Several reports hit the web on Monday that showed Trump's campaign is in complete disarray, as it is understaffed, unprepared and just flat-out inept compared to the well-oiled machine run by presumptive Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton.
Below we'll go through five big reasons that Trump's campaign is a disaster of epic proportions.
1.) Everyone on the Trump campaign hates each other.
Throughout his career, Trump has developed a style for encouraging rivalries among his employees under the theory that it will make them all strive to work harder. In a presidential campaign, however, this has created a situation where Trump's campaign staff is always jostling for influence and thus isn't focusing on crafting coherent messaging or strategy.
If you want evidence, look no further than this GQ profile of Hope Hicks, who serves as the Trump campaign's press secretary. In the profile, former Trump campaign adviser Sam Nunberg reveals how Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski -- whom the Trump campaign parted ways with on Monday -- made Hicks cry after she made a mistake by yelling at her, "You're fucking dead to me!"
Nunberg, over a controversy over some racist Facebook posts he wrote, also had some strong words for Lewandowski by saying, "I literally will suck the fucking blood out of his skull by the time I'm done with him."
Lewandowski, for the record, is so hated that even Trump campaign adviser Michael Caputo openly celebrated his firing on Monday:
2.) Trump's staffers can't even load the right versions of his speeches onto teleprompters.
Bloomberg reported on Monday that Trump's campaign had ghoulishly hoped to capitalize on the mass shooting in Orlando, but stumbled badly with a speech that was panned by both Republicans and Democrats alike.
Democrats in particular jumped on a gaffe in the speech where Trump said that Orlando shooter Omar Mateen was from Afghanistan, when in reality he was born in Queens, New York. It turns out that Trump said this because his staff didn't load the final version of the speech onto the teleprompter and instead loaded one that hadn't been corrected for obvious errors.
Sad!
3.) He's being outspent by Clinton in key swing states on an unprecedented scale.
As The Los Angeles Times reported over the weekend, Hillary Clinton is launching a $23 million ad blitz in eight key battleground states: Nevada, Colorado, Iowa, Ohio, Florida, North Carolina, Virginia and New Hampshire. How much is Donald Trump spending in these markets over the same period, you ask? The answer is: $0.
That's right: During a critical period in June before the conventions this summer, Clinton is nuking Trump with ads while his campaign is literally silent.
Trump in the past has insisted that he doesn't need to spend big on ads since he gets so much free air time from the major networks. That said, when the "free air time" consists of reports of him lobbing attacks on the "Mexican" judge overseeing the Trump University lawsuit, it may not be all that beneficial.
4.) Republican sugar daddies are starting to jump ship.
Major Republican donors are now talking to the media that they have grave concerns about the state of Trump's shambolic campaign. One GOP donor tells CNN that Trump's campaign needs "a massive, full body surgery type deal and we just don't have much time for that."
An RNC fundraiser tells CNN that Trump doesn't make the phone calls to major donors asking for cash that past Republican candidates such as George W. Bush and Mitt Romney made on a routine basis.
"There are very few people who like to do the ask, so I can understand why Donald Trump — first time at age 70 — doesn't want to make the ask," he told CNN. "He doesn't want to make the calls."
5.) The campaign has no centralized messaging apparatus -- and it's so desperate it's bringing Michele Bachmann's former campaign manager aboard to fix it.
If you've ever watched Trump surrogates squirm through interviews on TV, you won't be surprised to learn that the campaign has no centralized messaging apparatus. Indeed, we've seen Trump surrogates in the past even say that they can't speak on behalf of the campaign because they're not sure what their candidate actually thinks about given issues.
Bloomberg reports that the campaign has now made a key hire to get control of its surrogates' messaging: Keith Nahigian, who served as campaign manager for Michele Bachmann's failed presidential bid.
Bachmann, of course, was a famously undisciplined candidate who often drew media coverage for saying weird things -- remember, for instance, her insistence in 2011 that gay men had the right to get married in the United States so long as they decide to marry a woman. Or when she insisted that . Or when she warned that Hezbollah was creating missile sites in Cuba. You get the idea.
If anything, it sounds like the Trump campaign hired Nahigian because they needed someone adept at finding justifications for wild conspiracy theories that the candidate makes up on the fly.
