The infighting over the fate of a war room reflects the long-standing operational styles of the Trump White House and 2016 campaign over the past four years, during which personnel battles often overshadowed any well-honed strategy. The president has always preferred to run his White House with a team-of-rivals approach, with aides fighting over various policies or political options and Trump alone as the decider at the center of the action.

The impeachment battle may be no different.

“Have all of these geniuses been able to get this done for him? No, he gets it done for himself,” a former senior administration official said of the president’s approach to management.

A senior administration official said Trump is currently discussing his options with his family, aides and outside advisers, while another person close to the White House called it a “disorganized mess.”

White House press secretary Stephanie Grisham dismissed all of the jockeying as irrelevant. “The president has done nothing wrong and has been transparent throughout this entire process — that will not change,” she said. “We refuse to let partisan games and the media’s hysteria take away from President Trump and his administration’s work on behalf of the American people. There is much to be done for this country and that is what we are focused on.”

Trump appears to prefer acting as his own political strategist and communications director, even for the upcoming impeachment fight centering around his alleged attempt to persuade Ukraine’s government to investigate potential 2020 rival Joe Biden. He has spent the past several days speaking directly to reporters or prolifically tweeting about “presidential harassment” or Democratic House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff, all while trying to discredit the whistleblower whose complaint kicked off the investigation into his phone call with the Ukrainian president.

Trump spent Monday morning threatening Schiff with arrest for treason, while he spent the afternoon talking about unmasking the identity of the whistleblower whose actions and anonymity are protected under federal law.

“We're trying to find out about a whistleblower. We have a whistleblower that reports things that were incorrect,” Trump said Monday in the Oval Office during the swearing in of his new labor secretary, even though much of the whistleblower’s complaint tracks with the summary of Trump’s call with the Ukrainian president released by the White House last week.

The Trump team’s strategic calculation to beat back impeachment appears to center primarily on holding on to the support of Republicans. If there is a Senate trial, the White House cannot afford to lose more than 20 Republicans — provided all of the Democrats stand together on a conviction and his removal from office.

That’s a very different move compared with the special counsel investigation by Robert Mueller, whose authority extended to being able to charge Trump aides with crimes but who had no power to make a direct referral to Congress on impeachment.

Several White House aides and Trump allies spent Monday downplaying the threat of impeachment by saying the Democrats’ inquiry had only just begun or by playing up all of the policy discussions happening inside the administration. Other top Trump officials and outside advisers have dismissed the Democrats’ impeachment inquiry as political theater.

"We won the Mueller probe. We're going to win this one. Here we go! I tell you what. If Mueller was a war, this is a skirmish,” Jay Sekulow, one of the president’s outside lawyers, said on his radio show Monday.

Trump’s White House already has many of the mechanisms in place to battle impeachment. One White House official has said no additional hires are expected for handling the Democrats’ inquiry.

In the White House counsel’s office, Pat Cipollone started his tenure late last year by tapping Michael Purpura to lead a team of about 20 attorneys to handle Democratic oversight requests. Purpura and another White House deputy, Patrick Philbin, a veteran of the George W. Bush Justice Department, has made the transition into impeachment matters. Both lawyers personally attended former Trump 2016 campaign manager Corey Lewandowski’s appearance before the House Judiciary Committee, along with DOJ Office of Legal Counsel attorney Curtis Gannon.

Trump’s private attorneys also remain a key part of the action. There’s Sekulow, the chief counsel at the conservative nonprofit American Center for Law & Justice, who brings to the table his own team of lawyers.

That group includes Sekulow’s son, Jordan Sekulow, as well as Stuart Roth, the elder Sekulow’s longtime legal partner and a Mercer University law school classmate; former federal prosecutor and Georgia state attorney Andrew Ekonomou; and ACLJ senior counsel Benjamin Sisney.

On Friday, Jordan Sekulow leaned into the impending fight on his father’s radio show with a prediction that the House will impeach Trump.