I expect his finances are going to be a primary concern for this new, more mainstream campaign staff. Riding the populist wave seemed to be his last campaign manager's only real plan, and it got the campaign to the nomination stage and surprised everyone. But it's still a long way to November, and that time has to be filled with ads, campaign stops alone won't do it. And ads take serious cash. My guess is Trump is either unable or unwilling to personally invest in his own campaign. Both are a bad sign for Trump. I can't blame him. From a business perspective he's looking at maybe a total loss of $100 million worth of advertising if personally contributes his money and doesn't win. In politics it's always better to use someone else's money, and so he's going to try to fund raise. The problem is, his behavior during the nomination has closed him off from a lot of donors. So he may be forced to choose between risking his own capital to make up the deficit, bowing to the wishes of Republican moderates so he can get put back on the money life line, or just seeing if he can make it on the absolute bare minimum, which his new advisors will tell him is not feasible when you're going up against HDawg and a motivated democratic base who may hate you worse than they hated Bush.
That's actually kind of a dream of mine, to see a candidate go through the general election without having to play the multi-million dollar advertising game. A campaign that could be run just through social media. Of course that all still costs money and you're just shifting your platform to a new medium who also has expectations of getting paid. But I feel like television advertising and its relationship to politics has always been a dirty one, driving the $ of running a campaign through the roof. I'd be nice to see a lean, grass roots campaign utilizing the internet as its primary platform for reaching people succeed in American politics. I think it'd inject another dose of uncertainty into the bloated, money-rich system we've been operating under for decades, and maybe force a little more honesty out of people. Like, internet debates using Face Time where there's not a moderator constantly getting into the dialog and a crowd reaction to play to. (Can't imagine a Twitch-style text section would even be feasible.)
If nothing else it'd make for some golden memes.
I'm... I'm pretty convinced at this point that Trump doesn't really want to be president, folks. At least not enough to put any actual effort in.
I think it's evidence that Trump is a shitload less dynamic and smart and hands on than he'd have you believe. This paints him as someone that is essentially being steered by others rather than steering themselves.