Washington: The Trump notion of branding is not cutting it in politics. As revealed in a slew of investigative pieces on the art of his deals, his modus operandi is to lend his name to a project that others fund.
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Trump: Orlando 'is just the beginning'
Trump tells a crowd in Las Vegas 'If you think Orlando was the end of it with this weak attitude and this pathetic president that we have, it wasn't.'
The Republican Party candidate does it for tower projects and golf courses; the upshot is that he gets a lot of money for not too much work. But to win the presidency, a candidate has to have more skin than ego in the game.
Donald Trump's poll numbers are going through the floor, but for all his "do-it-my-way" braggadocio, when his campaign needed an infusion of a piddling $US100,000 ($135,000) to fund advertising in battleground states, an "emergency" request was made to supporters on Saturday. The candidate would not, or could not write a cheque.
![Donald Trump applauds while speaking during a campaign event in Atlanta, Georgia.](/web/20160621064942im_/http://www.watoday.com.au/content/dam/images/g/p/l/3/l/5/image.related.articleLeadwide.620x349.gpmxl3.png/1466388018168.jpg)
Trump has made it clear that he intends to rely on the Republican Party machine to do the heavy lifting, supporting his candidacy with its on-the-ground staffing and data programs. If Trump was to pay his own way, it would cost him in the hundreds of millions of dollars.
After two weeks of Trump's tone-deaf response to the news of the day, Republican insiders feel they are watching a slow-motion train wreck in which it's not just the poll numbers that give them heartburn. Political observers are slack-jawed too.
In the considered judgment of The Washington Post, Trump is running a real-time experiment in a new form of presidential campaigning - and the early numbers suggest that the experiment is shaping up to be a failure.
At the moment it's as though Trump takes a hit in the polls every time he opens his mouth - and he insists on opening it.Â
![Donald Trump has previously called for a boycott on Apple products.](/web/20160621064942im_/http://www.watoday.com.au/content/dam/images/g/p/l/b/e/p/image.related.articleLeadwide.620x349.gpmxl3.png/1466388018168.jpg)
In late May, polls suggested a tight contest between Trump and Hillary Clinton, but the Real Clear Politics average of national polls now has the Democratic presumptive nominee a good six points ahead.
"There's no way to look at Trump's national polling that avoids the grim reality that he is at a lower ebb than any general election candidate has hit in the last three elections," the National Review's Dan McLaughlin wrote last week.
![An average of poll results show Donald Trump has taken a big hit in the past month.](/web/20160621064942im_/http://www.watoday.com.au/content/dam/images/g/p/m/x/l/n/image.related.articleLeadwide.620x349.gpmxl3.png/1466388018168.jpg)
And it's not just the contest with Clinton that looks bad for Trump. Compared with recent GOP presidential contenders, Trump rates consistently worse than George W. Bush in 2004, John McCain in 2008 and Mitt Romney in 2012.
Never mind the notional swing states that Trump needs to win - Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan and Wisconsin - Trump would have party HQ believe that he can also give Clinton a run for her money in states such as New York, California, New Jersey and Maryland. This is the kind of overreach that many analysts say is pie-in-the-sky thinking.
Yet Trump is staffing in New York, but not in Ohio, and, instead of focusing on the swing states, one of the Trump aligned super PACs is seen to be squandering money in national cable TV markets, instead of in local markets where it might make a difference.
His state-by-state campaign team, all up about 30 paid staff, is virtually non-existent, when compared with the Clinton machine and, as explained in an Associated Press report on Friday, Trump intended, in effect, to outsource his campaign to the Republican Party.
In what might well have been a stunt to bend the GOP to his view of who is in charge and who'll be picking up the tab, Trump rebukes senior Republicans for not helping in fundraising and warned that he might end his fundraising efforts for the wider party and pay his own way to get to the White House.
"I am raising a lot of money for the Republican Party, and there are a lot of beneficiaries of that. And I like doing it. But we have to have help," he said on Saturday.
"If the Republican Party, and I hope they all come together, because I want them to all come together, but if for any reason, they get a little bit like they don't want to help out as much, then I'll fund my own campaign. I'd love to do that."
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