released an attack ad almost immediately, it took days before the campaign launched a major anti-Harris ad blitz.
“They were not prepared,” said one Republican operative close to the campaign, citing insufficient opposition research into Harris as an example.
Several aides and advisers said the campaign doubted Biden would drop out, after surviving pressure from fellow Democrats in the days after the debate. And if Biden did step aside, the Trump campaign expected a chaotic process to replace him, with a competitive convention or an abbreviated nominating contest possible, four aides and advisers said.
They were surprised by the speed of Harris' surge, aides said. Advisers spent valuable time, for instance, running advertisements through focus groups to gauge their effectiveness, according to one person with knowledge of campaign operations.
"While they were in the backroom mixing the paint, the Democrats were doing the painting,” said Jason Cabel Roe, a Republican strategist with contacts in the Trump campaign.
As Harris started to rise in the polls and fill arenas, Trump complained in private of wasting hundreds of millions of dollars to beat a man who was no longer in the race, according to two associates who spoke with him frequently. At one point, when Trump was handed polling figures showing Harris making gains, he cast the papers aside in disgust, according to one of the two Trump associates. When top advisers made suggestions to get his campaign back on track, Trump at times ignored or berated them, claiming they were unprepared for Harris’ rise, associates said.
A campaign official who declined to be identified denied Trump threw papers and that campaign money was wasted. "The results speak for themselves," the official said.
YOU’RE NOT FIRED
Over the summer, Trump and his allies grilled campaign managers Susie Wiles and Chris LaCivita about what went wrong, according to three sources close to the campaign.
A former Marine wounded in the 1991 Gulf War, LaCivita, 58, was a veteran of Republican campaigns at the federal and state levels. Wiles, 67, was a longtime Florida political consultant who worked on former president Ronald Reagan's 1980 campaign.
Up to that point, Wiles and LaCivita had won praise from Republican insiders for running a more disciplined operation than Trump’s past campaigns. Now, however, some of Trump’s allies questioned why the pair agreed to an early debate that upended a race they were on course to win.
Trump responded by hiring Corey Lewandowski, a longtime adviser who was fired during the 2016 campaign after clashing with other staff. Author of a book titled "Let Trump Be Trump," Lewandowski was known for supporting some of the ex-president’s most controversial instincts, including his tendency to lean into conspiracy theories.
Lewandowski’s mid-August arrival fueled a sense of paranoia in the campaign, operatives said. He began reviewing campaign expenses, according to three sources briefed on Lewandowski’s activities. He briefed Trump separately from the rest of the leadership team and advised Trump to shake up his top campaign brass, one of the operatives said.
Trump's previous two campaigns had been plagued by infighting and shake-ups. Some aides fretted that Lewandowski’s arrival would bring similar upheaval. But this time, Trump did not fire the team. “He handled it in a more executive way than he usually would,” said the operative close to the campaign. “Firing people would have been disruptive and would have caused a lot of ink. So he didn’t.”
Lewandowski and Wiles didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
“DUMB AS A FOX”
As Harris retained a small lead in some polls in September, Trump leaned into dark rhetoric about migrants. Some donors and advisers said at the time they feared the tactic would destroy his campaign by alienating independent voters. Yet the rhetoric kept the spotlight on immigration, an issue that favored Trump more than Harris, according to opinion polls.
At his Sept. 10 debate with Harris, their only face-to-face showdown, Trump repeated false claims that Venezuelan gangs had taken over swathes of a Colorado town. And he championed a false rumor that Haitians in Ohio were stealing and devouring their neighbors’ pets. "They're eating the dogs!" Trump shouted. "They're eating the cats!"
As those lines went viral, donors urged the campaign to focus on other issues.
But Trump doubled down.
After the debate, the screens at his rallies featured big slides flashing what appeared to be computer-generated images of Venezuelans in Colorado apartment buildings. “Migrant crime” became a hallmark of Trump's campaign, though academic studies show immigrants do not commit crimes at a higher rate than native-born Americans. Trump frequently put the spotlight on young white women allegedly killed by migrants illegally in the country.
The extreme rhetoric, though divisive, diverted attention from issues where Trump was vulnerable, such as abortion or the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol. While immigration has long been a hot-button social issue in the U.S., Trump spun it as an urgent existential threat, based largely on unfounded conspiracy theories. As voters responded – some with support, others with sharp criticism – Trump succeeded in injecting immigration deeper into the race.
As his polling numbers started to improve in October, some advisors and donors praised Trump: They now believed he had shifted the focus in his favor.
“I do think as clumsy and as weird as the animal-eating conversation has been, it did put a big magnifying glass on what is happening in some communities in the country that are being overwhelmed,” said Roe, the Republican strategist.
One advisor put it more bluntly. On immigration, he quipped, Trump was "as dumb as a fox,” referring to the animal known for its cunning.
