Special: Trump's money machine, Clinton & Trump campaign styles, "Stop Trump" standstill and is Hillary Clinton too well known?

ANNOUNCER: This is the Washington Week Webcast Extra .

GWEN IFILL: Hello, I’m Gwen Ifill, and welcome to the Washington Week Webcast Extra , where we pick up where we left off in the weekly broadcast.

Joining me around the table, Alexis Simendinger of RealClearPolitics, Michael Scherer of TIME Magazine, Ed O’Keefe of The Washington Post , and Jeanne Cummings of The Wall Street Journal .

When Donald Trump appeared before conservative Ralph Reed’s Evangelical group in Washington on Friday, he boasted once again that he has spent tens of millions of dollars in his own money winning the Republican nomination. But it is clear Trump is now reaching into other pockets as well, as he enters general election season. What does that look like, Jeanne?

MS. CUMMINGS: Well, it’s looking pretty messy right now. Trump is – because he wants distance between what money is raised and himself, so that he can still act like he’s independent and not one of those puppets that he used to call his rivals –

MS. IFILL: Right, not a minute ago.

MS. CUMMINGS: Right. He also does not have a list of people to call to ask for money. The RNC does. So he’s relying on the RNC to do this joint fundraising. But he will not be able to control most of his money, and he won’t get most of the money. Under this – the rules as they were written in like the 1990s for these joint committees, back when parties mattered, the party gets the bulk of it. So you can give $450,000, roughly, to the joint committee, and of that $5,400 goes to Donald Trump. The RNC, the state parties, they control all the rest of the money. And his campaign can’t tell them what to do with the vast majority of it. We’ve never seen anything quite like this. Given how strong-willed he is and how much he likes to control what happens in his campaign, I don’t know if this is going to last.

MS. IFILL: Well, let’s talk a little bit about how his campaign is shaped, Michael, because TIME Magazine had a story this week about – contrasting the massive and organized and data-driven Clinton campaign to the Trump-driven Trump campaign, and how different they are, and what’s going to work – and what seems likely to be working this year.

MR. SCHERER: Well, the last week, Hillary’s winning. I mean, the messages are focused-grouped before she delivers them. She knows exactly what’s working. She’s putting it out in order. She’s staying on topic. Trump has never done that. Trump, though, remains convinced – and he said it to us this week in another interview, with Zeke Miller – that his strength is his ability to maneuver, his ability to move quickly, his ability to come off as authentic and react strongly. And if you talk to Corey Lewandowski, his campaign manager, or Trump, they still say I don’t want to deal with any of that. I don’t want to deal with voter mobilization. I don’t want to deal with big fundraising staffs. I don’t know how to hire all those people. We don’t need to hire all those people. He actually said in the interview this week with us that it’s ridiculous that Hillary employs people on her staff that she’ll never meet, right? So she – you know, Hillary Clinton has 800 people or something working –

MS. IFILL: But he points out – he pointed out in a tweet this week, after she – they had a little tweet war where he – you know, he criticized her for her endorsement by Obama, she responded by saying delete that account, and he said which of your 843 people wrote that tweet or something like that.

MR. SCHERER: Interns. Yeah, yeah, that’s right. And that’s going to be part of his message, that she’s not running anything. You don’t want her to run the government. And his argument, then, is, if she becomes president, that’s the kind of government you’re going to get. You’re going to get a government where every decision needs 800 people to make it. If you make me president, I’ll just fix everything.

MS. IFILL: I wonder whose job it is to tell them that it’s the general election. Who at the RNC has the thankless task of saying but this is how general elections work?

MR. SCHERER: Reince Priebus has tried many times to impart to Donald Trump the conventional wisdom of what he should be doing now. And I –

MS. IFILL: Trump counts on conventional wisdom being wrong.

MR. SCHERER: No, and we – and we’ve seen – I mean, after Wisconsin – this is a month or so ago – there was this – he got scared. Trump got scared after losing Wisconsin to Ted Cruz. And there was a shift in the campaign, and then Trump won New York huge and he went on winning states. And he said, look, I’m just going to be me. And maybe that happens again. Maybe, well, there’s like three or four more pivots between now –

MS. IFILL: It could happen. In fact, I think we can count on it happening.

MR. SCHERER: – between now and November. But I think, deep down, almost more important for Trump than winning the presidency is remaining true to that brand of excitement and electricity and –

MS. IFILL: Which is exactly what worries Republicans.

