JANESVILLE, Wis. — With the relationship between Paul Ryan and Donald Trump already increasingly fraught, POLITICO has learned that a group of former Trump campaign hands is quietly working to defeat the House speaker in his primary election next week.

More than half a dozen of Trump’s former campaign staff members or leading volunteer organizers from around the country — and many more local volunteers — have signed on to the long-shot campaign of Ryan’s primary challenger, businessman Paul Nehlen, who openly embraces Trump and casts Ryan as an impediment to Trump’s agenda.


While they were not sent by Trump — in fact, most of the staffers had been laid off by his shoestring primary campaign or left amid infighting — their re-emergence in Ryan’s Southeastern Wisconsin district is notable.

Nehlen’s relatively small campaign appears to have collected the largest concentration of former Trump staff and volunteer advisers, with some acknowledging they see the effort to defeat Ryan as a continuation of the bitter fight Trump waged against the GOP establishment.

The migration to Nehlen’s team also suggests that Trump’s presidential campaign may be spawning a new crop of operatives outside tight-knit GOP consulting circles. And it hints at the depth and persistence of the divide between Trump’s supporters and the party establishment.

Nehlen, in an interview conducted Tuesday during a break in door-knocking here in Ryan’s hometown, accused the speaker of taking “every opportunity to undermine Mr. Trump. He’s not been loyal to him.” And Nehlen asserted, “I think [Trump] has had it with that,” before adding quickly that he didn’t know for sure “because I’ve never talked to him.”

In fact, Trump, in a separate interview with The Washington Post on Tuesday, praised Nehlen’s campaign and declined to endorse Ryan’s.

But both Trump’s campaign and Nehlen’s bristled when POLITICO asked about the role of out-of-town former Trump staffers in trying to upset Ryan, whose campaign office declined to comment.

Pete Meachum, Trump’s Wisconsin state director, said in a statement “the only campaign that Trump staffers in Wisconsin are working on is to elect Donald J. Trump as our next President. Period.”

And Nehlen’s spokesman, Noel Fritsch, used misdirection to cut short the candidate’s interview with POLITICO when the subject of ex-Trump staffers was raised.

Fritsch escorted Nehlen into a campaign RV parked nearby and emblazoned with the words “Dump Paul Ryan,” explaining that the candidate would be “right back out” to resume the interview after the campaign verified the candidate’s door-knocking route.

But 10 minutes later, Fritsch emerged from the RV alone, and it drove away with the candidate still inside. “You know what, we have another interview,” Fritsch said. “We have a very, very busy schedule.”

While Nehlen trailed Ryan by more than 70 points in a May poll and has been outraised by Ryan $14.9 million to $868,000 through July 20, the upstart’s bid has become something of a cause célèbre on the populist right. He’s earned endorsements from the likes of Ann Coulter and Michelle Malkin. He’s fashioned himself as a mini-Trump of sorts, championing the same protectionist, anti-immigration rhetoric as the presidential nominee, and has benefited from mounting frustration among Trump’s supporters over Ryan’s less-than-enthusiastic support for Trump.

Nehlen was one of the few Republicans to come to Trump’s defense this week after the presidential candidate drew rebukes from across the spectrum for criticizing the parents of a slain Muslim-American soldier. And Trump in return tweeted his thanks to Nehlen, which raised eyebrows, given the efforts to project an alliance with Ryan.

Then, on Tuesday, Trump told The Washington Post he’s “not quite there yet” when it comes to endorsing Ryan and praised Nehlen for running “a very good campaign.”

The Trump-Ryan relationship could get even trickier later this week, when Trump is planning to stump in the state, even though his tentative plans call for an appearance in Green Bay, hours away from Ryan’s district.

It makes sense that former Trump campaign staffers, volunteers and voters would be drawn to Nehlen, said Stephani Scruggs, who was Trump’s director of field operations in Florida and is now a senior adviser for the Nehlen campaign, working mostly out of its Kenosha office.

“The Trump message — opposing [the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade pact] and working to close the borders — resonated with folks here. And that is Paul Nehlen’s message, so it was a natural progression,” said Scruggs.

