The campaign chairman for Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump has resigned.
Advertisement
Stephen Bannon, the executive chairman for Breitbart News, is the new campaign CEO, while pollster and consultant Kellyanne Conway is now campaign manager. Manafort had said on several occasions he didn’t plan to be paid for his work for Trump.
Trump did bring aboard some new campaign consultants in July.
Trump added that “Paul is a true professional and I wish him the greatest success”. However, it can not be denied that Manfort’s past has been a problem area for the campaign and many believe that it was the right move after all.
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”.
“The last couple weeks have been very rough at the campaign, and Donald Trump was to perhaps – the speeches focusing on substance, getting into the last 11, 12 weeks, Rita, of a fought campaign – and he has every privilege of surrounding himself with the team that he wants”, she said.
Manafort told Trump he was becoming a distraction and he wanted to end that, a Trump source was quoted as saying by CNN. Donald Trump’s campaign turnaround plan on Friday featured the unorthodox candidate acting much like a conventional politician struggling to revive a presidential bid on the ropes.
In East Baton Rouge Parish, residents emerged from their homes to wave at Trump’s motorcade, some with gloved hands dirty from their house-gutting work.
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. At a Baptist church later, a woman screamed “We knew you would be here for us!” as he and Pence sat down with volunteers. But Manafort’s role in the campaign had been significantly marginalized under the new leadership structure announced Wednesday.
Most polls show Trump trailing Clinton significantly among black voters.
Advertisement
In another sign of a new direction in the campaign, Trump on Thursday made an unusual admission of regret for some of his past comments. “I have done that”, the GOP nominee, reading from prepared text, said at a rally in Charlotte, North Carolina, “And believe it or not, I regret it, particularly where it may have caused personal pain”.
