Donald Trump in big campaign shake-up hires Breitbart CEO

Shortly after news broke that Trump would be hiring Stephen Bannon of Breitbart News as campaign CEO and conservative pollster Kellyanne Conway as campaign manager, the RNC sent an email to supporters with the subject line: “Your input needed”. The campaign statement announcing the changes touted a Bloomberg Politics article that dubbed Bannon “the most unsafe political operative in America”.

Brian Walsh, a Republican strategist who has been critical of Trump in the past, said his embrace of Bannon seemed to indicate the NY businessman had no intention of changing tactics. “It’s proven to be a disaster in the general election”, Walsh said. “I am who I am”, he told a local station in Wisconsin. “This would actually take it in the opposite direction from where it should be going”. Conway, who worked on Newt Gingrich’s 2012 campaign and has long counted Trump’s running mate, Indiana Gov. Mike Pence, as a client, had thoughts on how Trump could reach out to more women and suburban voters.

After the New York Times reported Saturday that people close to Trump and his campaign described him as “exhausted, frustrated and still bewildered by fine points of the political process and why his incendiary approach seems to be sputtering”, Trump fired back in a series of messages to his almost 11 million Twitter followers. Here’s a good Bloomberg profile of Bannon and here is our news coverage of the campaign shakeup. He is also deeply mistrustful of the political establishment, and his website has often been critical of Speaker Paul D. Ryan and Senator Mitch McConnell, the majority leader. Crowd size is frequently not a good indicator of success on Election Day – and some Republicans attribute Trump’s refusal to alter his message for the general election to his insistence on measuring success by the adulation he receives from audiences he’s already won over.

Republicans have complained about Trump’s repeated stumbles, including his fight with the Gold Star family of a Muslim Army captain who was killed in Iraq and his claim last week that President Obama is the “founder” of ISIS.

Mr Trump has been pressed by some Republicans to tone down his fiery rhetoric in the wake of a number of controversial comments in the past two weeks and the subsequent drop in poll ratings.

The people briefed on the move said that it reflects Mr. Trump’s realisation that his campaign was at a crisis point. The campaign also said it would make its first major television commercial purchase later this week.

In a statement, Trump said he was adding “some of the best talents in politics” to his campaign’s top echelon.

Mr Manafort had also come under increasing scrutiny over his ties to Ukraine for elections he worked on as an global consultant, including handwritten ledgers showing he was designated to receive $US12.7 million ($A16.6 million) in undisclosed cash payments from a pro-Russian political party from 2007 to 2012. He denied receiving any “off-the-books cash payment”. “And that means being able to receive these briefings and not spread them around”.

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Conway, meanwhile has previous experience working for a PAC and is a long-time political commentator and pollster whose appointment is less likely to raise eyebrows than the selection of Bannon – who will take leave from Breitbart while the campaign is ongoing.