Trump campaign officials are trying to downplay controversial plans for 2025

Two top officials from former President Donald J. Trump’s 2024 campaign tried Monday to distance his campaign team from news reports about plans for what he would do if voters return him to the White House.

Susie Wiles and Chris LaCivita, who are in fact Trump’s campaign managers, issued a joint statement following a series of articles, many in The New York Times, about 2025 plans developed by the campaign itself and put forward by Mr Trump have been tracked down. Trump, as well as the efforts of outside groups led by former senior Trump administration officials who remain in direct contact with him.

Ms. Wiles and Mr. LaCivita focused their frustration on outside groups, which they did not name, that have devoted significant resources to drawing up staff lists and developing policies to benefit the next right-wing administration.

“The efforts of various non-profit organizations are certainly appreciated and can be extremely helpful. However, “none of these groups or individuals speak for President Trump or his campaign,” they wrote, calling reports about their personnel and policy intentions “purely speculative and theoretical” and “suggestions only.”

Mr. Trump’s team has tried to portray him as the most substantive policy candidate in the Republican Party. But according to several people with knowledge of the internal discussions, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss private conversations, Mr. Trump’s campaign advisers have become incensed over what they alternately see as borrowing by the groups, as well as headlines that are problematic for more moderate voters in a general election.

The statement noticeably did not go further than disavowing the groups and seemed intended only to discourage them from speaking to the press.

One challenge for the Trump team is that the most inflammatory rhetoric and proposals come from Mr. Trump himself.

For example, a June article in The Times examined Mr. Trump’s plans to use the Justice Department to retaliate against political opponents by ordering investigations and prosecutions of them, challenging the post-Watergate norm of investigative independence of the Justice Department versus the political control of the White House was eradicated. .

Mr Trump himself said in June: “I will appoint a real special prosecutor to go after the most corrupt president in the history of the United States of America, Joe Biden, and the entire Biden crime family.”

The Times recently published an extensive article about Trump’s immigration plans for a second term. He has promised what he called “the largest domestic deportation operation in American history” and has used increasingly toxic language to describe immigrants, including saying they are “poisoning the blood of our country.”

The Times article detailed plans for an immigration crackdown, based in part on a lengthy interview with Stephen Miller, the architect of the Trump White House’s immigration policies. The Trump campaign, after being approached by Times reporters about Mr. Trump’s immigration agenda, had asked Mr. Miller to speak to them.

President Biden’s 2024 campaign pounced on the article on immigration — which, among other things, detailed plans for mass detention camps — saying Mr. Trump was pursuing “extreme, racist, cruel policies” that were “intended to incite fear and To seperate us’.

Other articles in the Times focused on plans being drawn up by close allies of Mr. Trump, who held senior positions in his White House and are likely to return to power if he is elected.

These plans include efforts to increase White House control over the federal bureaucracy, which are being developed by, among others, Russell T. Vought, the director of Trump’s Office of Management and Budget.

But as The Times noted, Mr. Vought’s plans echoed statements Mr. Trump himself made in a video his campaign published on his website, including to swear to bring independent regulatory agencies “under presidential authority.”

The Times series also examined plans by Trump allies to recruit more aggressive lawyers, which are believed could be a boon to extreme policies. Mr. Trump fired the top lawyer at the Department of Homeland Security in 2019 over disputes over White House immigration policies and has purged key lawyers from his administration who had raised objections to his efforts to overturn his 2020 election loss.

Ms. Wiles and Mr. LaCivita’s statement on Monday said that “any 2024 campaign policy announcements will be made by President Trump or members of his campaign team. Policy recommendations from external allies are just that: recommendations.”