Trump returns to his comfort zone on the campaign trail to bounce back from his blundering summer

After a long, hot summer full of economic turmoil and bitter personal Twitter feuding, President Donald Trump and his team of advisers are hoping to bounce back with an ambitious campaign push in the coming months.

As the 2020 campaign season kicks into high gear, the Trump campaign is planning on playing to Trump's strengths with lots of campaign rallies in the fall, according to a recent report in Politico.

Trump's long, blundering summer of 2019 included, among other things:

Republicans and people to close to the White House lamented to the Washington Post that Trump had "squandered" his summer altogether between all the economic upheaval of the trade war and months of personal attacks on his enemies - despite the White House pointing to what they saw as big accomplishments.

Read more: Americans are rapidly losing confidence in the economy, robbing Trump of his biggest asset for 2020

One Republican donor told the Post that instead of taking advantage of the relatively quiet summer to actually resolve the trade war or work on a concrete policy accomplishment, he "fanned the flames of the trade war, attacked Baltimore, 'the squad' and the Federal Reserve, and failed to add a cornerstone achievement to his 2020 election credentials."

While Trump frequently struggles to meet the demands and norms of his office, being on the campaign trail without the bureaucratic constraints of government allows him to create his own narrative and captivate crowds with his grandiose - and often exaggerated - promises and accounts of his administration's own success.

Trump performs best in campaign mode, and could turn his bad summer around

Throughout his entire presidency and especially over the summer, Trump has blurred the lines between campaign rallies and official events on multiple occasions, including his taxpayer-funded 4th of July celebration and a speech at a Shell petrochemicals facility in Western Pennsylvania.

Next Monday, for example, Trump is traveling to North Carolina both to monitor the effects of Hurricane Dorian in the state and to host rallies for Republican candidates in special House elections in the state's third and ninth congressional districts.

At this point, Democrats may feel optimistic that Trump has public opinion against him in much of the country, holding net negative approval ratings in several 2020 battleground states including Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Iowa, Ohio, Arizona, and North Carolina, according to Morning Consult.

But as Politico noted, Trump already has a far more centralized and beefed-up campaign operation than any 2020 Democrat and can start general election campaigning as Democrats work out their primary.

Read more: Trump's trade wars could cost him support among rural voters in the battleground states he barely won in 2016

Trump is a salesman and an entertainer at his core, and the setting of campaign rallies allows Trump to captivate attendees with the bombastic, freewheeling communications style that powered his career as a reality TV star and a real estate executive - and stoke fear of his opponents.

While the trade war will be hard to positively spin to many voters, Trump campaign officials told Politico that the rallies will allow Trump to highlight other, more popular accomplishments including his nomination of conservative judges to the federal courts, tax cuts, and immigration crackdowns directly to the electorate.

As Democrats are battle it out in the primary that could last all the way until June 2020, Trump already has the institutional backing and the fundraising prowess of the Republican National Committee on his side.

In 2019's second quarter alone, Trump's campaign brought in a whopping $105 million, raising $54 million combined with an additional $51 million raised for his campaign by the RNC. By comparison, the top-raising Democrat Mayor Pete Buttigieg brought in $24.8 million.

The Trump campaign, which has around $100 million cash on hand, told Politico that they not only plan on focusing on battleground states, but also making inroads with voter registration and turnout efforts in some traditionally Democratic states including Minnesota, Nevada, and Colorado.

Some campaigns are pointing to head-to-head match-up polling showing top Democrats including former Vice President Joe Biden and Sen. Bernie Sanders defeating Trump.

But as an extensive 2016 analysis from FiveThirtyEight showed, hypothetical general election polling a year out or more from the actual election has historically been a very poor predictor of the actual election outcomes, meaning neither party can take anything for granted at this point.

Read more: Joe Walsh wants to beat Trump and save the Republican party. But he still defends calling Haiti a 's---hole country.'

Trump is facing two primary challenges from former Gov. Bill Weld and former Rep. Joe Walsh who point to the behavior displayed over the summer as reasons why Trump is fundamentally unfit for office and should be unacceptable even for staunch conservatives.

But neither are likely to make much of a noticeable dent in Trump's primary or general election prospects if he uses his fall of campaigning to successfully consolidate his current 88% Gallup approval rating among Republicans and convince them that, despite the blundering summer of controversy, they're ultimately better off with him.