In most election cycles, a candidate who knew negative stories were coming would have had a strategy to rebut them. In this cycle, Trump managed to make a bad situation much worse.

That's in part, the MSNBC report suggests, because Trump has no campaign. A traditional campaign involves a staff that collectively plans short- and long-term strategy with the candidate's approval. Weekly messages are planned, policy roll-outs and events to bolster the theme are developed, and the candidate's schedule largely follows from that. It's a circus, but there's a ringmaster.

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The impression left is that the Trump campaign staff are less ringmasters than the crew that has to clean up after the elephant's act. An act in which the elephant charges off through the crowd, knocking over tent poles and causing large parts of the audience to flee. He has one communications staffer, for example -- Hope Hicks, who joined the Trump Organization in August 2014. But then he has two guys who are jockeying to be the ringmaster of the clean-up crew -- Corey Lewandowski and Paul Manafort -- leading to tension.

The Trump campaign issued a press release in response to the MSNBC report, which is to say that Trump himself tweeted about it.

This tweet is more revealing than Trump realizes.

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Trump vascillates between embracing the idea of a big national campaign and rejecting it. His team has regularly indicated that it will grow as the general election approaches, but there's little sign that it's expanding outward very rapidly. The tweet above suggests that Trump would like the world to think that this is a good thing, smart strategy.

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The problem: It isn't.

Let's set aside the particulars of the MSNBC report and even the self-evident extent to which Trump's campaign's is incapabale of staying pointed in the same direction. Let's instead consider what needs to happen to win a national campaign.

Campaigns are about math. You need to figure out who's going to vote for you or who might be persuaded to do so and get those people (once persuaded) to go to the polls. In a presidential race, you need to do that in particular quantities in particular states to get the electoral college majority that's required. You need to simultaneously run a national and a very local campaign, with the latter acting as a sort of estuary for the great river that is the big-picture effort. Campaigns are fractals.

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Trump's idea is that his small (cheap) team can run the big-picture campaign that it ran in the primary and get the job done. Trump has eschewed the use of data targeting in the general election, suggesting that he can simply dominate media attention and Twitter to encourage people to go to the polls. And without expanding his staff outward significantly, putting people on the ground in swing states to coordinate local media and voter outreach, that's all he'll be able to do.

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This worked in the primary, but barely. He liked to talk about how he had figured out how to win a campaign, praising his team's get-out-the-vote efforts in New Hampshire, but he never really demonstrated any ability to do the sort of grinding work that such efforts actually require. Ted Cruz ended up running in second largely because his team focused on smart voter targeting; Trump's primary win was despite his small staff, not because of it -- overlaid with the failure of most of his opponents to run strong campaigns against him until he'd already racked up a number of wins.

The trend in recent presidential elections has been toward more unification from parties on behalf of their nominees. Barack Obama and Mitt Romney both got more than 90 percent of the vote from members of their parties according to 2012 exit polls, the first time that's happened since exit polling has regularly been conducted.

That would seem to play to Trump's advantage, but Trump is also a more controversial nominee than in years past, who has gotten a smaller percentage of the vote during the primaries so far than any Republican nominee since 1968. (Trump likes to talk about how he'll have received more votes than any Republican candidate in history, but he'll also be the most voted against.)

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Trump's position in the polls against Hillary Clinton at the moment is a function of Republican voters coalescing around his candidacy, but many of those Republicans are new converts to his cause. We would expect those Republicans to stick with him until November, but there's good reason to think that this year might be one in which a smart campaign would make sure that they do -- meaning targeting and outreach to lock down any part of the base that might be wavering.

All of this could change on a dime, as so often happens with Trump. He could decide to staff up significantly, quickly (though he also would need to either make a big personal investment or ramp up his fundraising to do so). He could suddenly become a candidate leading a traditional campaign.

But he has also been threatening to transition into the sort of candidate who doesn't do things like suggest that an Indiana-born judge is a "Mexican" who is biased against him. Ultimately, it's up to Trump to do what he wants -- which continues to be his problem.

Update: As if to put a fine point on this, Bloomberg reports on a Monday afternoon call between Trump, his staff and surrogates. An excerpt:

When former Arizona Governor Jan Brewer interrupted the discussion to inform Trump that his own campaign had asked surrogates to stop talking about the lawsuit, Trump repeatedly demanded to know who sent the memo, and immediately overruled his staff.

"Take that order and throw it the hell out," Trump said.

Told the memo was sent by Erica Freeman, a staffer who circulates information to surrogates, Trump said he didn't know her.