The change was seen as a demotion for campaign chairman Paul Manafort, who has been pushing Trump, among other changes, to use a teleprompter when he gives speeches as a way to stay on message – and not ad-lib himself into saying something offensive or wrong.
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“The Trump campaign is at a ludicrously high disadvantage”, said Dan Senor, a former adviser to 2012 GOP nominee Mitt Romney and House Speaker Paul Ryan, R-Wis.
Trump’s campaign also paid $20,000 to the consulting firm of Corey Lewandowski, the campaign manager he fired in June, two weeks after Lewandowski left the campaign and became a paid pundit on CNN.
Trump did bring aboard some new campaign consultants in July.
Either way, Manafort’s resignation comes just two days after the Associated Press reported that the Republican lobbyist “helped a pro-Russian governing party in Ukraine secretly route at least $2.2 million in payments to two prominent Washington lobbying firms in 2012, and did so in a way that effectively obscured the foreign political party’s efforts to influence US policy”.
A day after presenting a new kinder, gentler side, Donald Trump followed up his softer words at a campaign rally in North Carolina on Thursday night with a compassionate visit to Louisiana to assess the damage caused by flooding.
“So I’m very happy doing what I’m doing”.
Manafort’s ascension to the top of the Trump pyramid was, in part, an effort to bring on an experienced hand to manage his campaign’s delegate operation.
After warring behind the scenes for months with Lewandowski, who had little regard for Manafort, Lewandoswki was sacked earlier this summer. That decision by Trump seemed to be an embrace of Manafort’s strategy.
A different security firm has been contracted to examine email software that has been used by both the Trump and Clinton campaign, another source said.
For now, Trump finds himself behind Clinton in preference polls in almost every battleground state.
Trump’s shakeup shows tension with Manafort.
That, coupled with Trump’s reported unhappiness with leaks from inside his campaign team and his complaints about being boxed in by Manafort, along with his sinking poll numbers against Hillary Clinton, were enough to spell the end of their relationship.
Steele said Manafort’s departure “makes ideal sense”.
Donald Trump’s campaign expenses more than doubled last month, even as the Republican presidential nominee held his payroll to about 70 employees, aired no television advertisements and undertook no significant operational buildout across the country. But it wasn’t Manafort who led Trump by the nose into serving as a stooge for Vladimir Putin. The Trump campaign’s now former chairman had become a liability and, following a series of press investigations, had been implicated in illegal activity on behalf of foreign governments with interests opposed to those of the United States.
He added: “Too much is at stake for us to be consumed with these issues, but one thing, I can promise you this, I will always tell you the truth”. At a Baptist church later, a woman screamed “We knew you would be here for us!” as he and Pence sat down with volunteers.
“Again, my father just didn’t want to have the distraction looming over the campaign and, quite frankly, looming over all the issues that Hillary’s facing right now”, he concluded.
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“Well, look it’s obviously a hard thing for anybody when they change jobs and have a position that they’ve been so invested in for a long time and really put their heart and soul into something, to not be part of it, particularly when you’re this close”, Lewandowski told CNN’s Kate Bolduan on “At This Hour”.
