Instead, a new Trump emerged on Thursday: a less combative, more inclusive candidate who said he was running to be the “voice for every forgotten part of this country that has been waiting and hoping for a better future” and for those who “don’t hear anyone speaking for them”.
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The typically brash and spotlight-seeking billionaire offered notably restrained remarks as he surveyed the waterlogged wreckage. “I feel for Paul, I really do because I know how tough it is”.
He has come under fire for his ties to Russian interests and former Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych.
Eric Trump did not say anything Friday that explicitly pointed to Manafort’s Ukranian dealings as being a factor in his resignation.
A Trump source said Manafort told Trump he was becoming a distraction and he wanted to end that. Michael Caputo – who helped run his campaign in NY, fired in June after gleefully celebrating Lewandowski’s firing.
“Paul Manafort’s resignation is a clear admission that the disturbing connections between Donald Trump’s team and pro-Kremlin elements in Russian Federation and Ukraine are untenable”, Robby Mook said in a statement. “I wish him the greatest success”, Trump said.
Trump’s visit to southern Louisiana put pressure on Clinton.
Yet as his poll numbers tumbled, Trump decisively reversed course, installing a media provacateur – Bannon – as his campaign’s CEO.
Trump’s trip was a striking detour for a candidate who has largely stuck to boisterous rallies and phone-in interviews to appeal to voters.
In East Baton Rouge Parish, residents emerged from their waterlogged homes to wave at Trump’s motorcade, some with gloved hands dirty from their house-gutting work.
“We knew you would be here for us!” another volunteer shouted.
Trump’s statement on Manafort did not mention the broader campaign shake-up or the Ukrainian lobbying controversy.
The campaign shakeup this week that catapulted right-wing media mogul Stephen Bannon to the top of the Trump hierarchy had still left a spot for Mr. Manafort as campaign chairman. Trump’s operation on Friday released its first general election TV commercial, one of two set to run in battleground states over the next 10 days.
Trump flew into MI later on Friday to address a rally, explaining his appearance in an open-necked shirt and trucker hat by saying he had come straight from “a tour of the suffering and devastation in Louisiana”.
Although the suburb just outside Lansing is overwhelmingly white, Trump made an appeal to black voters.
“I think Donald Trump ought to really investigate this and where his chief adviser, what his association with the Russians are”, Rep. Adam Kinzinger of IL told CNN’s Jake Tapper earlier this week. “But I personally don’t regret anything that he’s said”. The next 80 days are going to be fiercely contested between the candidates and our current state of play shows Clinton holding a significant electoral advantage heading in to that intense fall campaign. Obama won roughly 93 percent of black voters in his re-election campaign in 2012. In a highly uncharacteristic move at a rally in North Carolina on Thursday night, Trump said for the first time that he regrets some of the caustic comments he’s made in “the heat of debate”.
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“Sometimes you have to bring different perspectives in”. “But what the most important thing is is this is a reminder to me and the American public that Donald Trump will do anything it takes to win”.
