Donald Trump Bets the White House on His One-Man Show

When Ted Cruz dropped out of the Republican presidential race on May 3, surrendering the nomination to Donald Trump, he did so from a stage in Indianapolis. Cruz had been in Indiana all week, employing every tactic in the political playbook to try to pull out a win. He crisscrossed the state, blanketed it with ads, and used it as the backdrop for his announcement that Carly Fiorina would be his running mate. In the end, Trump beat him by 16 points and did so by ignoring every rule in that playbook. The presumptive Republican nominee didn’t even bother to fuel up “Trump Force One”—his Boeing 757-200—to join the Hoosiers who had delivered him a landslide. He chose instead to remain in Manhattan and give his victory speech in the lobby of Trump Tower from a lectern that read: “VICTORY IN INDIANA, New York City.”

Trump has gone further than anyone imagined he could by flouting the conventions of national politics. Often this was by choice. As he turns to Hillary Clinton and the $1 billion campaign she’s expected to run against him in the general election, it will also be by necessity. According to multiple people familiar with Trump’s campaign, he has no plan in place to raise a comparable sum—and doesn’t seem particularly inclined to try, anyway. “Do I want to sell a couple of buildings and self-fund?” Trump mused on MSNBC the morning after his Indiana victory. “I don’t know that I want to do that.” Instead, Trump is poised to attempt something radical and never before seen in a general election: a presidential campaign as a one-man show. Says his campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski: “This campaign has proven we can achieve things that others can’t.”