The billionaire real estate mogul named Stephen Bannon of the conservative Breitbart News website as chief executive officer and promoted pollster Kellyanne Conway to campaign manager. The moves appear to sideline campaign chairman Paul Manafort who previously had been heading campaign leadership. Manafort, whose clout in the campaign will diminish as the result of the changes that also saw the promotion of senior adviser Kellyanne Conway to campaign manager.
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His installation at the top of the Trump campaign offers fresh evidence that the GOP nominee has no intention of reining in his brash, outsider’s style or cozying up to the GOP establishment despite his campaign’s recent struggles. Robby Mook, Clinton’s campaign manager, has been in his job since the outset of the campaign, and the same is true for nearly all of her campaign’s leadership. On Wednesday’s conference call with reporters, Mook went on to cite the Southern Poverty Law Center’s assessment of Breitbart under Bannon’s leadership, which he quoted as saying “has undergone a noticeable shift toward embracing ideas on the extremist fringe of the conservative right”. “You know, his unfavorable rating has been consistently too high to win a presidential election”.
According to two sources, Bannon told people earlier this summer that he helped write Trump’s speech about Hillary Clinton in June. “And that’s what it’s about”, he said on MSNBC.
Mr Bannon is strongly anti-establishment, described as a conservative firebrand who is highly critical of senior Republican Party figures.
Trump’s campaign is also likely to look more extreme, which can not help the flailing candidate in the suburban, highly educated precincts in states such as Pennsylvania, Virginia, Colorado and North Carolina where he is hemorrhaging more upscale Republican votes.
While Breitbart’s militant Trump-championing has been widely observable in its coverage for years, the site’s behind-the-scenes entanglements with the campaign have only become more conspicuous in recent months.
Bannon’s rise dramatizes the catastrophe GOP establishmentarians brought upon themselves by imagining that they could use the far right for their own purposes while somehow keeping it tame. Shapiro resigned earlier this year, charging Breitbart had “abandoned and undercut” its reporter Michelle Fields, who claimed to have been manhandled by Trump’s then-campaign chief Cory Lewandowsky.
The news, first reported by the Wall Street Journal, comes 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 soldier who died in Iraq and temporarily refraining from endorsing House Speaker Paul Ryan, who was involved in a primary in his home state of Wisconsin. And some say they hope the committee will focus on down-ticket races when trying to turn out Trump voters to the polls. “He has also discussed the possibility of launching a “mini-media conglomerate” outside of his existing TV-production business, Trump Productions LLC”.
Conway will be traveling with Trump full time, the senior campaign source told ABC News. Breitbart, he said, taffics in “deranged conspiracy theories” including President Obama not being an American or being the found of ISIS, as Trump said he was last week.
Walker weighs in: Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker said Clinton is “inflaming the situation” in Milwaukee, reports USA Today.
“Maybe, it’s just the mother in me”, she told the paper. He said voters will making their choice based on what each candidate is going to do create more jobs and make positive difference in their live.
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Trump, whose campaign is built on his persona as a victor, said several times Wednesday that the campaign was “doing well”, and said his speech hours earlier in Wisconsin Tuesday was well-received. Fundraisers later this month include concerts in Cape Cod with Cher and in the Hamptons with Jimmy Buffett, and a “Clinton California swing” where donors can talk politics with Leonardo DiCaprio, retired basketball star Magic Johnson or Apple CEO Tim Cook.
