Frustrated with his troubled candidacy, Donald Trump is hinging his presidential hopes on a risky bet: that the fiery populism and freewheeling style that won him the Republican nomination give him a better shot at the White House than uniting his party and rallying moderate voters.
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But the departure does raise the larger question of why a business executive’s political campaign has run through top officials at a rapid clip, and has shown a high degree of organizational turmoil.
On Thursday, in what some are mistakenly calling a “pivot”, Trump told supporters, that sometimes, “in the heat of the debate and speaking on a multitude of issues, you don’t choose the right words or you say the wrong thing”.
He added: “Too much is at stake for us to be consumed with these issues”. As the crowd cheered, Trump pledged to “always tell you the truth”.
The Clinton campaign has pointed to Manafort’s work in Ukraine to add to its criticism of favorable comments that Trump has made about Russian President Vladimir Putin and to sow doubts in voters’ minds about whether the Russian government has an unseen hand in the US election.
On Wednesday, Trump announced that he had hired as the “CEO” of his campaign Steve Bannon, the chief executive of Breitbart News, a publication that could generously be described as the slightly more mainstream iteration of Stormfront, the white nationalist website.
But Mr Trump has fallen further behind his Democratic rival Mrs Clinton in recent weeks, his campaign overshadowed by a long list of controversies including a fight with an American Muslim family whose soldier son was killed in Iraq. For the first time in his campaign, he expressed regret for some of the corrosive remarks that he has made since he launched his campaign in June 2015, and for “the personal pain” they may have caused, though he did not identify which ones.
Karlyn Bowman, a senior fellow and research coordinator at the American Enterprise Institute think tank, said Trump still had some time to turn around his campaign, noting the news came as many Americans were enjoying summer vacations. Trump will invest almost $5 million in battleground state advertising.
The New York businessman brought Manafort into the campaign in March to organize the Republican nominating convention, including the prospect of a delegate challenge by “Never Trump” opponents.
Trump has fallen behind Democratic rival Hillary Clinton in opinion polls nationally and in vital swing states, raising the prospect of a wipeout in the November 8 election that could hurt Republicans in congressional and state races. 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.
“I will not rest until children of every color in this country are fully included in the American Dream”, he said.
“What do you have to lose by trying something new?” he asked.
The Clinton camp dismissed it as “teleprompter regret”. “He has continued to do so through each of the 428 days from then until now, without shame or regret”.
“There is no new Donald Trump”, Clinton said.
The Clinton campaign signalled that it plans to continue linking Trump to Russian President Vladimir Putin.
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The news is significant as opinion surveys show Trump trailing Clinton nationally and in a host of key battleground states following a hard campaign stretch that saw him insulting the Muslim parents of a fallen soldier and temporarily refraining from endorsing House Speaker Paul Ryan during his own re-election bid.
