Trump's Advisers Fretted About Letting 'Trump Be Trump.' He Won Anyway

Contributing sentiments towards policy:

62% : 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.
61% : Musk and Trump also spoke regularly, according to a source with knowledge of the conversations.
59% : "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.
57% : Malik, a former Democrat, is part of a group of rich tech investors who have shifted right and embraced Trump in recent years.
57% : Trump had opted for a lean ground game that targeted a specific universe: infrequent voters inclined to support Trump.
56% : 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.
55% : Two days later, a week before Election Day, Trump got a break - and ran with it.
51% : 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.
51% : "I have to do it my way," Trump told reporters a day after the North Carolina event, dismissing suggestions to alter his approach.
51% : And crucially, Trump was able to capitalize on voters' sour economic mood, which left them looking for a change in leadership.
50% : 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.
50% : Trump refused to debate his Republican rivals during primary elections, yet he still glided to victory as the party's nominee.
50% : 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.
50% : It was the economy, Fleischman argued, that in the final hours led undecided voters to break for Trump.
49% : Then, on July 13, Trump was grazed in the ear by a would-be assassin's bullet during a speech in Pennsylvania.
48% : That week, Trump announced his running mate would be Senator JD Vance, author of best-selling 2016 memoir
47% : Trump shouted.
40% : And the voters who identified the economy as their primary concern voted overwhelmingly for Trump over Harris -- 79% to 20%.
40% : As voters responded - some with support, others with sharp criticism - Trump succeeded in injecting immigration deeper into the race.
39% : Over the summer, a Musk-founded super PAC, an outside spending group that can raise unlimited sums, emerged to help Trump turn out voters.
39% : 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.
38% : 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.
36% : 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.
36% : 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.
34% : 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.
33% : Trump publicly promised to tap Musk to lead a government efficiency commission if elected.
32% : But this time, Trump did not fire the team.
31% : 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.
30% : The billionaire regularly dashed off posts supporting Trump and spread misinformation about voting to his more than 203 million followers.
29% : 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.
28% : 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.
27% : A campaign official who declined to be identified denied Trump threw papers and that campaign money was wasted.
26% : Stubbornly high prices weighed on voters, an issue Trump successfully pinned on Democrats.
26% : But Trump doubled down.
25% : Trump frequently put the spotlight on young white women allegedly killed by migrants illegally in the country.
25% : 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.
23% : 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.
23% : Harris' shortened campaign season narrowed the time she had to make her case to voters and launch attack ads on Trump.
23% : Those Americans, especially white, working-class voters in economically struggling towns, once again saw Trump as an anti-establishment figure who understood their grievances.
23% : In Pennsylvania in late October, Trump discussed the purported size of the late golfer Arnold Palmer's penis.
22% : YOU'RE NOT FIREDOver 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.
21% : Trump responded by hiring Corey Lewandowski, a longtime adviser who was fired during the 2016 campaign after clashing with other staff.
21% : On immigration, he quipped, Trump was "as dumb as a fox," referring to the animal known for its cunning.
20% : 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.
20% : Yet the rhetoric kept the spotlight on immigration, an issue that favored Trump more than Harris, according to opinion polls.
17% : "DUMB AS A FOX"As Harris retained a small lead in some polls in September, Trump leaned into dark rhetoric about migrants.
11% : 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.
7% : 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.

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