Casting his campaign chairman aside with just 11 weeks until Election Day, Donald Trump moved ahead with the reboot of his White House bid on Friday with a tour of flood-ravaged Louisiana.
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“It’s probably a good move, and I’m sure he’ll continue to work with Trump, maybe in an informal role”, he said. And they contributed to Manafort becoming viewed with trepidation by Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law and a major force within the campaign, particularly after a number of false starts since the Republican National Convention, according to three people briefed on the matter.
But there was another problem: The drip of news stories chronicling Mr. Manafort’s ties to pro-Russia groups in Ukraine and undeclared USA lobbying efforts pointed to the role of hidden money in politics and against American interests. Only 15% said that Trump would be an “average” president.
“This campaign is not the first campaign to make staff changes”.
Meanwhile, new documents released by Ukrainian anti-corruption investigators appear to link the lobbying work the men directed in the U.S.to handwritten entries in ledgers listing $12.7 million in cash payments alongside Manafort’s name.
“I think my father didn’t want to be, you know, distracted by, you know, whatever things that, you know, Paul was dealing with”, the younger Trump said. I am very appreciative for his great work in helping to get us where we are today, and in particular his work guiding us through the delegate and convention process. There is growing chatter within Republican and political classes that Mr. Trump is heading for a historic defeat in November. A Politico investigation revealed that Manafort’s Kiev protégé, Konstantin Kilimnik, had and may maintain ties to Russian intelligence.
After he was hired by Trump, Manafort helped quash uprisings among Republican delegates that, even if they wouldn’t imperil Trump’s ability to get the nomination, would have been an embarrassing distraction at the convention.
Manafort allies desperately tried to spin Bannon’s hiring as a welcome addition to Trump’s campaign that in no way reflected negatively on the chairman’s performance, but by Friday, Manafort was out.
The campaign argues that the new leadership is designed to create a comfortable and effective environment for Trump to pull through in the final stretch.
Trump still has to answer serious questions hovering over his campaign given his propensity to parrot Putin’s talking points, the roster of advisers like Carter Page and Mike Flynn with deep ties to Russia, the recent Russian government hacking and disclosure of Democratic Party records, and reports that Breitbart published articles advocating pro-Kremlin positions on Ukraine.
There is more than a little bit of smoke surrounding Donald Trump and Putin. And his firm’s lobbying activities carried outsized importance as Manafort and Gates played a formative role building out Trump’s campaign operation after pushing out an early rival, former Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski. “I have done that”, the GOP nominee, reading from prepared text, said at a rally in Charlotte, N.C. Thursday night.
“I have done that, and believe it or not, I regret it”, he told supporters in a battleground state, one of the five where he will be concentrating his efforts under the changes in his campaign.
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Karlyn Bowman, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank, said Trump still had some time to turn around his campaign, noting the news of the shake-up came as many Americans were enjoying summer vacations.
