DONALD TRUMP’S 2024 PRESIDENTIAL CAMPAIGN is facing its biggest stress-test yet. And already the pressure is widening subterranean cracks of mistrust and rivalry.
The fault lines emerged rapidly as Trump’s VP pick, Senator JD Vance, struggled and reports emerged that “Trump allies” were second-guessing the selection. At the center of the friction is the familiar face of Kellyanne Conway—Trump’s longtime political adviser who has as much a reputation for tactical brilliance as for strategic leaking.
In interviews with The Bulwark, twenty Trump campaign staffers, allies, confidants, and advisers were quick to shoot down any notion that Trump was turning his back on Vance or was displeased with him amid his rocky rollout. But more than a dozen of those sources volunteered without prompting that they believed Conway, who initially opposed the selection of Vance, was undermining him through leaks to the press expressing doubts about his readiness and the campaign’s vetting.
Conway denied the allegations, calling the dozen anonymous accusers “gossip girls” and “ankle biters” jealous of both her success and her close relationship with the former president, who frequently consults her and gave her a speaking role at the Republican National Convention earlier this month. She said Trump insiders are talking about the situation, but she’s not instigating it or speaking ill of Vance or the campaign.
“When it comes to concerned people questioning the vetting or selection of JD Vance, the calls are coming in, not going out,” she said. “I’m not calling them and saying this is bad. People are asking me. They’re not just asking me. They’re asking lots of people.”
She said she tells people to train their fire on Vice President Kamala Harris and realize that Trump won’t turn his back on Vance because “he’s loyal. He was loyal to me. He’s a loyal guy. He sticks with things. And he knows firsthand, anybody would have been attacked and anybody picked would’ve been attacked, because he’s always attacked.”
But a Trump confidant who spoke in recent days about Vance with the former president felt sure that the inside-the-tent attacks are “100 percent from Kellyanne.” The chatter that Conway is secretly trashing the Vance selection has reached some of the highest levels of Trump’s team, including Vance himself and Donald Trump Jr.
“He’s pissed off about it. He knows it’s her,” a confidant of Trump’s eldest son said. But a Trump family member told The Bulwark that “the family in general thinks very highly” of Conway.
These sources requested anonymity so they could speak with The Bulwark candidly and avoid reprisal. Trump World insiders say this patch of turbulence feels more stressful than the GOP primary, Trump’s criminal and civil trials, and the assassination attempt.
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Donald Trump Jr., who has been close to Vance for years, tirelessly lobbied his father to pick the Ohio senator. Conway was pushing primarily for Florida Sen. Marco Rubio and, to a lesser extent, North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum, the favorite of News Corp. media mogul Rupert Murdoch, as The Bulwark first reported in June.
Eventually, Trump World itself split in two—into pro-Vance and anybody-but-Vance camps—with emotions running high toward the end of the VP selection process.
In a meeting at Fox News before Trump announced his selection of running mate, Conway, who joined the network as a contributor in 2022, said the former president would only “pick Vance over my dead body,” according to a source at the network. (This same source also relayed this account to Vance’s backers.) When Trump’s selection of Vance was announced on July 15 during the Republican convention, Vance backers were informed by alleged witnesses that they heard Conway lament the choice as a bad idea during a gathering in Milwaukee. Days later, as Vance came under fire from Democrats and the news media, a top operative who helps raise millions for Trump told Vance’s team about a call from a donor; apparently, on a phone call with the donor, Conway had trashed Vance and questioned the campaign’s vetting. The same source relayed the story to The Bulwark.
Conway denies each of the allegations. She said she believed that Rubio, a bilingual three-term senator and former presidential candidate, would have added more to the ticket, but now she backs Vance. She points to numerous public statements on the podcast she cohosts, The Campaign Managers, and her livestreaming show on Murdoch’s Fox Nation, Here’s the Deal, as evidence of her support.
“I’m not anti-Vance. I was pro-Rubio,” she told The Bulwark.
