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Trump adds senior campaign staff for 2020 race as risk of a GOP primary challenger rises

President Trump added a new round of senior-level hires to his re-election team, continuing an early push to build out his campaign and preserve a clear path to the Republican nomination in 2020.

The new hires include a trio of roles in media relations, positions that hold outsize importance for a president who turned lessons from his reality television career into billions of dollars in free media during his 2016 race.

Those media aides are communications director Tim Murtaugh, press secretary Kayleigh McEnany and strategic communications director Marc Lotter, a former aide to Vice President Mike Pence whose duties will include overseeing the campaign’s surrogates on news and social media, according to people familiar with the situation, who said the hires will be announced later Tuesday. The Trump campaign has also hired Cole Blocker as its finance director and Megan Powers as administrative operations director.

The five staffers join a core campaign team that has been in place for much of the last year. Brad Parscale was named campaign manager 12 months ago, about a year earlier than when former Presidents Barack Obama and George W. Bush hired managers for their respective re-election campaigns in 2012 and 2004.

Parscale quickly tapped Michael Glassner as chief operations officer and Lara Trump as a senior adviser. All three worked on Trump’s campaign in 2016. The campaign also added Chris Carr as its political director and brought in former White House aides Bill Stepien and Justin Clark as senior political advisers before the end of last year.

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