Kellyanne Conway has been promoted from senior advisor to campaign manager.
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Donald Trump’s decision to tap former Breitbart News chair Stephen Bannon as his campaign’s CEO is the nail in the coffin for the notion that Trump will start running a more mainstream campaign, according to the Clinton campaign.
Paul Manafort, the campaign manager since the last shake-up, remains campaign chairman but is expected to lose some of his clout. While Milwaukee is 40 percent black, Trump traveled to West Bend, Wisconsin, which is 95 percent white to issue his appeal to black voters. He also put $13.5 million into a super PAC Conway ran during the Republican primary in support of Texas Sen.
Sources told AP that Manafort “helped a pro-Russian political party in Ukraine secretly route at least $2.2m to two prominent Washington lobbying firms”, and “the project was structured in ways that obscured the foreign party’s efforts to influence USA policy”.
Donald Trump’s campaign shakeup elevates two political operatives known for bare-knuckle fighting.
Bannon, who was once called the “most risky political operative in America” by Bloomberg Politics, has pushed the nominee to continue as an outsider with a populist appeal. She said she doesn’t like Trump’s habit of calling rivals and critics crude names. Trump will not pivot, and now he has brought someone on who will tell him that he doesn’t have to.
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Paul Manafort and Stephen Bannon met on Sunday at the Trump National Golf Club in New Jersey to discuss new strategies for the campaign.
In her role as campaign manager, Conway clearly has her work cut out for her.
“There has been no bigger cheerleader in the media for Donald Trump than Breitbart News, and he just hired his biggest cheerleader to continue massaging him”, said Ben Shapiro, a former Breitbart editor.
“It’s an expansion at a busy time in the final stretch of the campaign”, she told The New York Times.
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.
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.
He had to pivot, Trump agreed with his family and advisers.
Caption + Donald Trump’s new campaign leadership reflects his desire to be more himself, after pressure to moderate his tone on the campaign trail.
The restructuring of Mr. Trump’s campaign comes just days before he plans to begin airing his first television ads of the general election. A recent poll conducted by NBC News shows Hillary Clinton leading the GOP nominee by 9 points nationally.
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Lewandowski had also attracted distracting controversy following a run-in with a Breitbart News reporter at a Trump rally who accused him of roughly grabbing her arm.
