Trump urged to start campaigning now for 2020

With 18 months to go before the 2020 presidential election, you might think that Donald Trump is busy enough tryng to deal with Iran, China, North Korea etc etc without having to spend a lot of time on the hustings telling voters about his achievements so far. Well he does that all the time of course, via tweets. But Trump is facing a unique situation. There are so many - 23 - Democratic Party candidates and all of them speechifying and pledging and raising funds, that they are winning the first rounds in the campaign merely by grabbing all the attention in the media. Trump hates the media, or most of it, but even he knows that with the Democrats seizing all the limelight, he needs to start getting his principle messages across right now if he wants to dampen the media's enthusiasm for covering all the rivals for the White House. Stories about Joe Biden, Eliabeth Warren, Kamala Harris, Pete Buttigieg et al are getting huge amounts of media coverage, while reports on Trump tend to be somewhat confused and negative, principally because the White House, Pentagon and State Department seem to have given up regularly briefing their respective specialist reporters. So no one truly knows what's going on from day to day. John Bolton, national security adviser, for example, has taken a hammering recently over the perceived attempt by him to make the president bomb Iran to bits. I'm pretty sure he has done no such thing but in true Bolton style he HAS taken a very hard line over Iran and has no doubt made this clear whenever he speaks to Trump. But I am assured it is wrong to suggest Bolton actually wants the US to go to war with Iran. But without briefing reporters, correspondents on newspapers and on TV channels are tapping other sources who may not know what is really going on. One very good source admitted to me: "The inner circle around Trump is so tight, no one outside has a good sense of who is saying what." Trump has said he does not want a war with Iran, Iran has said it does not want a war with the US which is all very sensible. But then Trump says if Iran were to attack US interests and assets, Iran would be finished, ie destroyed. He said the same about North Korea before he met with and liked Kim Jong-un. But all this confusion is muddying the waters in the 2020 election stakes. Trump's agonising over Iran and the trade war with China gets plenty of coverage, accurately sourced or not, and meanwhile his rivals from the Democratic Party are trying to woo the country with domestic policy promises. So Trump I'm sure will be hitting the campaign trail in due course and is bound to focus on the issues that really interest voters: immigration (Trump record - tough stance but no border wall yet), economy (doing well), jobs (lowest unemployment for decades), health (lots of promises to replace Obamacare but still no proposal), and infrastructure (a massive $2 trillion plan but no real idea where the money is going to come from). The real 2020 battle is about to start.