But at Milwaukee’s Trade Hotel next to the convention hall, conservative commentator Tucker Carlson, who backed Vance, fumed privately to others about Conway and South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham for lobbying so hard against the senator, calling them both “f*cking liars,” according to two witnesses. Carlson went on to savage Graham in an X post but publicly refrained from criticizing Conway.
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THE BREWING MISTRUST and ‘she said, they said’ public arguments echo the type of squabbling that marked past Trump campaigns. In Trump’s prior two presidential bids and during his term in the White House, MAGAville factions repeatedly vied for power and tried to undercut one another. It was a phenomenon partly fueled by a principal with a penchant for assembling teams of rivals—or, as one memoir that excoriated Conway as a leaker called it, a “team of vipers.” Trump churned through several campaign chiefs in 2016, when Conway eventually was elevated to the top post. She has remained a close Trump adviser, both official and unofficial, ever since.
What makes this third Trump presidential campaign different from the others has been its lack of staff drama, leaking, and infighting. That’s due in large part to the friendship of the top three leaders, Susie Wiles, Chris LaCivita, and Tony Fabrizio, who is a pollster like Conway. Fabrizio and Conway are not close after nine years of advising Trump together, but neither he, LaCivita, or Wiles would discuss Conway for this story.
Conway bristles at any suggestion she doesn’t have influence. She points out Trump frequently calls her and she gives advice “privately without compensation, expectation, or machinations.” Sometimes, Trump takes the advice, notably concerning his decision to back away from a TikTok ban in March. Other times, he sticks with his gut: He decided not to back a federal fifteen-week abortion ban Conway had advocated in summer 2023.
Because Trump still entertains so many circles of advisers, conflicts still erupt between the new and old guards of Trump World.
“This is less about the structure of the campaign and her angling to control it and more about how some of the outsiders and Kellyanne are trying to survive in a new world of peace for Trump,” said a top official involved in electing Trump. “This campaign is running along without drama. It’s the first time. But it doesn’t mean the old-school Trump people aren’t still doing their thing.”
LaCivita made that clear in a July 10 story in the Atlantic where he told Tim Alberta that the campaign was like a “360-degree shooting gallery” because “everybody is coming after you, internally and externally.”
LaCivita did some figurative shooting of his own in the piece by criticizing the Heritage Foundation and America First Policy Institute (AFPI) for their involvement in Project 2025, a massive Trump-administration-in-waiting blueprint. LaCivita suggested the groups were involved in a “grift” and called the endeavor a “pain in the ass,” according to CNN. The project became a millstone for the former president as Democrats linked him to some of its unpopular conservative policies.
Conway and a host of top Trump World figures are involved with AFPI and various aspects of Project 2025. And some of them privately complained to Trump about the campaign’s attacks on it. But Trump trashed it as “ridiculous and abysmal” July 5 on Truth Social.
After Project 2025’s director announced his resignation Tuesday, it only exacerbated the tensions between the campaign and outside Trump advisers and groups. A handful of high-profile social media supporters of Trump bashed LaCivita after he bid the project good riddance in a campaign statement.
“They made a whole lotta enemies at Heritage and AFPI over this, and that’s the intellectual DNA of the party now,” said another confidant of Trump’s who recently spoke with him. “So it’s combining with all this stuff about Vance, Harris. It’s a perfect sh*tstorm.”
In a written statement, Trump campaign spokesman Steven Cheung downplayed any talk of problems and said that “Trump is thrilled with the choice he made with Senator Vance to be his running mate. He called them “the perfect team to take back the White House.”
Cheung’s statement focused more on attacking Harris. And on that approach, at least, Conway agreed.
“It’s news to me that anyone connected with the campaign would spend their time anonymously attacking Kellyanne rather than aggressively attacking Kamala Harris,” she said, referring to herself and the vice president. “But if that’s true, I hope those who are over-jealous are not becoming overzealous and not allowing a rough news cycle to get them off their game. This is Donald Trump and JD Vance’s election to lose. And we need to win it. And in my business, you either are whining or winning. And I’m all for winning.”
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