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Major Trump campaign shake-up less than 3 months until Election Day

Trump has shaken up his campaign leadership yet again, bringing on Stephen K. Bannon to be its chief executive for the final sprint to the general election.

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Mr Trump has been pressed by some Republicans to tone down his fiery rhetoric in the wake of a number of controversial comments in the past two weeks and the subsequent drop in poll ratings.

Breitbart ” s “honey badger” motto-created by the fringe website’s patriarch Steve Bannon-may well be the guiding principle for Trump’s general election campaign, because on Wednesday, Trump lured Bannon away from the propaganda-as-news business and to the propaganda proper business when he announced Bannon would be the CEO of his White House bid.

The shaggy-haired Harvard MBA partial to shorts and Timberland boots is moving to the Trump campaign from the top of Breitbart News, a conservative website that has emerged in recent years as a social media colossus in politics one that has been unabashedly supportive of Trump’s campaign lately.

“Mr. Trump is still paying the price for running a lean-and-mean primary campaign”, Caputo said.

For the second time in two months, Donald Trump is shaking up his campaign’s leadership. “I don’t know that journalists are personally fearful of a President Trump – as if he’d sic the Federal Bureau of Investigation on them”.

A Reuters/Ipsos poll on Tuesday showed Mrs Clinton has a six point lead over Mr Trump.

Rudy Giuliani, the former mayor of New York City who has become a close Trump adviser, has also urged the candidate to dig in and prepare to fight harder, and in a more focused way, in what has quickly become one of the nastiest presidential campaigns in modern USA history. And when Trump’s small compromises didn’t result in improved numbers, it seemed he began to question the wisdom of the people advocating for them.

The most significant change was the campaign’s first TV ad buy, with spots slated to start airing Friday in Florida, Ohio, North Carolina and Pennsylvania. Manafort, who will keep his title of campaign chairman, has been plagued this week by controversies related to a career partly spent advising foreign authoritarians. Trump said he was going to fight for California, New York, and Washington state, because he considered them all winnable.

The head of Ukraine’s newly formed National Anti-Corruption Bureau said this week that more than US$12 million (RM48.06 million) was earmarked for payment to Manafort from 2007 to 2012, although it was not clear if he received the money.

Trump’s campaign advisers have sought to refocus him, including through a pair of scripted policy speeches on the economy and terrorism that offered a stark contrast to Trump’s freewheeling style.

Paul Manafort recently stated that Trump would be more disciplined in the following months, but the campaign staff overhaul appears to be a signal of the complete opposite.

Buried in all the other news about Trump’s campaign shakeup was an interesting factoid.

Mrs Clinton, campaigning in Cleveland, said voters should not be fooled by any Trump efforts to revamp his candidacy.

“He can hire or fire anybody he wants from his campaign”. “Donald Trump trusts and listens to her”, said Caputo, who left the campaign in June after thencampaign manager Corey Lewandowski was sacked. Yet Trump has shattered the Republican consensus here, activating fault lines under even the most stable-looking electorate. “I am who I am”, he told a Wisconsin television station on Tuesday.

“The press has declared Armageddon on Trump and Trump is responding with Armageddon and all-out warfare”, said Armstrong Williams, a conservative media investor and radio personality who is close friends with Bannon.

Clinton campaign manager Robby Mook was more blunt, saying that Mr. Trump had fully embraced racism.

Trump won the Republican primary by following his gut, aided by a staff of amateurs who served only to act as yes-men and abided by the rule of “Let Trump Be Trump”.

The campaign spun the changes as a logical “expansion”, but analysts saw desperation and panic and a knee-jerk response to a remarkable collapse in poll support for Trump.

Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump smiles as he participates in a roundtable discussion on national security in his offices in Trump Tower in New York, Wednesday, Aug. 17, 2016.

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Shapiro also accused Bannon of leading Sarah Palin on the path from “legitimate political figure to parody artist to Trump endorser” and suggested the Breitbart boss would do anything for power.

Brian Blanco