With four months left to salvage his re-election campaign against presumptive Democratic nominee Joe Biden, President Donald Trump has decided to pivot heavily to culture war bluster and hard-right posturing. A major part of that pivot appears to be turning his anger on people who don’t like the same statues he does and comparing those enemies to Nazi “fascists.”

Shockingly, there are some in Trump’s political orbit who aren’t convinced this tactic will move voters as much as the president seems to think it will. They see the “pivot” as Trump simply continuing to rile up a conservative base that will not, by itself, deliver him a second term.


But for now, Trump isn’t listening, telling a crowd at Mount Rushmore in South Dakota on Friday night, “This left-wing cultural revolution is designed to overthrow the American Revolution.”

Two individuals close to the president told The Daily Beast last week that they believe devoting so much time and energy to defending lifeless statues—a kick that started with sticking up for ones honoring racist dead Confederates—will likely fail to help rejuvenate his sagging 2020 campaign and close the wide polling deficits that former Vice President Biden has opened up.

Both sources independently said they intended to gently implore Trump to take a different approach. One of the sources said they had already told Trump in recent days that making statue fetishization a cornerstone of the re-election pitch amounted to a “distraction” that wouldn’t help move the necessary votes into the president’s column by the election in November.

“The question now is: Is the statue shit going to work?” said a senior Trump campaign adviser, adding that current polling was “inconclusive” at best.

Reached for comment on Sunday, the Trump campaign’s communications director, Tim Murtaugh, said—in a statement knocking Biden for not being as passionate as Trump is about statue vandalism—that “there is a loud, visible, and sometimes violent faction on the extreme left that seeks to delegitimize America’s very existence.”

“President Trump has made clear he will not stand for that,” Murtaugh said. “By contrast, the first instinct of Joe Biden and his party is to agree with the agitators that there is something fundamentally wrong with America and that there always has been.

But several prominent Trump allies also expressed skepticism that the re-election team and White House’s statues strategy would help fix what’s wrong with the campaign, or at least said that the president himself should move on.

When asked if he thought the constant complaints about threats to statues would help right the ship, Ed Rollins, a veteran GOP strategist who fronts the pro-Trump group Great America PAC, tersely replied, “No.”

Lobbyist Barry Bennett, a former senior adviser to Trump during the 2016 race, said that though he believes it’s an important issue, he thinks the president “doesn’t need to say anything [about it]. Everyone is already talking about it… I would talk about jobs, jobs, and jobs. Five million people went back to work last month. Talk about them… The [statues] issue is playing out without him.”


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