Paul Nehlen, who is challenging House Speaker Paul Ryan in the GOP primary, talks with a voter on May 19 in Wisconsin. | AP Photo

She noted that, even though Texas Sen. Ted Cruz soundly defeated Trump in Ryan’s district in Wisconsin’s Republican presidential primary in April, there were some pockets of support for Nehlen.

Scruggs said she and other former Trump advisers now working for Nehlen “see Paul Ryan as a block to the Trump anti-TPP agenda. … That is the biggest reason we joined this campaign and rallied our friends and colleagues around it as well.”

A handful of other operatives who worked on Trump’s winning Florida primary campaign also made the trek north. They include Scrugg’s fiancé, Michael Bowen (a policy adviser for Trump and now for Nehlen), and former Trump regional field directors Andrew Stempki (now running Nehlen’s get-out-the-vote effort) and Derek Hankerson (Nehlen’s coalitions director).

Stempki said “I can't provide any comment on this topic — other than we’re going to win,” while Hankerson said he saw parallels between Trump’s campaign in Florida and Nehlen’s bid to oust Ryan.

“We won in Florida by defeating two favorite sons, and we’re about to defeat another favorite son,” said Hankerson, who said he left the Trump campaign in June “because in Florida we had the best team in the country, but were underappreciated.” He added, “Mr. Nehlen wanted the best, so we came.”

Stempki and Hankerson have been paid $8,000 and $9,500, respectively, by Nehlen’s campaign for political and campaign consulting from May through mid-July, according to Federal Election Commission filings. Hankerson continued drawing a salary from the Trump campaign through at least the end of last month, though campaign payrolls often lag weeks behind.

A pair of other ex-Trump hands are field organizers for Nehlen — John Hulsizer, who worked for Trump in Iowa, and Tania Vojvodic, a Texas activist who built pro-Trump online networks. There’s no indication that they’d been paid by the Nehlen campaign through July 20, the period covered by the most recent FEC reports, though campaigns sometimes pay operatives through vendor companies.

And Matt Braynard, who was laid off in March as digital director of Trump’s campaign, recently agreed to help the Nehlen campaign with analytics, according to two people familiar with the situation.

Nehlen’s campaign finance lawyer, Dan Backer, whose firm has been paid $8,000 for legal services by the campaign, is working to boost Trump by advising one of the pro-Trump super PACs jockeying for supremacy.

And the Nehlen campaign in April paid $12,500 for strategic consulting to the conservative Alexandria, Virginia-based public relations firm Shirley & Bannister. It has had relationships with various pro-Trump figures and conservative groups, including Coulter, who is expected to make an appearance for Nehlen this week, and the conservative website Breitbart News. It has closely covered Nehlen’s campaign, publishing a string of articles defending Trump, praising Nehlen and castigating Ryan.

Shirley & Bannister co-founder Diana Banister said her firm is no longer working for Nehlen or Coulter and did not set up Coulter’s appearance. “We did some early work with Paul when he first launched the campaign — national media and coalition outreach,” she said.

Hulsizer, Vojvodic, Braynard and Backer either did not respond to requests for comment or declined to speak.

Bowen, who along with Scruggs left the Trump campaign in March, said that Trump has emboldened a crew of anti-establishment operatives and activists who intend to stay active in politics.

“It all starts at the presidential level, but this is a movement that is bigger than Trump,” said Bowen. “We are deploying it down-ticket, and this won’t be the last one that we do, by any stretch. We’re ready to fundamentally change races.”

Some of the people who went to work for Trump had faced threats of blacklisting from establishment operatives and firms that for years have controlled lucrative party, PAC and campaign contracts with an iron fist. In turn, when Trump clinched the GOP nomination, his team signaled that it intended to withhold party consulting contracts from firms or operatives that had worked to undermine his campaign.

That could pave the way for some Trump loyalists to gain a serious foothold in the GOP consulting world, but Bowen said that’s not why he and his former associates are staying active in politics.

“We are a like-minded group, and we are hell-bent on changing the political system by taking it back from establishment politicians and consultants,” said Bowen.