NEW ALLIES: MUSK AND RFK JR
As Trump’s polling numbers stabilized in October, supporters worked in the background to broker alliances that helped him consolidate support in the battleground states, especially among young men who don’t regularly vote.
Trump donor and financier Omeed Malik helped secure former independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s endorsement after Kennedy dropped out of the race in August. Malik, a former Democrat, is part of a group of rich tech investors who have shifted right and embraced Trump in recent years. The Kennedy endorsement, Malik told Reuters, “helped build an alliance we haven’t seen in modern American politics.”
But no single figure did as much to boost Trump’s campaign as Musk, CEO of Tesla and SpaceX and the world’s richest man. Over the summer, a Musk-founded super PAC, an outside spending group that can raise unlimited sums, emerged to help Trump turn out voters.
As Harris held on to a small lead in some polls, some Trump donors and Republican political operatives had raised doubts not just about Trump's rhetoric, but also about the structure of his campaign. A common complaint centered on Trump's "ground game," the network of volunteers and employees who go door-to-door advocating for a candidate.
Trump had opted for a lean ground game that targeted a specific universe: infrequent voters inclined to support Trump. Senior Trump campaign staff had publicly described previous Republican door-knocking operations as bloated and expensive. In past elections, they said, Republicans wasted resources visiting people whose minds were already made up.
As the race tightened, Trump allies grew concerned that a weak swing-state operation could cost them the election, they said. One prominent Trump ally, Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, warned Trump over the summer that his ground game appeared almost non-existent in her state of Georgia, said a person close to both politicians.
A representative for Greene did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Musk poured at least $119 million into a Trump door-knocking operation, according to filings to the Federal Election Commission.
While Musk’s America PAC struggled to reach some of its door-knocking goals and faced fraud claims, the massive operation still helped Trump’s otherwise paltry ground efforts. Like much of the campaign, Musk’s operation was geared at motivating soft Trump supporters to head to the polls – not at persuading undecided voters.
Musk’s ownership of X also helped. The billionaire regularly dashed off posts supporting Trump and spread misinformation about voting to his more than 203 million followers. Musk and Trump also spoke regularly, according to a source with knowledge of the conversations. Trump publicly promised to tap Musk to lead a government efficiency commission if elected.
By October, Musk had set up camp in must-win Pennsylvania and was giving away $1 million each day to a voter who signed a conservative political petition. Only those registered to vote in one of the seven swing states would be eligible to sign the petition.
Musk did not respond to an email requesting comment.
THE ENDGAME
By the end of the campaign, Trump's rhetoric was turning angrier and more apocalyptic. He frequently warned of a global nuclear war should he lose. In the final weeks, he appeared to gain momentum in polls. With the race looking like a coin toss, he showed little restraint. He repeatedly warned of the “enemy from within” when referring to political opponents, words that Democrats denounced as dangerous and reminiscent of fascist rhetoric.
His speeches went off on increasingly odd tangents. In Pennsylvania in late October, Trump discussed the purported size of the late golfer Arnold Palmer’s penis. In a discussion with podcaster celebrity Joe Rogan a few days later, he mused about life on Mars and said he would like to be a “whale psychiatrist” when talking about wind energy.
Trump’s aides said he set the pace of his events and talked as long as he wanted, often in an unscripted style he called “the weave” – a meandering approach that he claimed always returned to his initial point.
At a rally at Madison Square (NYSE:SQ) Garden in New York 9 days before Election Day, a pro-Trump comedian called Puerto Rico a “floating island of garbage” – a statement that sparked an instant backlash and risked turning off the key Puerto Rican vote in crucial battleground states. The event was supposed to showcase Trump's broad-based coalition. Instead, opponents branded it a symbol of the bigotry voiced by some of his supporters.
Two days later, a week before Election Day, Trump got a break – and ran with it. Responding to the comedian’s insult, Biden seemingly referred to Trump supporters as “garbage.” Trump’s showman instincts kicked in. Looking to draw attention to the gaffe, he donned an orange safety vest and climbed into a garbage truck before a sea of cameras in Wisconsin. The moment went viral on social media, possibly distracting some voters from his vulnerable issues.
Beyond these erratic flourishes in the final days, however, Trump regularly made a point of asking supporters whether they were better off during his presidency or the current Biden-Harris administration.
In the end, a critical mass of American voters fell into one of two camps. They either positively embraced Trump’s dark vision, or they were willing to overlook it.
“If you were going to be turned off by Trump’s rhetoric, you’d already be a Harris supporter,” said Republican consultant Jon Fleischman. It was the economy, Fleischman argued, that in the final hours led undecided voters to break for Trump.
“Voters looked back and asked the question: Am I better off now than I was four years ago? And I think most swing voters said: ‘No.’”