In early February 2023, Miller, the CEO of right-wing social media platform Gettr, joined the campaign as senior strategist and messaging guru. With Miller and spokesperson Steven Cheung driving the message, the campaign started to change the news cycle. Trump visited the town of East Palestine, Ohio, weeks after a train derailment caused a disastrous chemical fire. Cameras captured Trump handing out bottles of Trump spring water and McDonald’s hamburgers to the community. In a well-covered speech, Trump blasted the Biden White House for not sending enough aid. “That was a turning point,” the campaign adviser said.
But no one represented Trump’s drama-free campaign more than Chris LaCivita. In October 2022, the 56-year-old Marine veteran, who has a shaved head and linebacker build, joined the campaign as senior adviser. LaCivita is a practitioner of the political dark arts. During the 2004 presidential election, he advised the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth group that smeared John Kerry’s Vietnam War record. It was a supreme act of chutzpah: Kerry’s opponent, George W. Bush, never served in Vietnam. LaCivita is more than a street brawler. He has a Talmudic understanding of primary rules. Last summer, LaCivita lobbied state Republican parties to change their processes to favor Trump. (For example, he convinced the California GOP to apportion all delegates to the winner.) “While everyone was dicking around last year, the Trump people were changing all these party rules, getting their people in place, changing the battlefield,” a top GOP strategist said.
Trump benefited from a GOP primary crowded with inept candidates. His closest challengers, DeSantis and Nikki Haley, spent months attacking one another instead of rallying around a single candidate with the best chance of beating Trump one-on-one. But Trump’s political resurgence was also powered by the most unlikely fuel: his criminal indictments.
In December 2022, about 60 percent of Republicans wanted to nominate someone other than Trump, according to a CNN survey. In March 2023, Trump’s numbers shot up after the Manhattan district attorney Alvin Bragg indicted him for falsifying business records to hide the hush-money payment to porn star Stormy Daniels. Trump denies that the affair took place. Weeks after the New York indictment, Trump led his closest challenger, DeSantis, by 35 points, according to Five Thirty Eight. Later that summer, Trump was indicted in three more jurisdictions: in Florida federal court for allegedly hiding classified documents at Mar-a-Lago and for obstruction in the retrieval of the documents; in Washington, DC, federal court for allegedly preventing the peaceful transfer of power in 2020; and in Georgia state court for trying to overturn Biden’s victory in 2020. By September 2023, Trump led DeSantis by 45 points.
The criminal charges helped solve Trump’s messaging problem. Prior to the indictments, Trump was a one-line artist singing a tired tune that the 2020 election was stolen. But the dozens of felony counts gave him new material. He cast himself as a political martyr being prosecuted by the Biden White House. And there was the added benefit that his defense lawyers took up a large part of his schedule, leaving less time to stoke new controversies. “He’s so distracted with the legal stuff, that’s why the campaign is smooth,” a Republican close to Trump said.
On March 2, The New York Times published a poll that sent waves of panic crashing through the Democratic Party: It showed Trump beating Biden by five points in a head-to-head contest. With Trump ahead as the general election kicked off, speculation naturally turned to a Trump second-term agenda. In politics, they say policy is personnel, and this is especially true in Trumpworld. Trump values relationships and his family more than someone’s position in a West Wing org chart. To understand what Trump 2.0 might accomplish, you have to look at who in the MAGA-verse is angling to populate his administration. “There’s a total jockeying operation,” a former White House official said. “It’s a clearly defined formula: Go on TV and say nice things about Trump and beat up his enemies. He’s following very closely.”
So far, the horse race to be Trump’s running mate has gotten the lion’s share of attention. Names being floated include Senator J.D. Vance, Senator Tim Scott, Ben Carson, Congresswoman Elise Stefanik, Governor Kristi Noem, and former Fox News host Tucker Carlson. One campaign staffer told me Carson is “ascendant.” Carson, the retired neurosurgeon and former Trump cabinet official, has been loyal to Trump since 2016. The campaign’s view is that he could motivate Black voters to break with Biden (the recent Times poll showed Trump support from Black voters jumped to 23 percent from 4 percent in 2020).
Multiple sources I spoke to stressed that Trump’s number one staffing criteria is loyalty. It is widely assumed that Trump’s campaign advisers would occupy major West Wing roles. But the executive branch is a vast apparatus. According to sources, Trump has set up a vetting operation run by Johnny McEntee, his first-term director of the White House presidential personnel office. “McEntee is HR. He is so close to the president,” a campaign staffer told me. Last May, McEntee joined the right-wing Heritage Foundation’s 2025 Presidential Transition Project. According to Heritage’s website, the initiative will “vet thousands of potential applicants in advance of Jan. 20, 2025, when the next president takes office.” Trump needs a long list because he has vowed to purge 50,000 civil servants and stock federal agencies with political appointees. According to the Brookings Institution, Trump’s plan would be “the most fundamental change to the civil service system since its inception in 1883.”
Inside the Trump campaign, McEntee is well-liked—and feared. “Johnny has a lot more access to Trump than anybody else does,” the campaign staffer said. Paranoia about leaks ratcheted up in November when the Times published a shocking piece detailing Trump’s plans to build detention camps for undocumented migrants. “There was a lot of examination about whose fingerprints were on that article,” the source said.
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