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Donald Trump’s VP rollout of Mike Pence shows his campaign is still a shambles

By Matthew Yglesias
Donald Trump Holds Campaign Rally In Indiana Photo by Aaron P. Bernstein/Getty Images

Donald Trump’s selection of Mike Pence as his running mate didn’t just seem chaotic; it really was chaotic, as made clear by the somewhat shambolic rollout.

As Politico’s Shane Goldmacher explains in an excellent series of tweets, the Trump political operation simply didn’t do any of the basic nuts-and-bolts digital campaign work that you would expect to do with a major announcement of this kind. The normal approach would be to make a decision, then get a whole bunch of supporting work done and in position, and then throw all the switches right after you announce.

But it didn’t happen.

Those two don’t really matter in a concrete way but just reflect a kind of basic disorganization. These next two, though, signal a lost fundraising opportunity for a campaign that could use some cash.

Then you just have a lack of internet best practices:

Nor was there any kind of media strategy:

There’s also a failure to keep faith with campaign loyalists:

Now, what I think Donald Trump would tell you is that he won the GOP nomination and is putting up respectable numbers in the general election without doing these so-called campaign basics. Maybe there is a corrupt and incestuous circle of professional political operatives and professional political journalists who want the world to believe — perhaps even personally want to believe — that the whole rigmarole of an expensive, highly professionalized political campaign is essential even as Trump is proving it isn’t true.

Or maybe in politics nothing matters unless the race is close, in which case everything matters.

The whole campaign is, for better or worse, a fascinating political science experiment.

The political science that predicted Trump's rise

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