Does Trump have any control of this group?
I doubt it.
Other candidates, including Jeb Bush, were blamed for grounds they had no control over.
They’re probably being paid by an anti-Trump PAC.
Advocacy groups don’t have to have any ties with the candidate, intellectually or otherwise. This is a disconnect that could wreak great havoc for some smaller campaigns, and I can see it as something that lays a tarbrush of a candidate without a single thing that can be done to stop its efforts.
Great and laudatory praise for some aspect that the target candidate would rather minimize or sweep under the rug altogether, or scurrilous attacks upon another rival candidate, none of which is founded even remotely in reality, and is swiftly disproved by an alert interested public repository of fact, can torpedo the person in whose name the advocacy is being directed.
And by law, the candidate cannot even call up and try to turn the advocate group around to either tone down or retool their message.
By careful and crafty application of the weaknesses inherent in this arrangement, it is possible to completely subvert the dialogue, to paint the “good guy” as the worst kind of criminal and reprobate. Guilt by association is supposed to be a prohibited doctrine, or at least disregarded, but we see it being used all the time.