Stephen Bannon, executive chairman of Breitbart News LLC, will become the Republican campaign’s chief executive, and Kellyanne Conway, a senior adviser and pollster for Trump and his running mate, Governor Mike Pence of IN, will become the campaign manager.
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“I am committed to doing whatever it takes to win this election, and ultimately become president because our country can not afford four more years of the failed Obama-Clinton policies which have endangered our financial and physical security”, Trump said in a statement announcing the hires. The RNC, bless them, they think they know what they’re doing with Hispanic voters, but I’m promising you it’s not going to work.
The Washington Post cited Trump campaign aides as saying Mr Trump respected Mr Manafort but felt “boxed in” by people “who barely knew him”.
This tale of two campaigns came as opinion polls showed Mr Trump continuing to shed support among college-educated whites, married women and other voter blocs that have reliably skewed Republican in successive presidential elections.
In Cleveland on Wednesday, Clinton blasted Trump’s campaign shake-up as well.
Donald Trump does not like being controlled and, in a sign that he won’t be, he has taken new steps to stick with his signature style of tough talking populism, appointing a top executive from the conservative website Breitbart News as his campaign chief executive.
Bannon, a former investment banker and adviser to former Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska, is widely known for helping craft Breitbart’s vision as a pro-Trump outlet opposed to the GOP establishment and unafraid to run stories with a conspiratorial bent. A longtime Republican strategist and pollster, she has close ties to Trump’s running mate, Indiana Gov. Mike Pence.
Conway confirmed the moves to The New York Times, but denied they constituted a shake-up.
Manafort deputy Rick Gates, who has been traveling often with Trump, is expected to maintain a senior role with the campaign. The staff changes, first reported in the Wall Street Journal, are the second time in two months that Trump has shifted his campaign’s leadership. Early voting begins in a handful of states in September. Breitbart News head Stephen K. Bannon will be the campaign’s new chief executive officer “in a new position created to bolster the business-like approach”.
And if the theme of this latest bit of Trump court intrigue is a return to the “Let Trump be Trump” philosophy, Clinton’s operatives will only cheer. And he keeps telling us who he is, it’s time that we believe him. “That’s it. Pure and simple”, a source familiar with the tensions told CNN, adding that Trump’s gaffes and controversial statements in recent weeks have been fueled in part by his “exasperation” with the campaign’s management.
“They’ve really been the mouthpiece of the Trump campaign in a way that Fox News was the mouthpiece of previous Republican campaigns”, Fairleigh Dickenson political science professor Dan Cassino said.
Details of the new pecking order were hashed out at a lengthy senior staff meeting at Trump Tower Tuesday while Trump was on the road. But the staffing change, hammered out Sunday and announced Wednesday morning, was seen by some as a demotion for Manafort.
On Wednesday, she argued that Trump has already done that and there’s little chance he will change his ways before November. “We’re supportive of candidates up and down the ticket”.
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Mr. Trump’s campaign has been shaken since the Republican national convention by, among other things, controversies over his feud with the parents of a Muslim-American soldier who died in Iraq, and his assertion that President Barack Obama was the “founder” of the Islamic State.