MR. SCHERER: Yeah. And I think – you know it if comes down to a decision where, you know, you can either, you know, sound more like Romney in October and win this thing, or sound like Donald Trump and lose by 10 points, he’d take –

MS. IFILL: He’s rather lose it.

Ed, whatever happened to the “stop Trump” movement?

MR. O’KEEFE: Well, it’s not really there anymore.

MS. IFILL: I mean, there are three people whose names we all know who constantly complain that he needs to be stopped, but I don’t see anything happening really.

MR. O’KEEFE: Because they don’t have anything to do with it. And I think one of the things that people need to remember is that, while you may hear guys like Hugh Hewitt or Erick Erickson or Bill Kristol or Rick Wiley down in Florida saying we’ve got to do something, we’ve got to put some kind of organization together, there are only about 2,472 people who can do something about it, and we don’t know who most of them are.

MS. IFILL: The delegates.

MR. O’KEEFE: Yes, the delegates who have been elected by the 56 states and territories to show up. People like Craig Dunn from Indiana, who says in his state at least, among the Republicans, there’s a very unenthusiastic acceptance of inevitability. (Laughter.) And they’re unaware of any concrete plan to do anything to stop him. But you talk to someone like Kendal Unruh down in Colorado, who was a Ted Cruz supporter, and she’s trying to put together a proposal that would be considered the week before the convention that would allow the delegates to vote their conscience; they wouldn’t have to be bound to the results of their state, but they could do whatever they want. That’s unlikely to get anywhere, but it will be introduced and there will be a debate about it. Another person from Colorado, Guy Short, he wants to change the rules so that, in 2020, most of the primaries will be closed and not open to independents, but just to Republicans. The argument being that if we had closed our primaries, we probably wouldn’t have gotten Donald Trump.

MS. IFILL: Shutting the barn door after the horse has gotten out.

MR. O’KEEFE: Exactly. And the way he would force the states to do it is by giving more delegates to states that close their primaries. So that’s something that will be debated as well. But nowhere do any of them talk about some kind of plan to put forth Ted Cruz or John Kasich or Mitt Romney or someone else. And that’s why, despite all the talk of the pundits, it’s just not worth talking about unless those people are talking about it.

MS. IFILL: What was that phrase, unenthusiastic acceptance of inevitability?

MR. O’KEEFE: The unenthusiastic acceptance of inevitability.

MS. IFILL: Let’s talk about Hillary Clinton. So, in some corners of the Democratic Party, there is also an unenthusiastic acceptance of inevitability. There was a hashtag that week – this week that – when someone says, well, girl, I guess I’m with her, you know? They’re trying to just come around to this idea. Is it because we feel like we know her too well?

MS. SIMENDINGER: There is an element of that, and I’ll give you an example. I covered Hillary Clinton’s speech Friday to the Planned Parenthood Action Fund, and there was a woman in the audience that I talked to, 66 years old, she’s – her demographic. She came from Texas to come to this meeting, and she was a Sanders supporter. So I said, oh, you’re here; what do you think? And she said, well, I’m not unhappy. (Laughter.) And then she went on to describe all of the memories that she has of the Clintons and how she had voted in the past and her concerns. And she ended up describing Hillary Clinton as a very smart woman who doesn’t have the courage of her convictions, which is what made her like Senator Sanders so much.

So what is it that we know about her? We’ve known Hillary Clinton now for more than two decades, and we’ve seen various iterations of her service. She touts her service, but it’s also a two-edged sword because she’s reminding us of the past. And, as Michael said, we’re going to see this week a reminder from Donald Trump of a phase of the Clintons and their background and all of that that we want to see again. And I was looking back at polling, and you know, Hillary Clinton’s highlights has been like 66 percent favorability, and it happened to be when people thought she was the least political in her career, right? That’s when she hit the high points. And we were talking about the picture of her victory rally with her white outfit, and it reminded us of 1993 when she wore this white outfit on the front of The New York Times Sunday Magazine , when the article was about St. Hillary . So there are some things that don’t change about Hillary Clinton, as much as she’s trying to remind us that – she’s adapted to a party that’s gone left, for instance, right? She’s trying to persuade voters that she has gone that direction.

MS. IFILL: And that’s the problem, is the conviction of one’s beliefs that makes at least the Sanders people worry.

OK. Don’t you wish all that was in the regular show? We just didn’t have time, but at least you knew to come here to find it. Thanks.

Stay online all week long for the latest developments on these and other stories from the best reporters in Washington, our panelists. That’s, of course, at PBS.org/WashingtonWeek. And we’ll see you next time on the Washington Week Webcast Extra .