Yet the trip did little to obscure the turmoil in Trump’s campaign, punctuated early Friday when Trump announced that he’d accepted campaign chairman Paul Manafort’s offer to resign.
Advertisement
Donald Trump’s campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, quit on Friday amid a flurry of reports that he may have received undisclosed cash payments from a Ukraine political party. People who were still mucking out their homes, in some instances, came out to wave at the motorcade with gloved hands dirty from their house-gutting work.
Trump and running mate Mike Pence arrived in Baton Rouge, La., on Friday morning to tour the flood devastation.
After a tumultuous stretch since accepting the GOP presidential nomination last month, Donald Trump tried this week to broaden his appeal to a wider swath of the electorate, aiming to sow the seeds for a competitive fall race with Hillary Clinton. “You know, Paul was incredible”. Campaign sources said that Trump had been unhappy with Manafort for a variety of reasons.
If Donald Trump was to win all the remaining battleground states on the map, he’d still be shy of the 270 votes needed to win the White House which means he is going to have to pick off at least one of the states now leaning in Hillary Clinton’s direction in addition to running the table in those battlegrounds.
In a highly uncharacteristic move aimed at resetting his struggling campaign, Donald Trump has said for the first time that he regrets some of the caustic comments he’s made that may have caused people pain. Maybe the only way we’ll get through this election is by making ourselves laugh about it.
It was a rare admission for Trump, who has said he prefers “not to regret anything”. “And believe it or not, I regret it”, he said in Charlotte, North Carolina, Thursday night (Aug. 18). “I do regret it, particularly where it may have caused personal pain”.
Manafort had presided over a period in which Trump had fallen behind in opinion poll numbers in the race against Democratic rival Hillary Clinton for the November 8 election. The inaugural accuses Clinton of rigging the election and hammers her on her position on immigration.
Also Friday, Trump started airing his first ads of the general election after moving a day earlier to invest almost $5 million in battleground state advertising.
Clinton continues to face questions about her handling of classified emails while serving as Obama’s secretary of state, while Trump’s off-the-cuff remarks about immigrants, women and Muslims have rankled members of his own party.
Despite mounting pressure, the White House said Obama was unlikely to break from a New England vacation to survey the damage in Louisiana.
Advertisement
But the visit was met with harsh words from Gov. John Bel Edwards, whose spokesman Richard Carbo said, “We welcome him to LA, but not for a photo-op”. In an editorial published Wednesday, The Advocate newspaper in Baton Rouge called on Obama to visit “the most anguished state in the union”. The Republican presidential candidate named Stephen Bannon, head of Breitbart News, as the campaign’s chief executive, and longtime conservative pollster Kellyanne Conway was assigned the role of campaign manager.
